Mick Hartley

Joan Smith's new book Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac rescues some famous – infamous – women of ancient Rome from the gruesome tales told about them by (male) historians. The title gives a clue as those familiar old men's tales = often formulated, it's argued, in the spirit of, "oh come on, the men can't have been that bad…they obviously asked for it, these women…they were clearly sluts, nymphos" – that she's debunking. Victoria Smith has a review at The Critic – Revising Roman rottenness (a nod to Monty Python, I assume) – and makes some excellent points about its relevance today.

Unfortunately, She Was a Nymphomaniac is a timely book not least because its publication coincides with some contemporary examples of woman-hatred that also seem too extreme to be true. What is happening to women in Afghanistan at this very moment — a ban on them so much as hearing one another’s voices — feels like the kind of thing one might read about having occurred in some very distant past, whereupon one might think “well, that’s probably an exaggeration. Maybe the historians who first wrote about this just wanted to make the Taliban look bad. As if anyone would actually go that far!”. Similarly, the story of Dominique Pélicot and the fifty men who joined him to rape Gisèle Pélicot has that feeling of “just too awful to be plausible”. If this was a story about Nero or Caligula, one can easily imagine modern-day historians discussing its apparent implausibility. As if any man would be so monstrous! As if so many other men would be involved and not one — not even those who had refused the invitation to rape — would report what was happening! Yet clearly there are men like that — lots of them….

People of the past were as psychologically complex as you or I, but that doesn’t mean some of them were not cartoonishly monstrous. You only have to look at the flesh-and-blood cartoon monsters around us today.