Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith: Slut Shaming in Ancient Rome - Single women who dared to have sex were considered prostitutes while married women were treated no better than slaves

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac by Joan Smith: Slut Shaming in Ancient Rome - Single women who dared to have sex were considered prostitutes while married women were treated no better than slaves By ROGER LEWIS Published: 00:01 GMT, 15 November 2024 | Updated: 00:01 GMT, 15 November 2024 e-mail 1 View comments Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women by Joan Smith (William Collins £22, 292 pp) Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac is available now from the Mail Bookshop Libertines always receive hearty cheers, e.g. Jilly Cooper’s heroes with their non-stop rogering.

Women who enjoy sex, however, are immediately dubbed sluts, slags, whores, and nymphos – so they must be suppressed, controlled or otherwise denied a free, independent existence. It was ever thus. Joan Smith, in this powerful, angry, examination of the lives and fates of Roman ladies, in the period 27 BC to 68 AD, quotes an ancient philosopher as saying: ‘A sexually active single woman was no different from a prostitute.



’ And a married woman, Smith implies, was pretty much no better than a slave. Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac tells us that any intelligent female who’d dare look a man in the eye and speak without hesitation was slapped down as ‘wilful, ambitious, and sexually incontinent’ – polluted, perhaps, ‘by every type of vice’. Julia, daughter of the Roman general Agrippa, was ‘notorious for the raciness of her lifestyle and her taste.