(ix) Preface

Over het groeiende veld van onderzoek op dit terrein. Seks en seksualiteit als concepten. Overzicht van dit boek. Dankbetuigingen.

"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." [mijn nadruk] (ix)

"This book has a different trajectory, offering both a study of specific debates and a history of the history of sexuality. It traces the emergence of this field of inquiry: the early efforts to theorize sexuality as subject to historical change, the stark differences over whether sexuality was an essential, timeless force or the product of social and historical conditions, and more recently the attempts to move beyond this constraining dichotomy.
In pursuing these aims this account shifts between the terms sex and sexuality. At times the focus is on sex, defined here as intertwined practices of pleasure, desire and power. These practices include, but are not confined to, intercourse or other acts of penetration. Sexuality, on the other hand, refers to the ways sexual practices are turned into signifiers of a particular type of social identity." [mijn nadruk] (x)

"By trying to take a longer view (from antiquity to the late-twentieth century) and a broader canvas (Britain, Europe and America) this book attempts to highlight some general themes – such as the pervasiveness of the sexual oppression of women, the persistence of tropes of active/passive in the understanding of sex – and develop some comparative perspectives on different sexual regimes." [mijn nadruk] (xi)

[Dit boek is dus uitsluitend op het Westen gericht? Waarom? Ik weet: dat is al veelomvattend en ik waardeer dat, maar toch is het jammer dat andere werelddelen buiten beschouwing blijven.]

(1) Chapter 1 - Writing sexual history

Historiografie over seks. Allerlei auteurs en benaderingen worden besproken. Een groot accent ligt daarbij op Foucault, die overigens ook flink bekritiseerd wordt.

"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. Sexologists, such as Norman Haire, took up anthropological insights to highlight the historical and cultural diversity of sexual practices and customs. 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." [mijn nadruk] (1-2)

"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 [Gordon Rattray Taylor, Sex in History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1953) - GdG], 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." [mijn nadruk] (2)

Bespreking van Marcus over de Victoriaanse cultuur. Daar is kritiek op gekomen. Zo simpel als Marcus het zag was het nu ook weer niet.

"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."(6)

"The social history of sexuality was given added impetus by radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Civil rights, the sexual revolution, anti-psychiatry, student and prison activism, and most importantly for sexuality the feminist and gay liberation movements were crucial to the growing interest in the history of sexuality."(8)

"Early ‘second wave’ feminists such as Betty Freidan, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Robin Morgan made sex an important aspect of the pervasive patriarchal oppression of women. Women were denied sexual autonomy, chained to men’s demands for sexual access, driven into prostitution and assaulted, raped and humiliated if they refused. A key struggle was to create opportunities for women’s sexual autonomy."(8)

"Although by the early 1980s some feminists such as Carol Vance, Linda Gordon and Ellen DuBois were seeking to expand feminist horizons beyond oppression to such issues as pleasure, much of this interest focused on the present rather than the past."(8-9)

" In many of the pioneering works of women’s history, such as those by Patricia Branca, Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, sexuality was merely one sphere of oppression amongst many. In these works sexuality actually rated only passing mention. Of more importance for women’s history was work, wages, childcare, motherhood and the family. Even in areas more directly related to sexuality such as birth control and prostitution, the important pioneering contributions of historians, such as Linda Gordon, Judith Walkowitz and Ruth Rosen, focused more on issues such as misogyny and social repression than on sexuality."(9)

"Thus tropes of oppression and resistance became central in writing gay and lesbian history. Such interpretative frameworks also shaped some of the pathbreaking general histories of sexuality on both sides of the Atlantic. Jeffrey Weeks’ Sex Politics and Society (1980) and Estelle Freedman and John D’Emilio’s Intimate Matters (1988) put social repression and struggles for sexual freedom at the centre of the history of sexuality."(9)

Hierna wordt Foucaults benadering besproken.

"Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1 (first published in 1976 and in English translation in 1978) now stands out as the key text in the historiography of sexuality. It is a work that has elicited extraordinary levels of both praise and condemnation."(10)

"Foucault’s analysis marks a distinct departure from social role and deviancy theory. Rather than accepting sexuality as natural and roles as social, Foucault argues that both sexuality and sexual identity were historical. "(10)

"Victorianism spoke endlessly about sexuality in a variety of precise contexts – the family, school, work, the doctor’s surgery, the clinic, the asylum, and the prison. Sexuality became the subject of numerous sciences – medicine, pedagogy, psychiatry, demography, epidemiology, criminology, psychoanalysis – each with its own specific elaboration on the nature of sexuality.(...)
Thus in a striking and controversial formulation Foucault argued that Victorianism did not repress sexuality but instead produced it."(11)

"The idea that scientific knowledge and moral codes produce rather than repress goes to the heart of Foucault’s historical project, most evident in Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of his History of Sexuality. In these works Foucault explores the nature of power since the eighteenth century through an examination of specific human sciences such as economics, psychiatry, biology, sexology, penology and criminology.(...)
But capitalism, individualism, the collapse of absolutism and the rise of democracy worked to forge new modes of power; specifically disciplinary powers that sought to regulate behaviour, movement and thoughts.
This notion of a shift from juridical to disciplinary modes of power highlights one of the weaknesses in Foucault’s penchant for dramatic juxtaposition (most evident in the opening section of Discipline and Punish). It is all too obvious that while disciplinary power has flourished, juridical forms of power have similarly continued and even strengthened their hold. Nonetheless, Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power has been enormously influential. His studies of the ways discourses such as criminology, medicine, pedagogy, psychiatry and psychoanalysis shape human actions and how these discourses worked through specific practices to govern the actions and conduct of individuals have transformed theoretical debates about the nature of power." [mijn nadruk] (12)

"There is something refreshing about Foucault’s formulation of the problem of sexuality. It refuses to answer conventional ‘what’ questions about sexuality (is it biological, psychological or social?) and ‘why’ questions (was it a consequence of repression, the economy, puritanism?). Most importantly it does not seek to make sense of sexuality by seeing it as merely the reflection of something more real such as instinct, class relations, capitalism, modernity or gender domination. Instead it asks seemingly innocuous, but ultimately subversive ‘how’ questions – how do discourses work? What objects do they specify? What effects do they produce? How might they be subverted? Foucault seeks to make disciplinary power sensible in its own terms, with its own specific and historical logics, operations and effects. In his intensely descriptive analysis, Foucault seeks to undermine pervasive frameworks for understanding sexuality (psychoanalytic, biological, Marxist, sociological) by stressing its profound historicity. Moreover, by exploring the ways in which forms of supposed liberation from sexual repression (mainly psychoanalysis) were in fact forms of domination, Foucault critically challenges radical liberation politics and offers a new framework for developing a politics of resistance." [mijn nadruk] (15-16)

"New liberationist movements did not want to defer confronting power until communism had ‘solved’ oppression, but instead worked in diverse ways to undermine the operation of power at its point of most direct operation. Radical movements confronted power by refusing to accept that sexual ‘deviancy’ was pathological, contesting the authority of teachers to impose truth, opposing the power of psychiatrists to incarcerate the ‘mad’ and pointing to the complicity of penology, which claimed to reform but instead sanctioned brutality." [mijn nadruk] (16)

"Foucault was a theorist who drew inspiration from these new liberation struggles. He sought to reconceptualize the nature of power, domination and resistance in terms that made sense of the strategies deployed by these movements. But his relationship to these movements was ambivalent. He remained profoundly sceptical of liberationist claims. If sexuality was a product of specific discourses and practices of recent origin, it made no sense to strive for sexual liberation. Liberation implied that sexuality could be freed from repression. But Foucault had argued that sexuality was produced, not repressed, by power. For Foucault, there was no domain of pure freedom untainted by power (freedom was itself a product of particular historical discourses and practices) and sexuality could not be liberated as it was inextricably linked to power. Moreover, although Foucault has come to be a key theorist for what came to be known in the 1980s and 1990s as ‘identity politics’, his work also questioned identities as points for political mobilization." [mijn nadruk] (16-17)

[Ik vermoed dat Foucault bedoelt dat alles wat er gebeurt altijd gebeurt binnen machtsverhoudingen. Je kunt je natuurlijk niet 'bevrijden' van wat inhrent is aan menselijke interactie. Maar wat is het probleem? Je kunt immers wel een poging doen bepaalde specifieke machtsverhoudingen te veranderen of te vervangen door andere zodat ze andere interacties produceren. Je kunt dat zien als een vorm van bevrijding, waarom niet?]

