Bodies, sex and sexuality

Abstract

This chapter explores women’s bodies, sex and sexuality in relation to the stages of their reproductive lives: infancy and childhood to sexual development at puberty; the potentially reproductive years post-puberty; and older age following the cessation of reproductive possibility at menopause. It has been observed that contemporary divisions of the stages of life were predicated on the male body and life cycle as the norm, deploying traditional numerical divisions which were not necessarily coterminous with women’s lives and bodies. The classical humoral model of the body underpinned medical ideas about sexual development as well as sexual differentiation. Western European medical authors were consistent in their assessment of older women’s sexual bodies as undesirable, both because the physical ‘decay’ of the ageing body meant that older women were regarded as lacking in beauty or physical attraction, but also because the sexual parts of the body changed so that they were no longer so suitable for the act of sex.