Sexuality in World History

Peter N. Stearns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351976442
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book examines sexuality in the past, and explores how it helps explain sexuality in the present. The subject of sexuality is often a controversial one, and exploring it through a world history perspective emphasizes the extent to which societies, including our own, are still reacting to historical change through contemporary sexual behaviors, values, and debates. The study uses a clear chronological structure to focus on major patterns and changes in sexuality—both sexual culture and sexual behaviors—in the main periods of world history, covering topics including:

• The sexual implications of the transition from hunting and gathering economies to agricultural economies;

• Sexuality in classical societies;

• The postclassical period and the spread of the world religions;

• Sex in an age of trade and colonies;

• Changes in sexual behaviors and sexual attitudes between 1750 and 1950;

• Sex in contemporary world history.

This new edition examines these issues on a global scale, with attention to anthropological insights on sexuality and their relationship to history, the dynamics between sexuality and imperialism, sexuality in industrial society, and trends and conflicts surrounding views of sex and sexuality in the contemporary world.

1 Introduction

The Whys and Hows of Sex History

The history of sexuality, tentatively emerging as a subfield for teaching and research about four decades ago, was predicated from the outset on using history to support contemporary understanding. The first topics stemmed directly from a realization—perhaps somewhat exaggerated—that modern sexual attitudes and behaviors were very different from those of the Victorian age just a century before. The obvious challenge was both to explore Victorianism, to see how it operated as more than a museum oddity, and to assess the reasons for its collapse and for the advent of quite different approaches. The history of sexuality has gone well beyond this framework since its early days, exploring a greater variety of societies and time periods, and modifying the disdain for Victorianism itself. But the interest in the nature of change, in beliefs and practices associated with sexuality, and the commitment to use history as a source of perspectives on complex current realities, remains very strong.

This is a book about sex in the past, and how sex in the past helps explain sex in the present. It deals with a variety of societies around the world, while talking about how sexual attitudes and behaviors are affected by larger global forces like the advent of agriculture or, later, urbanization. The book seeks as well to show how the many current problems associated with sex, including sometimes bitter global disputes about sexual issues, have emerged from larger historical patterns.

A study of sexuality in history can understandably evoke several skeptical responses, and these are best discussed explicitly and in advance.

—This is a frivolous topic, not worthy of historical attention compared to the really important features of human society in the past. Response: to an extent, of course, this is a matter of personal taste. Serious work on the history of sex is only a few decades old; traditionally, historians devoted themselves mainly to work on politics, diplomacy, great ideas, and possibly economic patterns. But understanding patterns of sexuality in the past helps illuminate a major aspect of human behavior, which should be justification enough for this expansion of history’s topical range. Sex history connects also to other topics—like differences among social classes or gender patterns; recent work has emphasized the direct connections between power alignments and sexual ideas and practices. Governments often seek to regulate sexual behavior (not always with great success), and sex certainly figures in the impact of armies or colonial authorities—linking sex history directly with conventional historical topics. We increasingly realize how much rape plays into war and civil strife, another if particularly horrible linkage. Sex-related topics—gay rights, abortion, date rape—loom uncomfortably large in the current American political landscape, and historical perspective in these areas fills an obvious need. Score one for the relevance of sexuality history: the topic is not at all a frivolous aside in the history enterprise.

—This is an inconceivable topic (no pun intended), for sex is a basic behavior, biologically determined, so it has no real history. Response: this one is easy to disprove, though we will come back to this point in Chapter 2. Attitudes toward sexuality vary widely according to different social contexts—some societies in some periods disapprove vigorously of masturbation, to take one example, but then later ease off into greater permissiveness. Sexual culture, the values and beliefs applied to sex, obviously change over time, and this is an important part of the larger history. Distinctions between “normal” and “abnormal” sexuality are clearly constructed by particular societies; not surprisingly, a great deal of recent scholarship has been applied to this aspect, with attention among other things to relationships between homosexual and heterosexual evaluations. Actual behavior has a history too. Rates of adultery vary, depending on time period and larger social conditions. Ages of puberty change (which means that even biology is not an absolute constant), depending on nutrition and social context. Average age of menopause can vary as well. Relationships between sex and reproduction clearly shift, depending both on social norms and available technologies.

