In giving sex a special status by declaring it to be the original sin, Christianity placed sex firmly at the centre of Christian morality. The historian and social theorist Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality famously pointed out the irony of Christian ethics defining sex simultaneously as something shameful, which should not be spoken about, and as the sin ‘par excellence’, which must be traced not just in its actual manifestations, but also in the mind’s deepest-hidden desires. Through the evolution of procedures such as Catholic confession and the rigorous examination of one’s own conscience fostered by the Reformation, Christianity in fact created institutional mechanisms for incessant reflection
upon sex, encouraging the ‘confession’ of personal sexual ‘truths’. At the same time as Christian moral devaluation of sex asserted itself, writers such as Casanova, Sade, Wilkes, and the author of the anonymously published Victorian text My Secret Life, celebrated their libertine experiences in explicit detail, an apparent contradiction which seems less so when viewed as part of the same trend towards the public narration of sexual truths initiated by the Christian confessional model. In modern times, such confessional models spread to other areas of social life such as family, relationships, medicine, therapy, criminal justice, education, and the media, all settings where we are encouraged to communicate our deepest thoughts and desires. As Foucault puts it, ‘we have since become a singularly confessing society’.
Christian ethics came under attack from the Enlightenment crusade against religious dogma. A culture of sexual libertinism developed in Europe, most notably from the 17th century onwards, at first within the aristocratic elites, among whom the use of condoms, made from sheep intestines, and dildos became at the same time more widespread. From the 1850s, rubber condoms became available, although they seem to have been primarily used for protecting men against venereal disease from sex with prostitutes, and remained too expensive for the working classes. Although the subject of Church disapproval, abortion had traditionally been judged acceptable across much of Europe if carried out before the moment of ‘quickening’, when the woman started to be able to feel the frntus, around the fourth month of pregnancy. Methods for aborting were publicly advertised in the 19th-century press, and the abortion industry was thriving until, in the course of that century, it started to be regulated and criminalized in most European countries.
Cultural anxieties about sex intensified in response to the rapid social and political changes brought about by industrial modernization. The linked processes of industrialization (the development of modern, mechanized methods of production),
urbanization (the resulting increase in the proportion of the population living in urban centres), and secularization (the decreasing importance of religious beliefs in modern society) created large urban masses in which atomized individuals were less exposed than ever before to the social and religious control of traditional pre-modern communities. As the literary critic Steven Marcus has pointed out, the 19th century thus combined a thriving, and mostly urban, underworld of prostitution, dance halls, and a dramatic increase in the availability of pornographic material, partly driven by the development of modern print technologies, with public prudery and sexual repression. Against this backdrop, collective concerns about the decline in public and private morality that supposedly resulted from the impact of modernity intensified. Moral reform groups depicted sexual libertinism as a danger to the social order and to religion, while an extensive medical and advice literature warned of the dangers of sex and of sexually transmissible diseases to personal health.
Western culture developed in particular an obsessive interest in masturbation or ‘the sin of Onan’, drawing on its biblical reference. Concerns were initially triggered by an anonymously published, best-selling pamphlet that appeared in London in the early years of the Enlightenment (some time around 1712) with the title Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable Practice. Its author claimed that, while he initially thought that spiritual guidance would do the trick of dissuading people from this ‘filthy commerce with oneself’, he came to realize the superiority of a medical cure consisting of a ‘strengthening tincture’ and ‘prolific powder’, which he also happened to invent and sell at a rather hefty price. Despite its quackish nature, this text is significant in that it transforms the religious understanding of masturbation as a problem of moral weakness into a medical problem caused by ignorance of the dire consequences of ‘self-abuse’ on personal health, as the historian
Thomas Laqueur points out in his book Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003). The topic was subsequently, and avidly, taken up by key representatives of the Enlightenment. The eminent 18th-century Swiss physician Samuel Tissot produced a widely read work, Onanism, in 1760 which influenced the inclusion of the topic of masturbation in Diderot’s EncyclopSdie, the Enlightenment’s scientific work par excellence. Voltaire saw an opportunity in Tissot’s medicalization of masturbation for further attack on the clergy, whose unnatural abstinence made them, Voltaire argued, particularly prone to such unhealthy solitary pleasure, while Rousseau’s work on the education of the young, Emile (1762), equally warned against its dire consequences.
Masturbation was held responsible for a wide range of long-term medical problems including mental exhaustion, blurred vision, defective memory, blindness, rheumatism, gout, madness, gonorrhoea, epilepsy, impotence, and various sexual deviances.
By the mid-19th century, medical science invented the condition of ‘spermatorrhoea’ whose purported symptoms consisted of nervous debility and a general wasting of the faculties resulting from ‘excessive’ loss of semen due to masturbation. An anti-masturbation commerce developed which proposed cures ranging from rest, mountain walks, health spas, vigorous exercise, and cold baths to chastity belts and complex electrical devices intended to discourage masturbation by delivering electric shocks upon the perpetrators.