"Thus identity politics could liberate bodies from some forms of power, but also inscribed them in new relationships of power and knowledge. "(17)

[Precies.]

"The projected studies of the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the perverse adult and the fecund heterosexual couple that were to be the basis of an extensive history of the formation of sexuality in the nineteenth century were abandoned. Instead, his new theoretical concerns were elaborated through an examination of the uses of pleasure and the maintenance of the self in classical Greece and Rome."(17)

"Although Foucault had always insisted that domination was met by opposition, his analysis of resistance was at best perfunctory, more an assertion than an object of serious inquiry. (...) Equally important, Foucault left opaque the ways subjects could transform, resist or subvert the power that had produced them. Was power merely about domination? What was freedom? How did one recognize the truth of one’s self? In what ways were certain forms of conduct required to realize one’s self?" [mijn nadruk] (17-18)

"While Foucault retained his critique of liberationist politics, he turns to a new concern with ethics as a way of negotiating freedom within specific power relationships. Freedom was not absolute. Nor was it the absence of power. Rather, for Foucault, freedom was an ethical agreement to create specific spaces relatively free of discipline. Thus power was not only the site for the production of subjectivity, but also for freedom itself – a contingent and historically specific freedom, undergoing constant renegotiation. Ethics was the sphere in which people could work to secure a limited but meaningful domain in which to make their own lives."(18)

[Dat is wat ik hiervoor bedoelde. En dat lijkt mij ook de enige mogelijke insteek.]

Het volgende onderwerp is het debat in de 80er en 90er jaren tussen essentialisten (voortgekomen uit 'gay activism': homoseksualiteit is geen ziekte of afwijking , maar van alle tijden; bv. Boswell) en sociaal constructionisten (David Halperin, John Winkler, Edward Stein, Robert Padgug, vaak geïnspireerd door Foucault).

"Social constructionists may have been united in their opposition to essentialism but in other ways they were a very diverse group. While all were committed to the idea that sexuality was open to historical investigation, theoretically and methodologically there were clear differences in approach. A significant group of social constructionists, such as Jeffrey Weeks, Kenneth Plummer, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, drew their main inspiration from the new social history of the 1960s and 1970s.(...) This ‘new left’ faith in social action clearly implied that sexuality and struggles over sexuality were forged within larger economic, class, gender and race contexts." [mijn nadruk] (22)

Ze erkennen Foucaults belang, maar zijn het niet eens met belangrijke ideeën van Foucault.

"More importantly, although Weeks sees Foucault as central to the critique of essentialism and an important theorist of sexuality, he argues that Foucault failed to adequately explain why forms of knowledge change. Where Foucault interrogates forms of knowledge, how they work and their complex intersections with social practices, Weeks, and others such as D’Emilio and Freedman, are more interested in movements for sexual reform, mechanisms of historical change and how sexuality is embedded in wider structures of class, gender and race. In other words, social historians assert that Foucault has failed to situate discourses within their causal context. Moreover, these social historians are interested in the ways the state regulates sexuality, seeing the state as a site of social repression. In contrast, Foucault sees the state as an effect of mechanisms of disciplinary power and governance, a product of discourses and practices, not an independent tool in the hands of particular ruling groups and interests." [mijn nadruk] (23)

"Other historians have more fully appreciated the radical historical project of Foucault. These historians have stressed the importance of discourse in the construction of sexual identity. It is in the larger realm of language and discourse that forms of sexuality are inscribed within culture. And it is in the contest of ideas that new identities emerge. A notable advocate of this position is David Halperin, who has made a substantial contribution to the history of sexuality in ancient Greece and to theoretical debates about the historical nature of sexuality. Halperin, along with others such as Arnold Davidson, John Winkler, Robert Padgug and Froma Zeitlin, has been in the forefront of the movement seeing homosexuality, and sexuality more generally, as a recent phenomenon."(23)

"Another important critique [op Foucault - GdG] , however, has come from feminists. They have pinpointed Foucault’s neglect of gender as an important flaw in his history of sexuality. This is certainly a glaring absence. Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of sexual discourses and new sexual identities in the late-nineteenth century sees sexuality as a general discursive formation. For Foucault, discourse itself is the key issue rather than how discourses structured crucial differences between male and female sexuality. In describing his project as the history of the ‘desiring man’ Foucault obscures the way desire was gendered." [mijn nadruk] (24-25)

[Dat is een belangrijk punt van kritiek inderdaad.]

"MacKinnon’s insistence on the gender blindness of the historiography of sexuality ignores the extent to which male and gay historians such as Weeks have taken gender as a central dynamic of their studies. Nonetheless, her identification of gender as a striking absence in poststructuralist theories of sexuality and discourse is forceful. Other feminist theorists, however, have been less dismissive of Foucault, but no less critical. Scholars such Carolyn Dean, Eloise Buker, Lynn Hunt and Teresa de Lauretis, have been instrumental in arguing that the absence of the category of gender in Foucault’s work renders it unable to adequately theorize the historical processes through which sexuality is produced." [mijn nadruk] (25)

" A new generation of feminist historians sought to take Foucault’s idea of the radical historicity of sexuality and place it within a framework of feminist gender analysis. This has produced some pathbreaking work in the history of sexuality, which will be the focus of discussion in later chapters."(26)

Bij de conclusie:

"These theoretical disputes have had a marked affect on interpretations of the sexual past. In subsequent chapters we will explore in more concrete detail the way historians have constructed the history of sexuality in particular times and places. Throughout the following chapters the emphasis is not just on the history of past sexual practices, but on how history as a discipline is actively engaged in the recovery of the past. (...) In exploring these processes in relation to particular historical debates about past sexual cultures we will return to many of the ideas and historians raised in this chapter. "(29)

[Dit hoofdstuk geeft een goed overzicht van de historiografie rondom seksualiteit. Ik weet alleen niet of ik zelf zo geïnteresseerd ben in allerlei academische / theoretische discussies ver van de alledaagse praktijkproblemen.]

(30) Chapter 2 - Rule of the phallus

Over pederastie bij de oude Grieken en Romeinen. De actieve mannelijke onderwerpende houding in penetratie tegenover de passieve. Het schema is dus al vroeg dominantie tegenover onderdanigheid.

"The scholarly silence on ancient homosexuality was not really broken until the early 1970s when scholars such as Jeffrey Henderson and John Boardman opened up the field."(30)

"Michel Foucault heightened this ambivalence about the relevance of concepts of homosexuality to antiquity. Foucault and others, such as David Halperin, John Winkler, Paul Veyne, Froma Zeitlin and Maud Gleason, have argued that the ancient world was ‘before sexuality’."(31)

"This argument has been contested. John Boswell, Amy Richlin, Eva Cantarella, Rabun Taylor and others have sought to draw parallels between ancient and modern homosexuality, attempting to stress continuities against the rising tide of efforts to promote difference."(31)

"Some of the historiographical debates examined here arise, in part, because historians use Roman cases to refute arguments based on evidence from Athens and vice versa."(31)

"There is now substantial agreement about key features of Greco-Roman sexual life. It seems clear that same-sex unions between older men and youths were common, tolerated and, in many instances, praised as the highest form of ‘love’ in both Athens and Rome. Despite disputes over the applicability of homosexuality to the understanding of sexuality in antiquity, most commentators accept that there were profound differences between male sexual practices in antiquity and those in the Christian West. These differences were clearly specified by early-twentieth-century commentators, such as Sigmund Freud, who argued that for the ancients the primary focus of sexuality was aim not sexual object. By this he meant that men were not concerned with the gender of their sexual partners, but the type of act they would perform. This was a crude formulation, but it highlighted a fundamental rupture between the sexual cultures of the ancient and the modern worlds, a distinction that has become the focus of much commentary and analysis
The central trope of Greco-Roman sexual culture was activity / passivity not homosexuality / heterosexuality. In other words, what constituted one’s status and identity was whether one was the active, penetrating partner or the passive, receiving partner. The gender of the sexual partner was a relatively minor consideration." [mijn nadruk] (32)

