'Slut' - a word defined by the OED as 'a woman of a low or loose character' - dates back to 1450. But the negative connotations of sleeping around don't start there. Almost 50 years earlier, Chaucer had published his glorious portrait of Alyson, the dominant, sexually voracious, 'gap-toothed' (a signifier of hypersexuality) Wife of Bath in his Canterbury Tales. Even earlier, the notion that women could have too many sexual partners was rooted in traditions of lineage. In the early Middle Ages, wealth and standing was passed down, not by way of father to son, but to father to their sister's son. The thinking was that a man knew who his sister was and in turn who she'd given birth to so there was a guaranteed blood line. Your wife, on the other hand, couldn't be trusted. That doesn't mean women are any less interested in sex than men, just that they have more to lose...