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For since each hand hath put on nature's power, Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face, Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower, But is profaned.
In Book III of his Metamorphoses Ovid tells the story of how Jupiter teased Juno by saying women experience greater pleasure in lovemaking than men.1 Juno denied this, and when Tiresias, who had experienced sexual intercourse as both a man and a woman, said he agreed with Jupiter, Juno blinded him. Neither Ovid nor any other ancient teller of this story explains why Juno denied Jupiter's assertion or why she blinded Tiresias for agreeing with him, but the answer to those questions is not difficult to figure out. Juno did not want to acknowledge that she experienced greater pleasure in lovemaking because to do so would require her to validate his fantasy, to acknowledge that the picture she knew Jupiter had in his mind of her in a state of uncontrolled self-shattering ecstasy was accurate.
Fifteen hundred years after Ovid, Teresa of Avila spoke about her ecstasies and came close to acknowledging the truthfulness of Jupiter's original taunt. She believed her ecstasies were evidence that women had a greater capacity for loving God than men did (Weber 1990, 41). The language she used to describe these experiences is explicitly sexual. For example, in her most famous account she tells how a beautiful angel appeared to her with his face aflame: