Flick: A History Of Female Pleasure Author: Dr. Kate Lister ISBN-13: 9780857506436Publisher: Bantam Guideline Price: £22For something so relentlessly discussed, debated and moralised, women’s sexuality remains strikingly misunderstood. Basic realities of female pleasure have historically been ignored or distorted, from the fact that the clitoral nerves were only fully mapped this year, to the manosphere’s obsession with junk science about “alpha males”, evolutionary gender destiny and the supposed inevitability of male sexual dominance. To set the record straight (and sometimes sapphic) Dr Kate Lister has written Flick, a lively, funny and incisive history of how women’s sexuality has been controlled, pathologised and reshaped across centuries.In Flick, Lister argues that despite persistent cultural scripts, women have never been less sexual than men. What women have been is subjected to political, religious and cultural systems determined to regulate desire and define acceptable femininity.The book traces the strange historical reversals in how female sexuality has been imagined. Lister notes that women were historically cast as the lustful sex, driven by unruly appetites, while men were supposedly rational beings capable of resisting temptation. With the rise of Christianity and later Victorian Protestant morality, that narrative shifted dramatically. Men became helpless creatures overwhelmed by desire while women were recast as passionless gatekeepers forever faking headaches or lying back and thinking of England – myths that were (are) less about truth than about social control.Lister explores representations of female desire in mythology and religion, from the sexually charged goddesses Inanna, Ishtar and Freyja to the Virgin Mary – all defined by their relationship to sex. She examines how Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda and the emerging middle-classes’ ideas of respectability created new forms of sexual policing. These were steeped not only in misogyny but colonial and racist ideas about bodies and sexuality that still linger today.Lister is funniest when discussing the absurdities of sexual history, eager to cite some of the filthiest passages from Ezekiel or 15th century Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain’s Cywydd y Cedor (the translation of which is unsuitable for print). Some of Lister’s bawdier one-liners feel a little too eager to channel Samantha Jones, but the book’s irreverence is largely part of its charm.Flick’s most compelling passages concern ignorance around women’s bodies and pleasure, such as 18th-century beliefs that pregnancy required female orgasm – a theory used to discredit rape victims and provide Republican Todd Akin with his life’s complete sex education – and Victorian pathologising of female desire. Lister’s chapters on sapphic sexuality, orgasm and masturbation are sharp in identifying how sex has historically been defined around the penis, and how these sexual scripts still impact women’s pleasure today. Funny, accessible and genuinely informative, may Flick allow the record be loudly corrected.Roe McDermott is an Irish Times columnist