—This is a disgusting topic, certainly not fit for student audiences. Response: again, to an extent this is a matter of personal taste. The history of sex unquestionably involves issues that some people, even in our permissive society, still prefer not to discuss. I have deliberately referred to masturbation already; it’s an important aspect of sex history in some societies and times, but it’s not something usually discussed in history classes. My own belief is that it’s better to talk about sex, using history in fact as a way to explore key issues, than to cover it up. But there is no intention of being gratuitously shocking. Some sex histories have focused on exotic behaviors that don’t necessarily shed much light on what sex has involved for most people, and that’s not the approach taken in this book. Sex is an important aspect of the human condition, and its history can and should be explored in this framework, and not deliberately either to titillate or offend.

—All well and good, but sex is such a private behavior that its real history is impossible. Response: there are, without question, aspects of the history of sex that cannot be as clearly studied as one might like, because accurate data are simply not available. Behaviors that a society disapproves of are particularly resistant to history probes. Homosexual practices in some times and places are not easy to get at, to take an obvious example, though current scholarship has pushed back some of the older limitations. While historians can deal with attitudes toward masturbation, and some aspects of their impact, we will never be able to talk about rates of masturbation from one period to the next; this is almost always a concealed practice. Another current challenge is intriguing. The massive promotional campaign for drugs to improve male sexual functioning—Viagra and the like—makes one wonder if male dysfunction has been increasing. New health issues, like higher rates of diabetes or high blood pressure and its medication, might cause new problems; and/or growing desire for sexual pleasure and a need to demonstrate sexual masculinity even in later age could account for the new interest. Or the whole thing may be a function of drug company hype. Great questions, but the fact is we can’t know for sure: there is no tidy census of male erectile capacities in previous decades. There are, in other words, real limitations in what we can know historically (or even about sexual habits in our own times). But historians have discovered a great deal, and it is possible to talk about significant historical changes and continuities. Public attitudes, important in their own right, are easier to get at than behaviors; even many of the latter lend themselves to serious historical description and analysis. The subject is important enough that even a somewhat constrained historical treatment is worth the effort.

Casting a history of sexuality in world history terms heightens the problem of documentation. Different societies generate different types and amounts of relevant records. All societies have values that apply to sexuality—the subject is too important not to generate both laws and other conventions plus cultural commentary. So we can get at sexual cultures as soon as significant historical materials of any sort become available. The first known law code, from Babylonia, spent a great deal of time on sexual regulation, and early art also had strong sexual content—to take two examples. But material on sexual practice is much more varied. At least as important, for our purposes, is the fact that historians have studied sexuality far more extensively for some societies than for others, which means that not all the comparisons one might wish to develop are possible. Indeed, there is real opportunity for further work on the history of sexuality seen as a global and comparative topic, with strong potential for serious advances in historical knowledge (of the sort that have already paid off in research on several societies).

Still, the world framework, though not commonly applied to sexuality and certainly challenging, has its merits already, even in the present state of scholarship. All three of the main approaches developed for world history apply readily to sexuality, and gain additional richness when patterns of sexual culture and behavior are factored in. Different societies have different standards, so that comparison can reveal a great deal about how particular civilizations operated. Even the sensual content of art could differ greatly, as a comparison between statues of Hindu goddesses and women in Chinese art reveals quite easily. Contacts between societies—the second world history approach, after comparison—could also strongly affect sexual culture and practice. Spanish colonists frequently fathered illegitimate children with Native American women, helping to establish a widespread incidence of sex outside of marriage that has continuing impact in Latin America. British colonial control of India, at the 19th-century peak of prudery back home, necessitated special exemptions from British law for the use of Hindu art on Indian postage stamps, revealing an unexpected complexity introduced by contact among two societies with very different public sexual values. Finally, both culture and practice have reflected some of the larger forces in world history. Global trade patterns, in our own day, help explain a new incidence of sex trafficking in several parts of the world. Diffusion of agriculture, much earlier in time, had dramatic impact on sexuality. Sex, not surprisingly given its importance, has been a vital part of the panorama of world history, and helps translate world history patterns into an understanding of ordinary human behavior and daily life.

