This historian is trying to prove chastity belts were never a real thing

Over hundreds of years, chastity belts have become deeply ingrained in our knowledge of medieval history as a barbaric, almost comically absurd method of stopping a woman from sleeping around. Women, rest easy: The locked metal torture device your ancestors endured is likely the stuff of myths.

"As a medievalist, one day I thought: I cannot stand this anymore," University of Arizona German Studies Professor Albrecht Classen told Atlas Obscura. "It's a concise enough research topic that I could cover everything that was ever written about it... and in one swoop destroy this myth."

And so Classen wrote an entire book dedicated to debunking the chastity belt: The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process. He worked through the literary references available and determined some of them are jokes, complete with unlikely illustrations. Classen also told Atlas Obscura that a physical example conclusively from the Middle Ages has never been found.

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So why did the myth about locking up women's genitals persist? Classen poses a simple explanation: "Male fear."