"Men had to assert their authority over others in order to establish their claim to citizenship. Sex, like war, was a domain for the representation of social status.
Only male citizens were fully sexual subjects. Women were relegated to the margins in ancient sexual culture, with the major deliberations about sexual conduct in antiquity overwhelmingly concerned with the male citizen."(32)

"The fundamental requirement for sexual conduct was that the male citizen be the active partner in any sexual encounter. It was perfectly acceptable (to a greater or lesser extent, according to different authorities) for men (meaning male citizens) to have sexual relations with wives, concubines, male or female slaves and prostitutes, as long as the citizen was the active, penetrating partner. In Greece freeborn youths were also available as sexual objects, provided the youth was the receiver rather than the giver of passion. To be penetrated was to submit symbolically to the authority of another, something that shaped the whole fabric of citizenship and dominance in the ancient world."(33)

[En daarmee hebben we al meteen de basis van de mannen - en vrouwenrollen zoals die vandaag de dag nog steeds aanwezig zijn.]

"Enforcing sexual submission or humiliation was a means of asserting dominance. At the same time, most men married – an arrangement between families chiefly concerning property and social networks – and had children with wives to perpetuate their lineage. Although many men demonstrated a great love and affection for wives, they were able to conduct a variety of other sexual relations, mainly with slaves, prostitutes and concubines. While individual men may have had a preference for either men or women, it was perfectly acceptable for these partners to be of either sex, as long as the man remained the active partner. To be the passive partner compromised one’s claim to citizenship and authority. Thus there were very specific sanctions against sex between male citizens of the same status because these threatened codes of masculine dominance." [mijn nadruk] (33)

"Although male citizens had few restrictions on the number and variety of sexual partners they could enjoy, this was far from being a ‘libertarian’ paradise. First, this was not a culture that recognized a multiplicity of desires. (...) Male desire was not differentiated by sexual object, but was singular and focused on assuming a position of dominance in all sexual encounters. Secondly, this was not a culture of sexual freedom. In fact Greco-Roman sexual culture was a highly regulated regime, replete with numerous rules of conduct, deportment and practices for the refinement of the self. These rules and practices regarding sexual conduct were intimately tied to the formation of the identity of the male citizen."(35)

"The intense historical interest in pederasty is understandable given the androcentric nature of these cultures. More recently, however, historians have sought to recover the sexual history of others in ancient Greece and Rome. The lives of wives, daughters, slaves, freed slaves, concubines and prostitutes are particularly elusive. Although the documentation on elite women in Imperial Rome is certainly comparatively voluminous, in the main the experiences of women and slaves are largely refracted through the texts produced by male citizens. We have to read between the lines and concentrate on occasional references and comments to speculate on the sexual life of those who were not male citizens. In particular, the evidence on the sexuality of women and slaves is usually found in prescriptive and medical literature, which is useful for male representations of female sexuality, but less useful for actual practices. Male and female sexuality in the classical world was marked by contest and diversity." [mijn nadruk] (36)

"Other literature, however, attested to the pleasures of the marital bed. In Greek literature women were generally represented as either heavily susceptible to animal lust (thus requiring strict control) or ignorant and uninitiated in sexual matters. By the late Hellenistic and early Roman times a literature emerged celebrating sexual symmetry and mutual love between husband and wife. Ideas of pleasure and fidelity until death appear in Latin drama and poetry. Even in Greek dramas male authors ‘painted a many sided picture’ of female sexuality, which suggested that in normal life marital sex was an important factor for Athenian husbands and wives.
There were opportunities for women, within the structure of ancient social life, to pursue their own desires (albeit within very constrained contexts defined by the dominant male culture). Studies of legal texts provide important insights into women’s options and the regulation of their choices. Trials for sexual assault, rape and adultery, for example, have left evidence of married women being involved in long-term relationships with men other than their husband. There is a considerable body of literature on the problem of adultery, including legal discourses on the rights of wronged husbands (it was one of the few contexts in which male citizens had the right to kill another citizen). Cases of adultery point to the existence of men and women prepared to flout the law in the pursuit of their desires. Such evidence suggests important ways in which women asserted some agency within the patriarchal structures of antiquity.
In the same vein there is both literary and non-literary evidence of women taking female lovers." [mijn nadruk] (37)

"While men were represented as bold, courageous, innovative, reasoning and active, women were often seen as polluting, formless, putrefying, wet, potentially insatiable (robbing men of their heat) and threatening. Masculinity was constantly confronted by the enervating potential of femininity and this necessitated a complex sexual and social regime to produce and perpetuate masculinity." [mijn nadruk] (39)

"Equally, for Galen and a number of ancient authorities, orgasm was essential for procreation. Orgasm more generally was seen as the consequence of the heating of bodily fluids, arising from friction on the skin and other bodily movements. And in this moment of ‘heat’ lay the conditions in which life could be generated (life itself being the possession of heat). A few, notably Aristotle, disputed the necessity of orgasm for procreation, but prevailing opinion supported this view. In this context we can venture some conclusions about the nature of marital sexuality. It placed a primacy on orgasm for both partners to ensure reproduction and supporting this was literature on the arts of arousal and stimulation. Considerable attention was focused on the problem of passion and how passion could be heightened and regulated to ensure orgasm and reproduction."(39)

"Passive, effeminate men offended the sexual and social codes of the Greco-Roman world. As we have seen, to be the recipient of male desire was a form of submission to male dominance, and thus required of wives, slaves, concubines, prostitutes and boys. Male citizens who submitted to the sexual will of another, even that of a male citizen, flouted the fundamental social and moral codes that sustained ancient masculinity, citizenship and social order. Similarly, in the literature on the body, effeminate men (those with insufficient heat to sustain masculinity) denoted a problem of ‘lack’, a deficiency in life force. They were inadequate and illequipped to take on the role of citizen. Within the cult of pederasty ‘overly feminine boys were disdained’. A boy was beautiful because he ‘manifested the acme of masculinity’. Effeminacy challenged the fabric of the ancient social order and it is not surprising that there is a rich literature on its origins, dangers and consequences." [mijn nadruk] (41)

[En met die oude opvattingen zitten we 2500 jaar later nog steeds opgescheept. Het is niet te geloven. ]

"There is nothing unique in the cultural abhorrence of anal and oral sex. This is found in many times and places, and even heterosexual oral sex is still illegal in some American States. But to dwell on this longer history of sanctions against these two acts fails to do justice to the cultural specificity of the ways ancient Greek and Roman authorities understood these practices, and how they framed a larger GrecoRoman sexual culture. In the Christian West, even in the early part of the twenty-first century, anal and oral sex acts are seen by many church authorities to be ‘against nature’. These are not acts for the purposes of procreation, and are thus the subject of religious, and in some cases, legal sanction. But for ancient Greeks and Romans civilization was an advance upon nature, and therefore what was best about ancient culture was the triumph over nature. In this context sex acts which could not lead to conception were normal and acceptable. But sex acts in which men did not use their phallus in a direct and purposeful way, where the phallus was not penetrating some orifice, did transgress codes of sexual conduct. Such acts undermined the symbolic purpose of the sex act as an assertion of dominance and a signifier of citizenship." [mijn nadruk] (46)

(48) Chapter 3 - Sexual austerity

Seksuele 'soberheid' (kuisheid, onthouding) mag niet alleen toegeschreven worden aan het opkomende christendom, maar kan al waargenomen worden bij Grieken en Romeinen en in allerlei 'heidense' cultussen / sekten / stromingen.