The history of sexuality begins with the fact that, as many sociobiologists and anthropologists have noted, the human animal has some distinctive characteristics. Sex is, after all, a matter of animal behavior, though with human beings more is involved. Compared to many mammalian species humans have an unusual number of erogenous zones on their bodies, which obviously can encourage sexual stimulation. Although women of the species are fertile only a few days each month, their fertile periods are more frequent than those of many other mammals and they can be stimulated sexually even at non-fertile times, or after fertility has ended with menopause; their sexual activity is thus less dependent on a few annual points at which they are “in heat” than is true of many other animals. There’s another interesting distinction from most mammalian species (except for some chimpanzees): humans gain capacity for and interest in sexual activity before most young women are regularly ovulating, which means that they can indulge in sex for a few years with less likelihood (NOT, be advised, no likelihood) of pregnancy resulting. Human children display certain kinds of sexual awareness, at least of their own bodies.

These simple but basic points mean that human sexual activity can be, and often is, rather frequent and may be less fully tied to reproductive effort than is true for many other species. The point about a partial gap between appetite and reproductive capacity almost builds in some possible experimentalism for adolescents and certainly some big societal issues about regulating these experimental impulses in turn. Indeed the whole human biological apparatus, where sex is concerned, quite literally inevitably imposes some needs for sexual regulation on the species, to make sure that sexual activity does not get out of control or become too disruptive either of individual lives or of social relationships. This is particularly true because humans have the capacity for more reproduction than most families or societies usually want. If a couple tries to maximize their reproductive behavior, having sex as early in life as fertility develops and continuing until it ends (for women, with menopause), they will have on average about fourteen children. This is called the Hutterite formula, named for a religious sect in Canada that for several decades practiced this kind of unrestrained reproductive effort. And through history there have always been some couples who had family sizes at this level. But in most historical periods the Hutterite formula generates more children than can easily be raised or supported, so most societies develop some customs designed to encourage somewhat less reproduction, which in turn means either less sexual activity or some controls on sexual activity. Here too, the human sexual capacity quickly generates the need for social response. The precise nature of the response can, obviously, vary from one society to the next, and it can alter. This is part of the history of sexuality. But a tension between biological capacity and social needs is something of a constant, even though its specific manifestations change greatly over time.

Sociobiologists would add some other basics about human sexuality. They note that, like other animals, there are significant gender differences. Some have contended that males, constantly producing new sperm during their fertile years, are “naturally” bent on having as much sex with as many different partners as possible, to spread their genetic heritage; females, on the other hand, with a finite supply of eggs, and the burden of actually carrying children before birth, find it important to limit their partners and work toward assuring stability for the offspring they have. There is, according to this argument, a built-in gender distinction that will also play out in social arrangements, with men more eager, women more reticent. This may also help explain, though not excuse, some of the deployment of sexuality for male gender dominance, as in abuses of women during wartime. Historians would urge that this biological gender imperative not be overdone, because individuals and cultures can introduce a number of variants on any basic pattern; but it is worth keeping in mind. Men’s fertility usually lasts longer than that of women, which introduces some interesting issues for sexuality in later age. The overall point is clear: biology introduces important complexities into human sexuality, which in turn assures that the history of sexual attitudes and behaviors will be complex.

A few other biological issues should be noted. Some authorities argue that about 10% of the population is “naturally” homosexual. This is of course disputed by others who find homosexuality a matter of sin or psychological aberration. A few people are born with unclear gender sexuality traits, which means that many societies face an issue of what to do in such circumstances, how to define and manage what is currently called intersex or transgender. Here too, a standard phenomenon, in biological terms, calls for a whole variety of cultural responses, from one place and from one time to the next. Transgender issues, so important in the contemporary United States around debates over questions like bathroom designations, in fact have a rich and possibly revealing history. Biology obviously dictates the fact that interbreeding among close relatives produces a higher rate of genetically defective children than is otherwise the case, and presumably early societies registered on these results; this explains the many efforts to prohibit sexual contacts among siblings and other primary kin. Again, biology intersects with human sexual history in many important ways.

The history of sexuality is not just about connections with biology, however. A great deal of scholarship in the past two decades, often inspired by feminism or gay rights advocacy, has looked at sex less in terms of behaviors and more in terms of power relationships and cultural construction—the force of social beliefs in defining sexuality in ways that benefit certain groups (upper classes; males)—while marginalizing others. Historians have become increasingly adept at questioning the social framework for sexual rules and taboos, as well as outright policies that bear on sexual behaviors, with some particular attention to uses of sexuality in defining larger relationships between genders.

