An important feature of this biological model was its biologization of gender difference. From the 18th century, the traditional idea of the ‘one-sex body’, which conceptualized women’s bodies as similar but inferior versions of male bodies (with female genitals being thought of as internal, much smaller versions of male genitals), started to be replaced with the idea of a clear biological differentiation between men and women. Male and female bodies came to be seen as fundamentally, biologically different, not as part of the same hierarchical continuum. The gender hierarchy remained, however. It was variously based upon the amalgamation of femininity with motherhood, as in the 19th-century English evolutionist Herbert Spencer’s claim that woman’s inferior intellectual capacities were caused by the fact that she had stopped at an earlier stage of evolution in
order to free energy to fulfil her role in the reproduction of the species; upon a claimed basic difference in ‘cell metabolism’, as the biologists Geddes and Thomson influentially argued; or upon hormonal differences between the sexes after the discovery of sex hormones around the turn of the 20th century. While claims about the biological inferiority of women were also used to legitimize the continued exclusion of women from the public sphere and politics in a context in which such exclusion became increasingly contested, the emergence of new ways of seeing the body transformed understandings of sex as well, as Laqueur has emphasized. Sex was no longer understood as an encounter between cold and hot, active and passive partners, but as an act between men and women who were now seen as biologically very different creatures.
The innate biological differences between men and women, which justified their assignment to different social roles, were thought also to lead to differences in sexual behaviour and needs. Whereas male sexuality was seen as naturally aggressive and forceful, women’s sexuality was conceptualized as a response to male desire, driven by reproductive and maternal instincts. Although some sexologists, such as Havelock Ellis, emphasized the importance of female sexuality and of fulfilling sex as crucial for a happy life, the 19th-century English physician William Acton expressed prevalent public opinion when he stated:
The majority of women are not much troubled by sexual feeling of
any kind.
Sexologists routinely reproduced the double sexual morality of the time by picturing ‘normal’ women as passive and chaste, with a natural preference for monogamy, and by presenting male promiscuity as caused by ‘the sexual demands of man’s nature’, as Krafft-Ebing put it. Consequently, ‘excessive’ sexual urges on the part of a woman were seen as abnormal. This resulted in a stark increase in the diagnosis of ‘female hysteria’ in the course
of the 19th century, a nervous disorder that was thought to be caused by insufficient sexual satisfaction of excessively passionate women. Patients were sometimes treated by manual massage of their genitals by a doctor until ‘hysterical paroxysm’ (what contemporary terminology would describe as ‘orgasm’) occurred, while water massage devices were offered in spas across Europe and the United States and electrical vibrators became popular appliances with the spread of electricity to the private home. Alternatively, clitoridectomy could be proposed. Institutions across the US and the UK, such as the ‘London Surgical Home for the Reception of Gentlewomen and Females of Respectability Suffering from Curable Surgical Diseases’, set up in 1858, routinely offered clitoridectomy as a ‘cure’ for conditions ranging from hysteria to mania, idiocy, insanity, and urinary incontinence. Success stories circulated in England of operations performed on women who had sought divorce under the new 1857 Divorce Act, a behaviour that was interpreted as an obvious symptom of mental illness, and who after the operation conceded to return to their husbands. As the last example shows, genital mutilation could be used as an instrument for the disciplining of non-normative femininity.
Representations of female sexuality varied, however, with social class and race. Working-class girls and racial ‘others’ were often portrayed as more sexually available or even insatiable, as reflected in erotic literature such as John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (1748) and the anonymous My Secret Life (1888), while prostitutes were commonly depicted as hypersexual beings with rotten, corrupted bodies. The lower categories were on the assumed hierarchical scale of civilization, the closer they were to ‘primitives’ — which is why, in general, women were assumed to be ‘as a rule… much more the slaves of their instincts and habits than men’, as the Swiss sexologist Auguste Forel put it. Working-class men and women, Africans, Asians, and Jews (the latter considered a separate ‘race’) were considered especially voluptuous and more likely to engage in ‘uncivilized’, ‘degenerate’ sexual practices.
Female sexuality remained an intense focus of problematization throughout the history of sexual science, though later sex research tended, on the contrary, to see lack of sexual desire or pleasure in women as pathological. An example of this can be found in the famous experimental research by the American sexologists Masters and Johnson on human sexual response, which included laboratory observation of the physiological responses of hundreds of men and women during masturbation and sexual intercourse from the late 1950s to 1990s. In line with many other sex researchers, Masters and Johnson observed that many women do not have orgasms from intercourse, coining the term female ‘coital orgasmic inadequacy’ in their best-selling Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970). Female sexuality was thus constructed as pathological in relation to male heterosexuality (although they also observed the capacity for women to have multiple orgasms).