"While most accept that an emphasis on sexual fidelity and monogamy within marriage, and an idealization of chastity and sexual renunciation, marked the early centuries of the Christian era there is little agreement over the importance of Christianity in these shifts. Instead there has been a growing emphasis on the pagan origins of these new sexual ethics. Although many scholars argue that Christianity made a decisive contribution to reshaping the way sexual relations were understood, there is widespread agreement that the shift towards an ethics of austerity and fidelity began within pagan Rome. By the first century CE, the terms of what Foucault calls the ‘moral problematisation of pleasures’ had moved away from an interest in the regulation of pederasty and the ‘proper’ uses of slaves and concubines towards a concern with women, marriage and the self."(49)

"What effect did Christianity have on sexual practices? Historians of early Christianity have pointed to a heightened emphasis on monogamy, sexual fidelity within marriage and an idealization of chastity. Some have also charted deeper currents of profound distaste for sexuality, evident in widespread condemnations of women as the source of ‘man’s spiritual corruption’. St Paul crystallized many of these Christian sentiments regarding sex. For him ‘it is good for a man not to touch a woman’, but if men and women could not ‘contain themselves, let them marry’. Early Church Fathers forged a persistent opposition between a chaste elite whose chances of salvation were enhanced by renunciation, and the unruly laity whose desires could only be tamed by marriage.
Running through early Christian texts was a profound hostility towards sex, bodies and women, particularly sexually active and menstruating women." [mijn nadruk] (49)

[Dat soort waarden en normen bestaan dus al duizenden jaren. Kom er dan maar eens vanaf ... ]

"By the end of the fourth century CE Christian authorities were united in the view that women could not be teachers or priests and had to accept a subsidiary role within the Church. While religious life still held attractions for women their formal power was subsumed under the authority of a male hierarchy."(50)

"Gnosticism, Manichaeanism, Encratites and numerous smaller sects challenged the evolving Christian church. Many early Christians, notably St Augustine, flirted with some of these other cults before finally committing to Christianity. Some historians have also argued that the pervasive Christian condemnations of sexuality and the body were founded less on the teachings of Christ than on efforts to compete with these rival religious sects.(...)
Indeed there was considerable overlap between their [van de sektes GdG] attitudes to sex, marriage and the body and those of Christians.
Numerous scholars have argued that similar attitudes were prevalent in classical and late antiquity amongst pagan philosophers."(50-51)

"Although early Church Fathers supported the institution of marriage, urging monogamy and fidelity, it was also apparent that marriage represented a flawed compromise with the material world of the flesh. A fervent embrace of Christian principles required a renunciation of human pleasures and material needs for the greater goal of spiritual transformation and salvation after death. Hand in hand with the denigration of marriage was a growing suspicion of eroticism, evident in the disappearance of passionate, sexual love from Latin belles lettres after the fourth century CE." [mijn nadruk] (52)

"Boswell argues that an ethic of sexual austerity first began to emerge within pagan culture. Its immediate cause was the declining birth rate amongst the Roman elite. Thus there was an increasing emphasis on marital unions and procreation within Roman law and a tightening of regulations governing divorce. These principles governed early Christian understandings of marriage, creating a sharp tension in Christian theology."(53)

"Paradoxically Christian theology came to both promote marriage and denigrate it, seeing marriage as the desirable option for the laity, but celibacy as the course for those with a higher spiritual calling within the Church."(54)

Brooten houdt zich net als Boswell bezig met 'same-sex'-relaties in Oudheid en Christendom, maar verwijt hem terecht 'gender blindness'.

"For Brooten, female homoeroticism cannot be collapsed into a history of male same-sex relationships because attitudes to love between women were decidedly different to that between men. Where Boswell charts an acceptance of male same-sex unions within pagan and early Christian culture, Brooten highlights the persistent antipathy to love between women. "(54)

"Brooten draws on an extraordinarily wide range of obscure texts often overlooked by other scholars – a rich literature on magic, astrology, dreams, physiognomy and medicine. She documents a long history of fear and anxiety about sexual relations between women and demonstrates that female homoeroticism was widely known and discussed. There was no acceptance or toleration of this practice, suggesting that the history of lesbianism might move to a very different chronology than that of male homoeroticism. For Brooten, there were fewer turning points in the history of female homoeroticism because of the persistent structures of male domination. Love between women challenged the phallocentric cultures of pagan and Christian antiquity, and the response to this challenge has shaped the historical experience of lesbians ever since. In the hands of influential Church Fathers, such as St Paul, longstanding antagonism and fear of female homoeroticism found a very secure and continuing place within Christian doctrine."(54)

"What most concerned the ancients was not the sexuality of the tribades but their challenge to gender stereotypes. Although there was some ambiguity, as Brooten shows, about whether tribadism encompassed both the active and the passive partner, in the vast majority of texts it is the ‘mannish’ virago that is the source of concern. Thus what is at stake in antiquity for Halperin is not sexuality but gender."(55)

"Some of Foucault’s critics have dismissed him as an historian of discontinuity, implying that the concentration on the specificity of past cultures is more political than scholarly. In their view, the focus on discontinuity raises questions about the accuracy of his account. This is an overly simplistic reading. One of Foucault’s central concerns was certainly to disrupt Whiggish historical narratives of progress. In his early studies of madness, the clinic, economics, grammar, biology and the prison, Foucault concentrated on a few decades at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries as moments of profound rupture in the organization of knowledge and power. In contrast Foucault’s analysis of the desiring subject in antiquity moves away from the notion of rupture. Like many historians of this period Foucault sees deep affinities between the ideas of early Christian theologians and pagan philosophers, doctors and political thinkers." [mijn nadruk] (56)

[Garton heeft wat meer waardering voor Brown dan voor Foucault. ]

"Although early Christians drew on the writings of pagan philosophers, doctors and political thinkers, they transformed these ideas in fundamental ways. In the pagan world the body and sex had been natural things that had to be mastered. Sexual urges were accepted as ever present, things that needed to be controlled, regulated and subjected to techniques for their appropriate use. Thus the body and desire were incorporated into a wider domain of moral reflection. Christianity, however, prised the self from the physical world, making the body and sexuality something to overcome. The ways in which the body could subvert the will, and the intractability of sexual urges manifest in the body, were signs of evil, of man’s fall from grace. Sexuality became the site of human bondage; renunciation was the key to liberation." [mijn nadruk] (60)

"Christians were now at war with the body and sexuality; these were aspects of the self to defeat in order to return to God’s grace. Thus Christian theologians devoted considerable energy and enterprise to deciphering the signs of desire, rooting out its symptoms in order to engage with the enemy and overcome it. In very interesting readings of the writings of St Augustine, historians such as Erin Sawyer and Kim Power have mapped how the Church Fathers developed an ascetic vision of Christian manhood in which women were seen as corrupting, fleshy and polluting. In contrast, men embodied the will to transcend feminizing desire."(60-61)

" One question that has engaged some historians is whether Christianity succeeded in transforming the sexual habits and practices of social groups outside the Church hierarchy. Although Christianity was built on pagan foundations, the Church preached the virtues of fidelity, continence and renunciation with greater intensity than most pagan philosophers. How effective were such teachings in changing the sexual and social customs of the wider population? " [mijn nadruk] (62)

"Priests devoted considerable attention to monitoring and regulating sexual practices within marriage, frowning on all those that did not lead to procreation. Sexual practices purely for personal satisfaction, and the delight in pleasure for pleasure’s sake, were seen as abuses of marriage." [mijn nadruk] (62)

(64) Chapter 4 - Christian friendships

"Although in many areas pre-Christian ideas, customs and rituals survived, through its teachings, canon law, confession and penitentials, the Church exerted enormous influence over marriage, the body and sexual practices. The linking of sex, flesh and the body with sin, cemented in the early Christian era, became the dominant framework in which sex was understood. Sex was something to be renounced, a manifestation of sin, and a hindrance to be overcome in the search for spiritual salvation. Monastic and ascetic practices served to demarcate a religious elect whose path to salvation was smoothed, from a laity condemned to the temptations of the flesh. But even for those unable to escape the bonds of the flesh, there were powerful strictures governing marital sexual relations that helped to demarcate ‘unnatural’ and ‘natural’ sex acts. This distinction became an important point of contest in the government of sexuality for the next millennium." [mijn nadruk] (64-65)

