| | Jana-
Kevin is right. In fact, the 19th century's idea of 'acceptable' birth control was the removal of the clitoris, for the reason this would prevent orgasm, and therefore, conception.
My apologies for not getting to you earlier.. I was searching through my current reading selection... I just happened to be researching sex and religion in the ancient world at the moment... Goddess! I wish I had my library. I was frustrated to find no exact answer to your question, but my surmisings are as follows:
First of all, I'm becoming uncertain as to whether our idea of a 'classical period' is actually valid, at least when regarding sexual theory and practice (but it's a broader change is essential values and social structures). The 'classical period', meaning roughly Homer to Julian, seems to be one long period of transition defined by the *coexistence* of pre-classical attitudes towards sexuality with the later 'Christian' conceptions. I will therefore respond along those lines.
In the preantiquitous period, is is clear sexual pleasure is considered a high, often sacred, value- and contrary to the prevalent myths- that knowledge of the link between sex and procreation extends well into paleolithic times. Given the state of scientific knowledge of the time, I would not be surprised if orgasm and conception were linked, but I also would not be surprised if sexuality was simply regarded as an uncontrollable part of life from which children eventually resulted and no one kept a clock on the precise causal chain, and children that did arrive were viewed as a semi-separable issue. Nothing in my readings gives a clear yea or nay, but either might well imply the orgasmic theory de facto, in that sexual pleasure for the female would be at least an equal priority.
Continuing in history, the 'Golden Age' of classical Western Civilization clearly represents a decline in the view of the importance of sexual pleasure... a decline which begins roughly at recorded history and bottoms out with the institutionalization of Christianity (I confine myself to the 'Western' branch of history). But it is in high classical Greece that the decline starts insisting on cleaning house and consciously gets defined. Sophocles has Athena declare that a child is only truly a father's... that the mother is a mere vessel (which is a deliberate desecration of the preantiquarian view which the Oresteia were written primary in war against; a blasphemous near-parody of heiros gamos, the equivalent of a sex scene with Jesus to Christian eyes), and Aristotle explicitly makes precisely the same claim metaphysically, claiming the male provides active form and the female passive substance. It is worth noting that to the degree they were 'respectable', the classical Greeks did not expect pleasure from wives but most definitely expected (male) children... Demosthenes, while rhetoricizing about Athens' good life clearly distinguishes wives, prostitutes, and courtesans (hetaerae) as serving exclusive functions for Athenian men. The Romans of the following period are not so explicit,, but given the Lucretian ideal of Roman womanhood, I find it impossible to believe they took female sexual pleasure preparatory to bearing children very seriously... again, I mean 'respectable' Romans. The general theme is that females are a passive vat for active male seed... it is the precise opposite of the orgasmic conception theory. Of course, the full Medieval development denounced the pursuit of sexual pleasure even while mating for the purpose of procreation.
But this is not the entire 'classical' position. I believe what we see above is part of a general transition to the familiar Christian views... contrary to Objectivist histories, Greek philosophy is less 'Pagan' than it is an unstable half-way point between true Paganism in the past (I reject the common distinction between polytheism and animism) and the future montheism, incubated in an upper class that increasingly breeds a 'witch-doctor' faction touchier and touchier about sex. Aristotle, I am sorry, is a figure early in but not at the beginning of the decline... Epicurus, the early stoics, and finally Marcus Aurelius get closer and closer to the full Augustinian nightmare.. There is still a strong Pagan current all the way to the end of the classical period, decisively defeated in philosophy in the person of Pelagius, and it persists in coopted, submerged, esoteric, and isolated forms subculturally afterwards. There are definitely classical pieces that take share the same sense of life as the preantiquarian cultures- Aristophanes and Sappho, both rebels, use imagery that could have come out of paleolithic times. Similarly, the Hellenistic Alexandrian and Roman plebians often maintained a very free, counterculturalesque sense of sexuality that is a semi-secularized continuation of the preantiquarian practices. For instance Liberty, strictly Venus Libertas, was the Roman patroness of freedom and freedman (including children who inherited the station), who eventually comprised an absolute majority of the Roman plebs; she was an aspect of Venus, the goddess of eros and beauty, who was herself both associated with and a lineal descendant of the Near Eastern Ashtoreth (Ishtar, Astarta, Aphrodite, etc.), the patroness of sacred prostitution. So one popular 'democratic' wing of culture saw things differently; Liberty, their patron, was also the sex goddess.... their sexual practices and beliefs were probably an inheritance from the preantiquarian views. Whether they did accept the orgasmic beliefs I don't know... it is plausible.... what you heard may well be true, but it is strongly likely their sexual practices emphasized more-or-less equal sexual pleasure.
That's everything.
Jeanine Ring {))(*)((}
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