Ikea, Sudoku grandmasters, Ken Livingstone, quadratic equations, chancery law, John Lewis, the Tu clothing range at Sainsbury’s, matcha lattes, suet. This is a non-comprehensive list of things that are somehow sexier than a new non-fiction title, Aphrodisia: Women, Sex and Pleasure in the Classical World by Dr Jean Menzies (she insists on the “Dr”). In fact, we might contend that there is nothing less sexy than writing non-fiction pop academia about sex.
That the hyper-sexual often enters the realm of the totally unerotic is a common conundrum. The sanitised, aggressive, smooth and unmysterious porn star is the logical culmination of this principle. I glance at another book on my desk and wonder if I might find more eroticism in The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire by the Canadian classicist RC Blockley. In fact, Aphrodisia is a book nominally about sex; it contains no sex at all.
Aphrodisia’s aromantic rampage through the classical world covers plenty of ground: sex and religion, taboos about penetration, the proclivities of imperial women, the rights to adultery, the material culture of sex toys. If this were not enough to make the reader feel like Mary Whitehouse at a party for the Erotic Review, then the chapter headlines will soon get you there (so to speak): “Licence to bang: marriage, divorce and adultery law” and “Fake it till you make it: ancient guides to sex and dating”.
In her 2000 treatise No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class Camille Paglia pities popular culture’s treatment of contemporary sexuality: Hollywood once made films filled with flirtation and romance; by the 1970s insinuation was replaced with uninteresting nudity; and then the next generation of filmmakers lost the “skill of sophisticated innuendo” before the industry collapsed under the weight of its own sexual literalism. Menzies takes Paglia’s criticism – that sexuality has been cleaved from sex – and throws it back in her face. Aphrodisia is literal, unmysterious, incurious. No sex please, I’m an academic.
She tells us the topic is serious: “There is power in celebrating [women] as sexual beings in a world that so often sees them as sexual objects.” What “power”, she never says. And I am minded to ask, for a matter so serious, why is the rhetorical scaffolding of Aphrodisia so juvenile? “Licence to bang”? It is as though Menzies, too, is embarrassed about her own subject. The puerile (puellile?) tone continues throughout. “This book is dedicated to my first vibrator. RIP,” she writes on the first page. Another chapter concerns what appears to be a dildo from Roman Britain: “Is it a phallus? A dick; a cock; a willy; a schlong; a penis?” Has Menzies borrowed her vocabulary from a teenage boy?
We certainly know from where she extracted her politics. “[Sex toys] were used by women,” she says, before adding an aside: “Though of course anyone can enjoy a dildo, regardless of gender identity.” The eighth chapter begins with a “content warning” for homophobia, lesbiphobia and transphobia. She complains of “sexist ideologies” in the same chapter.
Along with this very 2010s mode of politicking, her linguistic style is packed with BuzzFeed usages. In Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, she says, the poet suspends his advice for the amorous “before any discussion of marriage can enter the chat”. Meanwhile, historians who claim to be unbiased, she adds, are “straight up lying to you”. Interjections – “let’s be honest” and “now let me be clear” – are scattered with alarming disregard for cadence.
The cumulative effect of this – the insistence we take her subject seriously, her refusal to take it seriously herself, the dated politics, the twee juvenalia, the ambient crassness, the giggling childishness, the Urban Dictionary thesaurus – conspires to make Aphrodisia an artefact of semi-recent history. A time in which Caitlin Moran and Jo Brand ruled the femosphere; when female “sex” was boorish and women joked about, er, “schlongs” on TV. For a book that demands we focus on the pleasure faculties of the fairer sex, it is rather, well, masculine in timbre.
But what of its academic merit? Substance, severed from style – does Aphrodisia hold up? Menzies’s primary contention is that for too long women’s sexual “joy” has been a neglected line of academic inquiry, that the quest to understand their sex lives has been associated with “shame” and “stigma”. Menzies writes that her work would never have been published 100 years ago, perhaps not even ten. The reader would be forgiven for finding the claim baseless: Mary Beard, for one, has been in print since the 1980s. Austen for a lot longer than that. No, Aphrodisia is not an original conceit.
It is weakest on literature. One of the most famous female classical authors, Sappho, receives quick treatment. Menzies identifies a coherence in her poetry: “All in all Sappho frames desire and sex as intimately linked,” which is an observation as acute as, “All in all Byron is concerned with brooding romance.” She skips along to the Roman poet Sulpicia for whom “sex and desire” similarly go “hand in hand”.
Beyond this Menzies fails to offer any meaningful reason for the textual comparison beyond the poets’ shared gender. They did not write in the same language and they wrote some 600 years apart. Less time has passed between now and Shakespeare’s death. Does that make the playwright and Jonathan Franzen a meaningful literary comparison?
It is a shame close reading of the literature is so neglected in favour of shallow breadth. Virgil’s Aeneid, featuring one of antiquity’s greatest written stories of passion and romance – Dido and Aeneas – receives no treatment at all.
Menzies is sometimes impressive when operating in the realm of detail. Her collation of material evidence for the ancient use of sex toys is, if not exactly my thing, at least thorough.
But a lack of confidence thrums behind everything. “How seriously should we treat the intention of Ars Amatoria?” she asks, sensibly. “Is it a genuine pick-up manual, political satire, a bit of both, or something else entirely?” I don’t know: it’s your book; you tell me. Elsewhere it is “impossible to state with certainty” while other things at best “seem” valid. Conversely, she relies on axiomatic bombast to justify the project: “Women’s sex lives, their wants and desires, their pleasure and sexual expression, are important. Yesterday, today and tomorrow.” Important for what, and to whom, she does not say.
And so, I am left wondering who this book is for. The textual analysis is pitched at a level suitable for a GCSE student – with scant close reading and mere glances at history. The tone is adolescent in places. But the subject matter (forgive me for priggishness) is technically R-rated, but not actually sexy .
I am thinking of Paglia and No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class again. Victorian prudery, she says, put an end to the sexual candour and ribaldry between men and women. Aphrodisia is explicit but it is no work of candour – it is far too self-conscious to treat its subject matter with requisite confidence. Ribald? Perhaps. But at the expense of any intellectual curiosity: to write of ancient sex and not of Dido is a staggering omission. Afraid of truth, beauty, eros – you know, all that stuff – Aphrodisia panics, blushes and trades it in for a dick joke.
Aphrodisia: Women, Sex and Pleasure in the Classical World
Jean Menzies
Monoray, 240pp, £20
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[Further reading: The Booker Prize 2026 shortlist]
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This article appears in the 24 Sep 2026 issue of the New Statesman, A Sense of Power
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