"Historians like John Boswell have argued that it took nearly a millennium for Christian teaching to penetrate all levels of European society and culture, but once Christianity was firmly established two key questions confront historians of sexuality. First, did Christianity provide new discourses and practices that went beyond denial to shape forms of erotic experience? Historical work on medieval spirituality highlights a strong tradition of ecstatic experience amongst men and women in enclosed orders. Secondly, we have to ask whether Christianity had a marked effect on sexual practices outside of religious institutions."(65)

" In other words, sexual discourses and customs from classical antiquity may have persisted despite Church teachings. Far from Christianity destroying older sexual traditions, a range of sexual practices and cultures continued to thrive. " [mijn nadruk] (65)

"Despite the potential for confusion and dispute, Christian theology relied heavily on the trope of ‘nature’ to ground its concern with sexual practices. Those that could not be found in the natural world (amongst animals) were deemed unnatural and particularly sinful. Ideas of sins ‘against nature’ were important instruments for enforcing Church doctrines. But there was a tension in the deployment of this discourse on nature. On the one hand, nature was the measure of what was an acceptable practice. On the other hand, the aim of Christian practice was to transcend nature in order to purify the soul." [mijn nadruk] (66-67)

Maar het was niet alleen de christelijke religie / de kerk die invloed had op de seksuele praktijken van leken. Er waren ook allerlei seculiere informatiebronnen en invloeden.

"Thomas Laqueur has argued that the crucial agents of transmission of scientific and medical ideas to the wider populace were midwives, surgeons, merchants and artisans who eagerly read the vernacular translations of Latin texts. Whatever the means of transmission, historians have increasingly turned to the largely Latin literary and scientific sources to explore European sexual cultures in the first half of the second millennium." [mijn nadruk] (70)

"Medical and philosophical literatures were not always divorced from theological ideals. There were many popular warnings against the consequences of excessive sexual indulgence, notably the widespread belief that prostitutes would become infertile. On the whole, however, secular culture put an emphasis on sex as a normal activity for both men and women. Impotence, for example, was grounds for the dissolution of marriage and thus a disease to be cured. The popular notion of the ‘marriage debt’, where both husband and wife could demand sexual favours from each other when they so desired, reinforced the idea of marriage as a union for procreation. It also defined marriage as a relationship for the mutual satisfaction of desires. In the same vein, ideas about the process of conception itself, where women and men both produced seed that combined in sexual intercourse to conceive children, placed a high premium on the necessity for female orgasm." [mijn nadruk] (72)

"People did not always conduct themselves by the dictates of science, religion, literature and folklore. Despite clear religious sanctions against sex outside marriage there is abundant evidence that premarital sex was widely practised and accepted – people often married after having children or where the bride was pregnant. Some regions even allowed trial marriages, while prohibitions against adultery seem to have been widely disregarded. Moreover polygamy, concubinage and rape were common, while the culture of courtly love praised the virtues of seduction and paraded a virile ethic in eroticized clothing, such as elaborate codpieces. Studies of medieval and Renaissance marriage also indicate that many unions fell far short of the ideals of theological teaching. Despite the constraints imposed on women by Church and society, many resisted the demand to be obedient and silent." [mijn nadruk] (74)

"The policing of ‘sodomites’ raises important questions about the relationship between religious and legal doctrines and popular sexual culture. The evolution of Christian doctrine led to severe condemnation of sodomy and most European and later American jurisdictions made sodomy an offence incurring severe punishment, even death. There is a striking difference between the official culture of antiquity and that of the Christian West. In antiquity ‘unnatural’ acts were not the source of formal legal sanction, although anal penetration of youths from good families was forbidden in classical Rome. What concerned citizens in antiquity was the passive male. In contrast, both participants in unnatural acts could be subject to punishment in the Christian West. Moreover, often it was the active penetrating ‘sodomite’ who was the object of greatest concern. Thus Christianity transformed the perception of unnatural acts in profound ways and this translated into legal regulations governing the conduct of sexual acts. " [mijn nadruk] (79)

(81) Chapter 5 - Making heterosexuality

"As Merry Wiesner-Hanks has argued, sex was also an integral part of the Reformation. Protestants attacked the vow of celibacy and proclaimed sex within marriage as the key to affection and domestic harmony. Sexual desire was natural and part of God’s plan. For Luther, ‘refusal to have sexual relations within marriage constituted grounds for divorce’. Accompanying the praise of sexual relations within marriage went a fierce condemnation of sodomy, prostitution, contraception, abortion and adultery. Protestantism did not challenge the traditional Catholic stress on the need to scrutinize marriage and sexuality. Protestant sermons, courts, consistories and congregations were institutions for closely regulating sexuality and maintaining social discipline." [mijn nadruk] (81-82)

Had dat invloed op het leven van gewone mensen?

" In the realm of sex, however, the evidence is more ambiguous. Certainly there is abundant evidence that prostitution, concubinage and sexual licence flourished in early-modern Europe and America, just as it had in the West before the Reformation. A number of works have focused on the emergence of a significant ‘libertine’ culture in early-modern Europe, while others have highlighted the ‘sexual freedom’ of the American frontier." [mijn nadruk] (82)

"Historians of early-modern Europe, particularly England and France, have been able to chart with some precision important dimensions of the sexual behaviour of ordinary people. As we have seen, sources for the history of sexuality are partial, often excellent for an account of attitudes, but more opaque for a history of practices. They mainly consist of literary, artistic, theological, philosophical and scientific accounts of sex, treatises on morality and guides for the proper conduct of sexual life. Often these are admonishments to change one’s behaviour, not necessarily descriptions of how people actually conducted sexual rela- tions. Thus much of the history of sexuality is a study of attitudes and the clash of different sexual cultures. To get around these limitations social historians of sexuality have turned to court and police records to uncover the history of sex acts. This approach has opened up important new insights into the nature of sex and sexuality in the West. These legal sources have enabled historians to explore areas such as domestic violence, sodomy, impotence, divorce and sexual underworlds. None- theless, legal sources have their own limitations. They offer important insights into undercurrents of sexual behaviour and the lives of those who came before the courts. Although social and cultural historians of sexuality have been able to read between the lines to explore more general conclusions about sex in the West, legal records leave largely untouched the lives of people who escape the purview of the law (Church and secular).
The abundance of early-modern British, European and American parish and local records on births, deaths and marriages, however, has created significant opportunities for historians to map larger patterns of sexual behaviour amongst the general population. Demographic historians have been able to use these records to reconstruct the formation of families, average age at marriage, birthrates and the incidence of illegitimacy, providing some fruitful propositions about how the majority of people conducted their sexual lives."(83)

"The key demographic trend of eighteenth-century Europe and America, however, was the dramatic rise in fertility.
An important dimension of these fertility patterns was that legitimate and illegitimate births, as well as the rate of women who gave birth soon after marriage (prenuptial pregnancy), moved to a similar rhythm. These rates were traditionally low in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and all rise sharply in the late-eighteenth century. This suggests that illegitimacy and prenuptial pregnancy, far from being ‘deviant’ acts or reactions against prevailing cultural values, were instead part of larger social patterns of fertility. While conception before marriage was common, ‘bastardy’ was not, despite the existence of Foundling Hospitals in Europe to deal with this social problem." [mijn nadruk] (84)

"The rise in the fertility rate, however, has more usually been tied to rising real incomes, industrialization and urbanization. As marriage was traditionally seen as the basis for creating an independent economic unit, sufficient resources were required before a couple could be relatively secure about their future. Historians have seen this as the basis for the late age of marriage and stable fertility rate in pre-industrial Europe."(85)

