Histories of Sexuality

Antiquity to Sexual Revolution

Stephen Garton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136090264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

A history of sexuality runs the risk of confirming popular fears that academics are capable of ruining even the most simple of pleasures. This book, however, is written in the hope that histories of sexuality (although not necessarily this one) can enlighten and, occasionally, even delight. At their best such histories offer a means of investigating the clash of instinct and culture — how seemingly timeless and natural behaviours shape and are in turn shaped by history. Sexual practices may persist through time but history also illuminates how sex and sexuality are surprisingly mutable. This capacity of history to unsettle and surprise is evident in many of the works discussed here. In less than 40 years the history of sexuality, as a definable area of scholarly enterprise, has grown from a few works describing past attitudes and behaviours into an enormously rich field that sustains its own journal, a number of monograph series and countless seminars, conferences, articles and books. Moreover, this field has moved well beyond accounts of exotic ideas and strange obsessions to embrace sophisticated analyses of such issues as subjectivity, identity, power, desire, gender and embodiment. Through these studies we now have a much more detailed account of past sexual ideas, beliefs, practices, fantasies and struggles.

Chapter 1

WRITING SEXUAL HISTORY

Sex is one of the few things about which historians can be certain. Without heterosexual penetration we would not be here to ruminate on the past. Of course, there is much more to sex, even heterosexual sex, than reproduction. But for many historians, sex is a constant — outside history. For a discipline committed to charting social, political and economic change, sex was something biological, natural and beyond historical inquiry. What is the point of writing about something that happened in all times and places? Instead sexual practices found their way into history through other means. For some social reformers, such as Margaret Sanger and Howard Brown Woolston, reflections on the history of birth control or prostitution served to underpin claims for legislative change. These histories, written by reform-minded amateurs rather than professional historians, served to illustrate the errors of the past.¹ More common amongst University-based historians was the tradition of subsuming sex within a wider concern with morality. Pioneering nineteenth-century historians, such as William Edward Hartpole Lecky, made the history of European morals a legitimate area of inquiry, one properly subject to observable patterns of change over time.² Such an approach, however, made moral codes historical, leaving sexual behaviour timeless and unchanging.

While many historians, until the 1970s, accepted the force of biological and psychological theories of sexuality, other disciplines were very interested in the cultural webs that entangled the sex drive — courtship rituals, sexual initiation rights, marriage customs, religious sanctions, superstitions, beliefs, childbirth practices, and child-rearing traditions. Pioneering anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, charted rich cultural differences in the organization of sexual life.³ Sexologists, such as Norman Haire, took up anthropological insights to highlight the historical and cultural diversity of sexual practices and customs.⁴ More importantly, for both anthropologists and sexologists, the sexual life of exotic cultures was a way of pointing to the limitations of Western sexual practices. In both disciplines sex and sexuality was a fixed domain of human experience, which was then subjected to different forms of cultural organization. These forms of organization then could be compared on the basis of how much they repressed ‘natural’ sexual instincts. Importantly, these studies suggested that some sexual practices were culturally and historically specific.

A few adventurous historians took up these ideas and attempted to write histories of sex that stressed difference and change. One of the earliest and most important is Hans Licht's Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (1932).⁵ Licht argued that masturbation, perversion, tribadism, prostitution and sexual licence were widespread and compatible with civilization. Erotic literature was at the heart of classical culture. More importantly, Licht asserted that homosexuality was widely practised, acceptable and the source of much of the cultural richness of the classical era. Such a conclusion was implicitly a plea for tolerance of modern homosexuality. Others attempted to bring sex to the forefront of the history of morals tradition, giving it a more radical edge. Gordon Rattray Taylor's Sex in History (1953)⁶ covered an enormous historical sweep from early Christian Europe to the twentieth century. Although he stressed the variety of sexual customs in the history of Europe he concluded that, despite apparent diversity, there was a ‘remarkable continuity in the sex attitudes that form part of Western culture’.

The novelty of his focus on the history of customs, however, was subsumed into a more conventional stress on the history of attitudes. For Taylor, if sex was constant and morality historical, then excessive regulation of sex lives was arbitrary and contestable. Thus the past and ‘exotic cultures’ both served to suggest that modern sexual life had failed to foster healthy outlets for natural sexual drives. History became a critique of modern Western sexual culture and a weapon in a variety of reform struggles rather than an area of historical enquiry marked by a diversity of viewpoints and approaches. More importantly, what was missing from these works was any plausible theory of how sex might be made part of history. For such historians the past was a reservoir of illustrative examples of exotic practices and strange views, but they did not ask how or why sexual practices and sexual identities might change. Morality changed; sex did not.