Female masturbation was seen as particularly deviant against the backdrop of normative ideas of female sexuality that portrayed women as less subject to ‘animal passions’ than men. In addition, women’s physical constitutions were thought to be weaker than those of men. Masturbation was consequently considered even more dangerous to women’s health, and drastic treatments could comprise surgical interventions including clitoridectomy (the removal of part or most of the female genitalia). More generally, not only grown women but also young persons (of both sexes)
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4. Victorian anti-masturbation devices: a penis ring; a machine delivering electric shocks to the perpetrator; and a warning ofthe physical and mental consequences of masturbation, from 1845
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were thought to be particularly prone to this dangerous practice. This reflected the wider assumption that children, being less cultured and therefore closer to nature than adults, were sexual beings with appetites that needed to be kept in check by civilizing norms — a sexualized understanding of childhood that Freud
would radicalize by further arguing for the fundamentally sexual nature of children (see pp. 46-7).
Whereas in pre-industrial European societies, sexual practices were primarily subjected to moral and religious problematization and categorized in relation to sin, the social transformations brought about by modernity from the late 18th century onwards, and the Enlightenment-inspired march away from religious obscurantism towards the twin deities of science and rationality, led to new ways of thinking about sex which turned it into an object of scientific research. Modern understandings of sexuality can be traced back to the birth of the science of sex (‘sexology’) around the turn of the 20th century. Sex became an object of scientific study in its own right, particularly in the context of medicine and the social sciences. Darwinian theory having had a major influence on the emerging social sciences, Darwin’s view of sexual selection as the key to evolution also became a major impetus for the development of modern sexual science. Through the concept of sexual selection, scientific investigations were, from their beginnings, concerned with questions of heredity, degeneracy, and race. A second major impetus for sex research was the growing concern with public health, in particular with prostitution, personal hygiene, and venereal disease. Sex research became closely intertwined with growing state intervention in sexual matters. It reflected the social and political concerns of the time, as well as its social hierarchies, which were heavily structured by class and gender.
Against this backdrop, sexuality was invented. The term ‘sexuality’, in its contemporary meaning of ‘possession of sexual powers, or capability of sexual feelings’, first entered the English language in 1879 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The first comparable occurrence in French is attributed to the somewhat obscure novelist Peladan, who wrote of the ‘animal drunkenness of sexuality’ (‘l’ivresse animale de la sexualite’) in his erotic novel Le vice supreme, published in 1884. The new concept of sexuality
located sex, as an area of scientific study as well as of subjective experience, firmly in the realm of nature and biology. Sexology replaced the undifferentiated religious category of sin with the medical categories of physical and mental disease and degeneracy. In the process, it radically transformed the social meanings of sex. As the sociologist Jeffrey Weeks puts it:
Sexology was simultaneously constituting and exploring a new continent of knowledge, assigning thereby a new significance to the ‘sexual’.
Biological models of sexuality dominated sexual science throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. They conceptualized sexual behaviour as the outcome of natural, biological drives which form the basis for a variety of social experiences. Sexual normalcy and deviancy from the norm came to be defined in relation to the assumed biological naturalness of essential human reproductive instincts. As an instinctual and potentially overwhelming force, sex was at the same time seen as a possible source of social disorder. The Scottish 19th-century biologists Geddes and Thomson thus warned against the ‘volcanic element in sex, quite underlying the rest of our nature and for that very reason shaking it from its foundations with tremors, if not catastrophe’. Consequently, it was argued, sexual instincts need to be kept in check by society through moral control, sex education, and legislation.
Pioneers of sexology such as the Germans Bloch, Krafft-Ebing, Hirschfeld, Westphal, Rohleder, Moll, and Friedlander, the Austrian Stekel, the French Fere and Thoinot, the Swiss Forel, the Hungarian Kaan, and the English Ellis set out to explore sexual ‘abnormalcy’ through zealous labelling and classification of deviations from the norm. They invented a wide range of new and increasingly exotic taxonomies of ‘perversion’, such as fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism (also called eonism), hermaphrodism, frottage (rubbing against others), coprophilia
(deriving sexual pleasure from faeces), necrophilia (sexual gratification from having sex with the dead), undinism (sexual arousal associated with water), algophilia (sexual gratification associated with inflicting or experiencing pain), and urolagnia (sexual pleasure from urinating), which they presented in ‘the most nauseous detail’, as a reviewer for the British Medical Journal described the case histories presented in Krafft-Ebing’s influential medical handbook of sexual deviance Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). Sexology thus emerged in Europe as a new scientific discipline with international scope. It did not constitute, however, a homogeneous, unified field. Rather, it regrouped scientists with different institutional and political agendas, which led to controversies both within and in response to sexology. Public reactions were mixed. Some of the early works by Ellis and Bloch were prosecuted for obscenity, while Krafft-Ebing tactfully switched to Latin when describing specific sexual practices in Psychopathia Sexualis (rumours circulated at the time that sales of Latin dictionaries soared in Germany after the publication of his best-selling book).