"Moreover, it is clear that what constituted a legal marriage was by no means uniform across Europe and America. Some local areas only accepted unions sanctioned by church ceremony as marriages, while others counted as legitimate customary unions based on an exchange of vows before witnesses. In other parishes a statement of intention could allow ‘legitimate’ sexual intercourse. In colonial America informal marriages, especially amongst the poorer classes, were common. Some of these unions were celebrated through simple ceremonies and pledges, but they remained outside the purview of secular and church authorities. Despite the occasional efforts of legal authorities to prosecute couples living in informal marriages for adultery, many colonial Americans remained remarkably oblivious of the requirement to have the church sanction their union." [mijn nadruk] (86)

"There were other sexual opportunities that left few records of births. On the American frontier, for example, sexual relations between white men and native American women and between masters and slaves were widespread, largely outside the purview of authorities and any consequences were absent from parish birth records. Same-sex relations, appear to have been common and likewise left no mark in the birth and baptismal records." [mijn nadruk] (87)

"A wealth of anthropological and historical research points to the widespread use of birth control in many cultures. Barrier methods and withdrawal would appear to have been common in early-modern Europe and colonial America. Evidence does indicate that prostitutes had a range of effective contraceptive methods, such as vaginal tampons. But barrier methods were unreliable, particularly before the widespread use of sheep intestines for condoms from the late-seventeenth century. Withdrawal and mutual masturbation were common forms of ‘birth control’, within and outside marriage, although withdrawal was unreliable." [mijn nadruk] (87)

"There are few sources supporting the idea of a conscious working-class effort to transform traditional sexual customs, although it is clear that rising rates of illegitimacy amongst the plebeian classes of eighteenth-century Britain in part reflected the rising incidence of informal marriages.(...)
In contrast Lawrence Stone sees the aristocracy, the middling ranks and country gentry as the driving forces for new sexual freedoms. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century patrician and middling sexual culture was sharply divided. On the one hand, marriage was primarily a relationship to produce children, particularly male heirs, and largely used to cement social bonds between families. It was not considered a relationship based primarily on sentiment or sexual companionship. On the other hand, patrician men sought ‘love, companionship and sexual pleasure’ from mistresses and extramarital affairs. During the eighteenth century, however, people in upper social strata increasingly saw marriage as a union for the satisfaction of sexual desires. Companionate marriages based on personal choice increased, and people began to criticize the habit of delaying marriage, promoting instead the ideals of romantic love and happy passionate unions of loving couples. For Stone, the ethic of companionate marriage required the collapse of moral Puritanism and the emergence of ideas that people should marry for love rather than property." [mijn nadruk] (90-91)

"The collapse of moral Puritanism, however, was not merely a reflection of the rise of capitalism. For Lawrence Stone, attitudes praising sexual pleasure and asserting the ‘naturalness’ of the body and sensuality were crucial. A loss of religious sense that sins of the flesh were important and the emergence of new ideas about the need to cultivate ‘human nature’ overthrew the strict moral austerity of Puritan England and Catholic Europe. Thus, for Stone, there was ‘a release of libido from the age-old constraints of Christianity’. These attitudes first appeared amongst restricted court circles in England in the seventeenth century. Sexual libertinism and homoeroticism seem to have flourished amongst the courtiers in early-modern European and English Court society." [mijn nadruk] (91)

"By the eighteenth century people from a broad cross section of the population began to consider the ‘sins of the flesh’ as harmless and natural. The Enlightenment attack on the clerisy and religious doctrine, and the promotion of mechanical and natural law conceptions of the universe hastened the decline of religious authority and sexual Puritanism. Enlightenment philosophers condemned religious doctrine, and promoted nature, pleasure and passion as the sources of morality and guides to the conduct of life. These ideas spread rapidly amongst other classes. The dramatic increase in the publication and sale of pornography is one indicator of this diffusion of libertinism and the importance of obscenity in the creation of modernity."(92)

"An important dimension of libertinism, however, is the way it played with conventions of gender. Cross-dressing, masquerade and ‘passing’ were favourite pastimes of libertines. In a variety of public spaces men and women passed for the opposite sex, testing the boundaries between nature and culture, pushing against forms of social toleration and delighting in the capacity to live gender as fluid, malleable forms of theatre."(93)

"While libertinism may have expanded sexual opportunities for some women, it also constrained others. In emphasizing women’s sexual excesses and availability, libertines also reduced women to the image of the whore, ever available and compliant in the satisfaction of man’s needs."(93)

"Trumbach’s focus on how men responded to the persecution of ‘mollies’, however, indicates that something new was happening in European sexual culture. Why European men of the eighteenth century responded to the moral panic of effeminacy by asserting a heterosexual identity, when men of earlier centuries had not, is far from clear. " [mijn nadruk] (100)

"Although Laqueur’s focus is on the discourse of sex and Trumbach’s concern is gender, both presage the idea that a culture based on the dichotomy of active and passive was gradually replaced by one structured round difference – male and female, homosexual and heterosexual. "(100)

(101) Chapter 6 - Victorianism

"Only the nineteenth century has achieved the distinction of being a ‘sexual epoch’. The Victorian era has found a central place in popular culture as a period of excessive sexual austerity, repression and prudery. In the pioneering histories of Steven Marcus, Eric Trudgill and Ronald Pearsall, Victorian sexuality was depicted as a period of Puritan moralism, an inevitable reaction against the aristocratic libertinism of the eighteenth century.
Victorian moral rectitude was not confined to England. These values and anxieties were shared on both sides of the Atlantic. For the early historians of Victorian sexuality, however, this was also an age of hypocrisy. Social conventions made discussion of sex, sexuality and bodily functions taboo, but at the same time pornography and prostitution flourished. For Marcus and Pearsall, the sexual puritanism of the middle classes drove sex underground, creating a split in Victorian culture. Public prudery masked a flourishing trade in vice. These historians see the new sexual morality as the creation of a sober, austere, self-controlled and frugal middle class, whose ideas gradually held sway over other classes in Britain, Europe and America. Victorianism came to dominate the ideas, habits and social conventions of the entire society but, for Marcus and others, sexual desire could never entirely be tamed. It found outlets in the flourishing vice trade.
The views of early historians of Victorianism echoed those of earlier critics. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries a host of influential doctors and reformers, such as Havelock Ellis, Margaret Sanger, Edward Carpenter, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld, diagnosed the consequences of sexual repression and pointed to Victorianism as an era of unhealthy sexual adjustment." [mijn nadruk] (101)

"Since the late 1970s revisionist historians have done much to dismantle this simplistic historical cliché. For Michel Foucault, the ‘repressive hypothesis’ became the critical point of departure for an investigation of the explosion of sexual discourses in the nineteenth century. These discourses, he argued, constructed sexuality as the central domain for the decipherment of the self in modern Western cultures. Far from repressing sex the Victorians invented sexuality. Others, such as Jeffrey Weeks, Michael Mason, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz and Peter Gay, also highlight a wide range of evidence that challenges the idea of excessive repression. In place of Victorianism we can see the emergence of a more complex account stressing the proliferation of sexual discourses and the clash of sexual cultures in the nineteenth century. Equally important, historians such as Nancy Cott, Mary Ryan and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have situated discourses of sexuality and moral reform in a wider context of rapid social transformation and gender crisis. " [mijn nadruk] (102)

"As a consequence of this extensive new research it is now questionable whether the concept of ‘Victorianism’ can be sustained. The range of sexual ideas and customs within the Victorian era have been shown to be so broad, varied and even contradictory that the notion of a single, coherent sexual culture, developed by historians such as Marcus and Pearsall, seems overly narrow. Victorianism needs to be abandoned as a meaningful category, even though it remains a useful device for exploring the pitfalls of universalizing approaches to the history of sexuality."(102)

[Ik houd wel van die simpele visie van 'repressie' en vraag me af of Foucault etc. het allemaal niet te ingewikkeld maken. Middenklasse mensen die de middenklasse repressie theoretisch zitten goed te praten? Hoe dan ook: er was op allerlei manieren sprake van repressie binnen het kader van bepaalde machtsverhoudingen, daar zijn genoeg historische feiten over. Dat kun je niet wegrelativeren vind ik.]