This relative neglect of sex as a subject of historical inquiry was overcome in the 1960s and 1970s. In the context of sexual revolution and new movements, such as gay liberation and feminism which put sexuality at the centre of contemporary politics, the history of sexuality became a concern for both activists and historians (and historians who were also activists).⁷ Within a decade the trickle of works on the history of sexuality had become a flood. And since the 1970s the history of sexuality has become an area of significant growth — a definable sub-discipline not merely the hobby of a few — spawning numerous theses, conferences, books, articles and even specialist journals, such as the Journal of the History of Sexuality (1991). More importantly, it is a field that now encompasses a variety of approaches and viewpoints in creative tension with each other. The field became an arena for major theoretical debates, often crudely characterized as the struggle between ‘essentialists’ and ‘social constructionists’, over the nature of sexuality and how it operated over time.⁸ More recently, historians have sought to move beyond this dichotomy to theorize how sexual identities and practices can be both historical and transhistorical — a concern with questions of difference and continuity in the organization of sex throughout history. How and why historians sought to make sexuality a central concern of history are themes that weave themselves throughout many of the forthcoming chapters in this book.

The Emergence of Sexual History

The roots of the expansion in historical fascination with sexuality are diverse. One avenue was through the history of ideas. This was an outgrowth of the older Lecky tradition of the history of morals. In 1959 Keith Thomas's seminal essay on ‘the double standard’ made sexual attitudes a legitimate object for intellectual history. Thomas diagnosed what he saw as a pervasive historical difference in the ways sexual behaveiour in men and women were viewed. Thomas argued that ‘unchastity is for a man…mild and pardonable, but for a woman is a matter of utmost gravity’. For men the role of the rake or seducer was acceptable and even embedded in English institutions of marriage and the law. Although the ‘rake’ ideal was contested by the Christian ideas of reciprocal fidelity and the growth of middle-class respectability in the Victorian era, the acceptance of the sexual rights of men and antipathy to women who ‘betrayed’ their calling as wife and mother was deeply rooted in English culture.

The key to this pervasive ethic was ‘the desire of men for absolute property in women’. Although Thomas highlighted the need to examine gender m the history of ideas and how ‘the double standard’ shaped moral conduct and its regulation, ‘unchastity in men’ appeared to be a timeless ethic but one open to contest in specific times and places. For Thomas, like Lecky before him, morality not sexuality was historical. Nonetheless, arising out of this renewed interest in ideas came a number of studies of attitudes towards such social problems as prostitution, the age of consent, social purity and ‘white slavery’.⁹

More ambitious was the effort of American literary scholar Steven Marcus to provide a theory of historical change for sexuality.¹⁰ The Other Victorians (1964) contrasts an official nineteenth-century British view of sexuality as contained and controllable with the abundant evidence for an extensive network of pornographers in England since the seventeenth century. For Marcus, Dr William Acton, a prominent physician who wrote extensively on prostitution and venereal diseases, exemplified the official view. Acton believed that children and respectable women did not suffer from sexual feelings. Desire, however, was a potent natural force that surged through the bodies of men (and fallen women), and if left unchecked could lead to ruin. Acton turned sexuality into a problem — the source of disease and the social evil of prostitution. In his view sexuality was something that threatened the body and had to be channelled into the safer waters of marital sexual congress. The body itself was a fixed reservoir of sexual energies that if drained could never be replenished. Masturbation or sexual excess wasted these finite energies, depleted the body, leading to nervous debility and physical decline. In Victorian sexual culture, through the eyes of Acton, sex was something to be feared.

At the very time that Acton was writing, however, there was a thrivmg market in Victorian pornography. Marcus provides a detailed analysis of the extensive pornography collections of bibliographer-scholar, Henry Spence Ashbee, the 11 —volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life and a plethora of nineteenth-century pornographic novels. The key feature of Victorianism for Marcus is the extraordinary gap between the dominant moralistic culture of restraint and the thriving subculture of pornography. The two are mirror opposites — one repressed, troubled, limited, focused and moral and the other characterized by inexhaustible excess, repetition, plenitude, insatiability, in Marcus's terms a ‘pornotopia’.

The ‘excessive repression’ of Victorianism, Marcus suggests, drove sex underground, fuelling the pornography industry. Thus repression and pornography were integrally linked. This connection was reinforced by Marcus' argument that the pornography industry only began to take off in the late-seventeenth century. Thus the gradual shift towards Victorian ‘moralism’ through the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries paralleled the rise in pornography. It also paralleled the development of the novel as a new form within English literature, detailing the inner lives and social values of thrift, individual initiative, endeavour, self-control, self-consciousness and respectability promoted by the emerging middle class. Marcus, as a literary critic, was at pains to distinguish between pornography and the novel as being very different forms of literature. But for Marcus their historical connection was no accident. Drawing on Weber, Marcus linked Victorianism, the novel and pornography, to the rise of capitalism, puritanism and individualism.

The question for Marcus becomes that of why bourgeois sensibilities produced the proliferation of pornography. The answer, he believed, lay in the work of Sigmund Freud. For Freud, sexuality was an irresistible natural instinct that had to be tamed or channelled into other activities in order for civilization to progress. This process of sublimation was a necessary engine for the rise of capitalism, but it came at great emotional and physical cost. Instincts could never be completely overcome and thus sublimation involved a constant struggle between sexuality and civilization. Sublimation and repression were imperfect tools in the war against unconscious desires. For Marcus, the more society repressed sexual expression, the more Victorians had to find other outlets for their instincts, so they turned to the underground world of pornography and prostitution for sexual fantasy and satisfaction.

