It's hard, in our hypersexualized, innuendo-stiff era, to imagine the prelapsarian innocence that obtained among gentle folk in Victorian times, when men and women were ignorant of their own and one another's anatomies, not to mention the mechanisms of coitus. Little wonder the malady of the age presented as a constellation of nervous irritabilities that doctors labeled hysteria, particularly prevalent among women of the leisure class. That this hysteria had anything to do with the brusque, silent sorties perpetrated upon them by their husbands in the dark of night seemed obvious to no one, not even the contemporaneous Dr. Freud of Vienna, who famously asked, as though it were an unanswerable conundrum, "What do women want?"
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