Historici hebben allerlei redenen vastgesteld voor de nadruk die op zelfbeheersing en onthouding kwam te liggen.

"Moral restraint was one answer. While Evangelical reformers saw sexual abstinence as morally uplifting, political economists saw control of fertility in social and economic terms."(106)

" James Mohr has concluded that abortion was widely used by middle-class women in America before it was outlawed in the late-nineteenth century."(108)

['Outlawed' door wie? ]

"Another reason for disentangling abstinence and birth control is that contraception was embroiled in controversy. Despite the popularity of birth control measures many doctors, moral reformers and politicians sought to prevent their use. The sources of this opposition were diverse. Moral reformers feared that birth control encouraged moral indulgence.(...) Throughout the nineteenth century there were efforts to prosecute abortionists and those who spread birth control advice."(108)

"Traditionally abortion had been acceptable if performed before ‘quickening’ (when mothers were supposed to be able to feel the foetus), roughly the fourth month of pregnancy. In 1803 this doctrine was abolished in England, abortion becoming illegal at any stage in the pregnancy. In America the concept of quickening remained current until the 1840s, but agitation by doctors and moral reformers lead to laws making abortion a criminal offence. "(109)

[Ja, die weer. ]

"Despite legal sanctions and occasional prosecutions birth control and abortion businesses continued to thrive. The rate of abortion appears to have increased across the Western world in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with a corresponding decline in post-natal practices such as infanticide and baby farming. Those most directly involved with policing the abortion trade – police, magistrates and local council and parish authorities, as well as the people who could report well-known local abortionists – did not always exhibit great enthusiasm for the task. Many of them were men conscious of the fact that abortionists assisted desperate single women, who were the victims of rape, seduction and abandonment. They were also aware that many couples were anxious to limit the number of children they produced. Sometimes they turned a ‘blind eye’, knowing that men of their acquaintance were the seducers or husbands who benefited from the availability of birth control and abortion."(109)

"Sex was dangerous. This was the message of a vast amount of nineteenthcentury moral reform, social conduct, pedagogy, child-rearing and medical advice literature. This was literally so for the women who died in childbirth or from botched abortions. It was also harmful to the men, women and children afflicted with venereal diseases." [mijn nadruk] (110)

"The argument that medical practitioners were influential ‘anxiety makers’ has been challenged in recent years. While many doctors did not subscribe to all of Acton’s views, Lesley Hall has argued that his views on the dangers of sexual excess were widely shared. Other historians disagree, arguing that Acton was neither influential nor representative. "(112)

[En we kunnen niet vaststellen wie er gelijk heeft?]

"Medical opinion may have been far from uniform in its attitude to sex, orgasm and masturbation, but underlying the polyphony of voices on Victorian sexuality lay pervasive attitudes to masculinity and femininity. Historians of Victorian sexuality have devoted considerable attention to the ways in which medical and moral advice constructed gender." [mijn nadruk] (115)

"If the desirable state of domestic femininity was ‘passionlessness’, then ‘fallen women’ were their mirror opposite, voracious, insatiable and morally corrupt. These were women who had fallen from grace. It was important to maintain a rigid distinction between the two. For example, America reformer John Kellogg believed that humans should follow the example of animals, pursuing intercourse only for procreation, denouncing men who tried to use their wives for pleasure, as one would a ‘harlot’."(117)

"Abolitionists and social purity activists argued that innocent young girls were being induced into prostitution by an unscrupulous international traffic in women. Historians have argued that this moral panic touched on wider anxieties about immigration, the growth of ethnic ghettoes, the increasing incidence of venereal diseases and parental anxieties about the ‘sexual liberty’ of their children. White slavery symbolized these diverse fears and focused enormous public energy on the eradication of prostitution and increasing forms of regulation over sexual commerce."(118)

"Understandably, prostitution, given its prevalence and the outrage it inspired, has been the focus of much historical research. While this research has focused on ideologies of purity and the politics of reform evident in the white slavery movement, important research has attempted to move beyond moralism to the political economy of commercialized sex and the daily lives of prostitutes. The work of historians such as Ruth Rosen, Timothy Guilfoyle, Judith Walkowitz, Frances Finnegan and Joanne Meyerowitz, for example, has highlighted the interconnections between prostitutes and working-class women. Prostitution was a common resort of impoverished women, married and single, struggling to put bread on the table. In a context of labour market volatility it was a common means of gaining a livelihood. These historians have depicted prostitution as a form of women’s work, breaking down the boundaries erected by Puritans between respectable and immoral working-class women. In seeking to break away from Victorian ideas that prostitution was a form of sexual pathology, historians have turned prostitution into an industry. " [mijn nadruk] (118)

(124) Chapter 7 - Dominance and desire

"Many Europeans and Americans took the trouble to record how people of different races and lower classes could excite their sexual sensibilities. In the creative imagination and daily lives of Westerners cultural difference had powerful erotic overtones. Men more than women had the power to capitalize on these desires. On the other hand, these class and race boundaries could be fraught with anxiety. "(124)

"In recent years, some of the most important work in the history of sexuality has explored the interconnections between sex, gender, race, class and nation. Sex rarely sits alone within Western culture. It is embedded in wider contexts of power and dominance, sometimes reinforcing oppression, at other times moderating it. Desire gained sustenance and form from the European engagement with different cultures and classes. Much of the scholarship on the intersection of desire with other social structures has explored how sex was a tool of oppression and dominance, maintaining hierarchies of class and race." [mijn nadruk] (125)

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doctors, moral reformers and polite society viewed the bodies of working-class women and girls with a mixture of horror, fear, contempt and lofty sympathy. Scientific, medical, religious and literary texts pathologized the ‘fallen woman’.(...) This scientific effort was part of a larger cultural revulsion at the sights and sounds of the urban under-class going about its business." [mijn nadruk] (125-126)

"The attitudes of men like Strong towards women of the streets were commonplace. They fuelled nineteenth-century social purity and abolitionist campaigns for the eradication of prostitution. In the evolving medical and reform literatures on the evils of prostitution, however, the marks of this ‘foul disease’ were difficult to distinguish from those of ordinary working-class women."(126)

"The association of moral depravity, sexual diseases and prostitution with working-class women was a double-edged sword. Such images stood in marked contrast to middle-class ideals of domestic femininity, with their emphasis on passionlessness, purity, restraint, moral uplift, domesticity, motherhood and nurture. Although middle-class women, such as Laura Lyman and Mabel Loomis Todd, expressed ardent sexual desires in private, there was a rich cultural association between middle- class purity and working-class depravity. In a bourgeois culture that disavowed any link between respectability and sensual pleasure, working-class women became major signifiers of depravity and eroticism. [mijn nadruk] "(126-127)

"Victorian pornography paraded an array of working-class girls as the objects of erotic life, the opposite to the stifling maternalism of the bourgeois home."(127)

"Edward Said’s path-breaking work Orientalism (1978) has set much of the framework for the analysis of the interrelationships between imperialism and culture. Said argued that British, European and American anthropology, philology, science, literature and art systematically represented the East as the polar opposite of the West. Where the West was rational, scientific, ordered, modern, organized, vigorous and systematic, the East was chaotic, debilitating, irrational, backward, mystical and sensual. The East was ‘the other’ that helped define the distinctiveness and superiority of the West."(130)

"Orientalist discourse had an explicit gender dynamic. For Said, it was a ‘male power-fantasy’ that sexualized a feminized Orient, making it available for Western domination and exploitation. The imperial frontier was in some contexts virgin land, or in others hot, sensual and exotic, while the West was enshrined in masculine metaphors of coldness, hardness and vigour. A key dynamic of imperialism was the sexual subjection of oriental women by Western men. Sex was both a signifier and a practice for asserting dominion over other peoples."(130)

Al is er wel kritiek gekomen op Said soms wat eenzijdige weergaven.