Paralleling this argument about the interconnection between moralism and licentiousness was Marcus' claim that this peculiar Victorian world was itself now past, strange and alien to modern readers. By placing Victorianism in the past Marcus suggests that this sexual culture was historical — the product of specific conditions and now a world we have lost. Thus Victorianism was bounded by other sexual regimes. Prior to the seventeenth century, according to Marcus, sexuality was relatively open and accepted in both art and life, and thus there was no need for an extensive pornography industry. On the other side, Freud represented for Marcus the crucial break with Victorian sexual culture. Psychoanalysis was a science that revealed the psychological mechanisms that structured sexuality. Freud demonstrated that sexuality was itself a consequence of necessary repression, but that excessive repression fostered neurosis. By implication Marcus saw Victorianism as a ‘neurotic’ culture, while modern society had learned from Freud that sexual liberalism was a healthy and culturally enriching social attitude.

Freud is the key to understanding Marcus text. On the one hand, Marcus was committed to the idea that sexuality was a natural drive present m all people and all cultures. Civilization, however, required a measure of repression to promote human progress. On the other hand, too much repression could harm both individuals and cultures. The implication of Marcus conception of Victorianism is that the role of the historian is to chart the historical fluctuations between periods of excessive repression and relative liberalism. This conclusion rests on his theorization of a link between two related yet opposite sexual cultures. But Marcus argument about sexual cultures, or more properly culture/subculture, is crude and poorly substantiated. Many historians have questioned the significance of William Acton as the major exemplar of Victorianism, arguing that even in the mid-nineteenth century many medical specialists rejected his views.¹¹

Moreover, the idea that pornography was little in evidence before the seventeenth century and, by implication, in decline after Freud, is not borne out by the abundant evidence for a flourishing pornography industry in modern culture. Equally problematic is Marcus' use of the concept ‘Victorian sexuality’. Marcus sees Victorianism as an undifferentiated phenomenon. In doing so he focuses almost entirely on heterosexuality, largely ignoring homosexuality, transvestism, and other forms of sexuality. Hence he fails to see the variety of subcultures and practices that disrupt any simple notion of ‘Victorianism’. Nonetheless, Marcus's idea of the history of sexuality as a circular process of alternating periods of light and excessive repression was one of the first attempts at a systematic historical account of sexuality, one that influenced later historians.

Another important contribution to the history of sexuality m the 1960s, was social interactionist sociology. Prominent sociologists such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman argued that society constructed social roles, which people came to adopt as ‘scripts’ for forms of interaction with other members of the community. This was a powerful assertion of the primary importance of social context in the construction of social behaviour. Out of this school of thought came an intense interest in sex roles and how ideas of ideal male and female behaviour powerfully constrained the actions of individuals of either sex. From 1970 the journal Sex Roles (a ‘journal of sex research’) provided an important forum for the investigation of how sex roles shaped sexual behaviour. Labelling and deviancy theory, pioneered by sociologists such as Howard Becker, also provided a framework for seeing sexual deviancy as a social phenomenon rather than a natural or biological anomaly. Labelling theory explored how in specific social contexts behaviours that were different from dominant social norms were stigmatized. For Becker group identity was forged through the defining of ‘outsiders’ as deviant. Thus societies provided a range of ‘scripts’ for normality and abnormality and these roles varied considerably across different cultures, indicating their social character.¹²

In 1968, leading British social interactionist Mary McIntosh formulated a provocative theory of homosexuality that proved to be very influential for English historians of sexuality.¹³ McIntosh questioned the self-evidence of homosexuality, arguing that it was not a ‘condition’ or ‘social problem’, biological or environmental in origin, but a social role. The scientific work that argued that homosexuality was a disease was a means of social control not an objective analysis of behaviour. In contrast, focusing on homosexuality as a social role allowed social scientists to step outside apparatuses of social control, to explore how roles create expectations, and investigate the extent to which individuals fulfilled these expectations. More importantly, McIntosh claimed that the way homosexuality was made into a social problem, rather than homosexuality itself, should instead become the object of study. To cement this argument McIntosh pointed to Australian Aboriginal, African, Middle Eastern and Native American cultures, where homosexual behaviour was an accepted social role. Further, she resorted to historical evidence, arguing that a definable homosexual subculture did not develop in England until the seventeenth century. By arguing that the homosexual role did not exist in all societies, McIntosh hoped to prove that while homosexuality was timeless, the stigmatized...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Writing Sexual History
• 2. Rule of the Phallus
• 3. Sexual Austerity
• 4. Christian Friendships
• 5. Making Heterosexuality
• 6. Victorianism
• 7. Dominance and Desire
• 8. Feminism and Friendship
• 9. Imagining Perversion
• 10. Normalizing Sexuality
• 11. Sexual Revolution
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Select Bibliography
• Index