Human sexuality has been changing a great deal in recent decades. New levels of population pressure—global populations tripled in the 20th century, an unprecedented rate of increase—force new personal and social decisions about reproductive sex. New devices, like the pill, facilitate a growing separation between sex and reproduction, creating greater opportunities for recreational sex than ever before. Novel types of media, like movies and television, create opportunities for the visual portrayal of sexual stimuli never before experienced. Growing contacts among societies, thanks to global communication and commerce, inevitably create tensions as different sexual standards collide. New human rights ideas create debates over the treatment of certain kinds of sexual minorities, and while these debates are particularly vigorous in some societies, they can have some global resonance. Changing work and coeducational schooling patterns, with more and more women studying and working outside the home thanks to global industrialization and urbanization, create opportunities for sexually-relevant interactions but also for concerns about appropriate regulation of behavior—the novel modern concept of sexual harassment is one important response. And amid these and other fundamental changes, many societies and individuals react with indignation, seeking to defend against undue innovation in one of the most intimate but potentially sacrosanct areas of human life. One of the reasons that the history of sexuality gains significance involves the opportunity to analyze current patterns of change and reactions to change—using recent history better to understand our contemporary global selves.

One central tension is obvious, and while it is not brand new it is clearly taking on new relevance in the contemporary world. On the one hand, opportunities and possibly interests in sexual pleasure, including sexual diversity, have almost certainly been growing in recent decades, or at the very least public discussion has become more open. On the other hand, however—possibly in part as a result of this first trend—a list of sexual problems has been growing as well, including “date rape” and sexual abuse in many current settings, bitter and often truly nasty quarrels about homosexuality within and among global societies, or the explosion of available pornography.

But the history of sexuality is not just a modern topic, and older patterns are interesting in themselves as well as providing vital backdrops to more contemporary concerns. Different regional reactions to common contemporary trends, for example, relate directly to sexual values systems developed often many centuries ago. At least a portion of the current problems list gains greater clarity from exploration of earlier patterns as well as recent trends. Historians indeed have debated how much change in sexuality results from “modern” conditions, how much continuity persists from earlier patterns and regional cultures—and addressing this topic requires attention to the earlier side of the equation, and not just recent adjustments.

This book begins with a brief discussion of some of the anthropological findings about sexuality, often in less complex societies. This provides some insights into sexual variety and the role of cultural norms, which can feed into historical inquiry directly. It also offers an introduction into some of the theoretical issues that play such a great role in relevant scholarship, for example from the standpoint of feminist theory. Inevitably this exercise involves some discussion of whether, in the past, some societies managed to express sexuality more successfully, with fewer personal and social hang-ups, than more complex societies would achieve. The thorny question of whether greater complexity, in more elaborate civilizations, additionally complicates sexuality is impossible to avoid.

We then turn, in Chapter 3, to the sexual implications of the transition from hunting and gathering economies to agricultural economies—a transition that had obvious impacts on behaviors and which, even more dramatically, encouraged development of new cultural norms. There is no question that agriculture changed the framework for sexual behavior considerably, in this first great transformation in the human economy. Gender differentiation increased, and sexual standards both reflected and promoted this complex process. Other anxieties associated with sexuality may have extended as well.

As agricultural societies matured, they developed various standards for sexuality, brought out by comparisons among the classical societies detailed in Chapter 4. Gender norms and approaches to homosexuality were among the key variables, but within agricultural civilizations differences of social class must also be considered.

The spread of the world religions introduced still further change, particularly during the postclassical period between about 500 and 1450 ce. Explaining the causes and impacts of change, and updating comparative findings, bring the history of sexuality closer to modern times. This postclassical period also saw an unprecedented surge of extensive travel, and many accounts dealt with sexual issues.

Between 1500 and 1750, the big story is the development...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Introduction: The Whys and Hows of Sex History
• Part I Preface: Sexuality before Modern Times
• Part I Conclusion: Sexuality in the Agricultural Age
• Part II Preface: Sex in the Modern World, 1750–1950
• Part II Conclusion: Was There a “Modern” Sexuality by 1950?
• Part III Preface: Sexuality in the Age of Globalization
• Part III Conclusion: A New Variety?
• Epilogue: Sexuality from Past to Present
• Index