If sex is such a normal part of life and our bodies are designed to have plenty of wonderful sex, why is it that so many of us are at least a bit screwed up about it.

Why are there so many myths about sex being bad, and particularly around sex being bad for women?

Let’s go back to the cradle of western civilisation, the middle east.

Since the birth of civilisation about 10,000 years ago, (and quite possibly for tens of thousands of years before that, back to the beginning of human prehistory) until a few thousand years ago, the main deity was female.

You may have seen images of stone carvings of very fat female figures. That was Ashtarte, Isis, Arinna or Ishtar.

She had many names. She was the supreme deity, the creator of the world. She was worshipped in temples that had female priests and in which ceremonial sexual activity was considered a religious activity to honour the deity and creation and so forth.

The society in which the Creatress of Life, the Queen of Heaven, was worshipped as the supreme deity was respectful of women and femaleness, to the extent that the societies were matrilineal. That is, the family line went down the female side.

This makes a lot of sense, since you always know who the mother is. (This doesn’t mean they were necessarily matriarchal, that the women had the power.) Any child born by a woman would be raised by her husband as his own.

This all changed over a period between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, with the introduction of new tribes from the north who brought with them the concept of a male supreme deity.

Over this period of time you can see how the religious myths slowly modified, so that the original supreme female deity first became the consort of the principal male deity and then she became lower and lower, often becoming the arch baddie, a wanton depraved figure, or disappearing altogether.

Along with this shift in religious doctrine was a shift in the status of women over the same period of time. The main difference being that the family line changed from being matrilineal to being patrilineal. That is, it went down the male side.

The trouble with patrinlineal systems is that you have to know who the father is. In the days before DNA testing there was only one way to ensure the mother’s husband was the father: make bloody sure she didn’t have sex with anyone else!

And there are only two ways to do this: one is to stone her to death if she does; or, more insidiously and much more effectively - to the extent that this still lingers in our society thousands of years later – raise your girl children to think that they are not sexual.

By raising girl children to think that they are not sexual, and shouldn’t be sexual, chances are those girls really will grow up to think that they’re not.

So for tens of thousands of years the supreme deity was female and we had positive female sexuality, then for a couple of thousand of years we had a male supreme deity and a negative female sexuality…

Then about forty years ago, scientists started studying sex seriously and discovered that shock horror, women were sexual.

But unfortunately the pendulum shifted so far the other way that the new belief was that women should be sexual like men.

Now the most common female sexual dysfunction is low sexual desire!

In the space of a few decades we’ve gone from it being normal for a woman not to want sex, to it being dysfunctional if she doesn’t! No wonder we’re a bit confused!

The truth is that women are as sexual as men, but we’re not the same as men. Equal does not mean same.

Vive la difference!

Next time I’ll talk more about the differences, using some great analogies from ancient sexual philosophies of Taoist China and Tantric India, as well as what modern science has discovered.

And then… this long introduction into things sexual will be over and I’ll start getting into some practical guidance for you to fulfil your potential and make your sex life all it could be.

Note: If you’d like to read more about today’s topic, I highly recommend Merlin Stone’s brilliantly researched book When God Was A Woman (Harcourt, 1976).