After ten days or so on the Holy Mountain I began to find the total absence of womankind strangely oppressive

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 254.

This time Athos was a joy. Day after day, the sun beat down. We walked from monastery to monastery—there are twenty of them, and I think we notched up seventeen—staying in a different one every night and during the day wandering through some of the most ravishingly beautiful country in the world—the more so because it is utterly unspoilt: no one swims in the limpid little bays, the flowers have never had children to pick them. The views—particularly as you head south, where the Holy Mountain rises to its 6,000-foot summit—are breathtaking. The monks, once they were persuaded that we were not Roman Catholics, were friendly and in their way hospitable. (I qualify this last remark only because Athonite food is—or was in those days—in a class by itself for horror; every meal was a gastronomic nightmare, and if we had not taken copious provisions with us from London it is unlikely that we should have survived.) I had only one unfortunate contretemps, when, one morning at dawn, I was giving myself a much-needed strip wash in the bathhouse of the most venerable of all the monasteries, the Grand Lavra, standing in a long trough and clad in nothing but soapsuds, when the guest-master appeared. Never have I seen a man so angry. His outpouring of hysterical Greek was largely incomprehensible to me, but the message was plain enough: by standing stark naked under the very roof of the Lavra I was desecrating the monastery. I grabbed my clothes, struggled into one or two of them, and fled, soapsuds and all.

I have often wondered: could this incident possibly have occurred in any community in which women were not rigidly excluded? There is something disturbingly unnatural about this negation of all femininity—which extends not only to human beings but to cows, ewes, bitches, and in theory even to hens—engendering as it does an almost pathological terror of sex of which this seems to me a perfect illustration. After ten days or so on the Holy Mountain I began to find the total absence of womankind strangely oppressive—above all in the little village of Karyes which serves as the Athonite capital. Every other village in the world has women and children living in it; Karyes has none. When we finally returned to the outside world and I saw my first woman for a fortnight, I could have thrown my arms round her and kissed her—not, heaven knows, for any reasons of sexual frustration but simply for the values she represented.