"Orientalism, however, was not just an imposition on the colonized. Ideas and practices born in the colonies moved back to the metropolitan centres, shaping Western culture in profound ways."(131)

"A considerable body of scholarship has documented sexual violence and coercion on the frontier. Soldiers, traders and masters raped slaves, servants and indigenous peoples. They also forced, beat and demanded sexual services from those under their control. There were few impediments to such practices."(132)

"Although mindful of the underlying structures of coercion that shaped frontier sexual relations, in recent years some of the more interesting studies have focused on dimensions of colonial sexuality that went against the grain of brutal domination. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonists sometimes established relatively stable and permanent relationships with slaves and indigenous women, conferring a higher status on these women. More interesting, because they undermine one-dimensional representations of the frontier as places of racist domination, have been studies of white women who had relationships with black slaves and indigenous men."(133)

En zo waren er nog meer nuances in die interraciale relaties.

"One of the central questions in the historiography of colonial sexuality has been whether attitudes to inter-racial sex gradually became less tolerant. (...) The source of this increasing intolerance has been disputed. The growth of moral puritanism within British and American culture is one factor. Missionaries on the frontier, as well as social purity campaigners, moral reformers and abolitionists, created a climate increasingly intolerant of licentiousness, sexual exploitation, concubinage and prostitution both at home and abroad." [mijn nadruk] (133-134)

"By the late-nineteenth century social Darwinist ideas of racial fitness and degeneration convinced many commentators that miscegenation was a threat to ‘racial fitness’. Harsher attitudes also fanned anxieties about the threat to white supremacy from blacks and coloureds who might covet white women. The apotheosis of these cultural shifts was ‘Jim Crow’ America and apartheid South Africa. For historian George Frederickson, these regimes were ones rooted in a genuinely racist belief in the immutable genetic inferiority of non-white races."(134)

"Increasing missionary activity and a growing Christian distaste for pagan Indian culture led to official condemnation of concubinage relationships and repudiation of ‘Eurasians’."(135-136)

" Hyam [Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) - GdG] romanticizes a ‘golden period’ of supposed sexual tolerance and demonizes the middle-class women and missionaries who, in his view, were the purveyors of puritanism. Such a conclusion ignores the broader cultural, political and economic contexts that fostered antagonism towards the ‘Orient’. Moreover, it underplays the crucial role of European men in enforcing sexual puritanism, as well as the importance of social Darwinist ideas in pathologizing inter-racial sex." [mijn nadruk] (136)

"Imperialism and colonialism destroyed, suppressed and transformed other economies and cultures, but also produced new peoples and identities. The children of inter-racial frontier unions, the metis populations of the Americas, Africa and Asia were literally in-between cultures. Over the last few decades a number of historians have studied the emergence of these mixed cultures and their assertion of distinct social and political identities."(139)

"Historians of Eastern sexual cultures have highlighted how, in many Asian and Middle Eastern traditions, sex was not an independent feature of life but an integral part of being. In many Asian cultures, in particular, concepts of sexual orientation did not exist. Nonetheless, within Eastern cultures increasing contact with the West led to transformations within religious doctrines, notably ‘neo-Confucianization’ and Chinese Buddhism, which stressed sexual abstinence and the avoidance of women as a bulwark against religious and social decline. These responses to the West began as early as the thirteenth century." [mijn nadruk] (142-143)

(148) Chapter 8 - Feminism and friendship

Eind 19 eeuw / begin 20ste eeuw leidde de prostitutie en de geslachtsziekten die er vaak het gevolg van waren tot allerlei verzet van de kant van morele hervormers etc.

"Similarly, in America, there were many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century moral reform and anti-vice movements opposed to the legalization of prostitution or the introduction of contagious diseases regulations. The leaders of these organizations were politicians and moral reformers such as Anthony Comstock and Charles Parkhurst, but women, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Ellice Hopkins, Anna Powell, Frances Willard and Lavinia Dock, were also at the forefront of societies for moral purity and the eradication of prostitution. The ‘new abolitionists’, as historian David Pivar has described them, believed that men had to accept woman’s standard of morality..
The assertion that men had to conform to a stricter morality went against the grain of ‘commonsense’ understandings of male sexuality. As Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz has argued, there was a rich nineteenth- century sexual popular culture that saw obscenity, ribaldry, prostitution and illicit sexual intercourse as natural." [mijn nadruk] (148)

"The reputations of the Victorian abolitionists and feminists who challenged the inevitability of male sexual needs have had a chequered history. Some contemporaries ridiculed them as pleasure-hating spinsters and religious fanatics. Such assessments were perpetuated by generations of historians who regarded feminist moral reformers in particular as middle-class puritans campaigning against simple working-class pleasures, unwitting accomplices of a larger movement towards increased state regulation of morality. But the attitudes of woman movement activists of the nineteenth century to sex have also troubled feminist historians. A number have seen the nineteenth-century campaigns for social purity led by reformers like Josephine Butler, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and Jane Addams as socially and sexually conservative. Moreover, the argument of prominent suffragists on both sides of the Atlantic, such as Emmeline Pankhurst, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Butler herself, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and many others, that essential differences between men and women were the basis for women’s political rights, has been seen by some historians as a dead-end for feminist politics.
These women have been characterized as middle-class reformers who failed to understand the need for more fundamental social change, which could address the real differences between women, based on class and race. Some prominent feminist historians, such as Nancy Cott, have seen these reformers as leaders of a ‘woman movement’, one that spoke of women as a unified category, insensitive to the differences between them. Instead, Cott argues that feminism was born in the early years of the twentieth century, when its leaders began to advocate ‘female individuality, political participation, economic independence and sexual freedom’. This represented a real challenge to masculine social order. Other historians who have argued that nineteenth-century suffragists, new abolitionists and purity campaigners were grappling with some of the fundamental dilemmas of feminist politics – oppression and similarities and differences between the sexes – have contested such assessments." [mijn nadruk] (149)

"For historians, a gendered sexual culture raises the haunting spectre of anachronism. There is the ever-present danger of assessing Victorian attitudes to sexuality in the light of a set of assumptions bequeathed by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The assertion that new abolitionists, social purity reformers and Victorian feminists were prudes is one example of this trap. Instead we have to see these reformers in their context. The campaigns of women like Butler, Elmy, Gilman and others, are examples of how sexual cultures can both silence some possibilities and develop others." [mijn nadruk] (150)

[Natuurlijk is er altijd de context, dat is waar, maar toch weet ik niet of je zo gemakkelijk mag relativeren. Je zou dus precies moeten weten wat voor waarden en normen die bewegingen voorstonden als het ging om seksualiteit - als dat al mogelijk is. Zo ja, dan kun je wel degelijk met oordelen komen als 'conservatief', 'vijandig tegenover seks', en ja, ook wel 'preuts. ]

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the growth of a leisured middle class and the increasing emphasis on the domestic sphere as women’s domain encouraged women to orient their social life towards home, church, child-rearing and visiting. It also afforded them the opportunity to develop close relationships with other women in similar circumstances. The popularity of diary, journal and letter writing has left historians a rich archive for examining the feelings and emotions of these women. But it also poses a dilemma for modern historians. "(151)

[Het probleem van anachronismes dus: het projecteren van onze beelden en ideeën op de uitingen van die tijd. De vrouwenvriendschappen van die tijd zijn bijvoorbeeld niet per se lesbische relaties.]

"Despite the best efforts of Smith-Rosenberg and Faderman to place female friendships in a specific Victorian social context, other feminist historians have contested their conclusions. They have pointed to new evidence undermining the claim that these relationships were merely socially acceptable friendships."(153)

"More importantly, critics have accused Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg of falling into the trap of imposing the present on the past, the very thing they had tried to avoid. Liz Stanley has pointed to the dangers of determining the ‘nature’ of a relationship post hoc with the partial and limited materials historians have to work with. She points to the flaws in Faderman’s narrow definition of sexuality, as an act involving genital contact. Such a definition is riddled with questionable assumptions. It goes against the grain of influential theorists and historians, such as Adrienne Rich and Blanche Wiesen Cook, who have suggested that there is no single lesbian attribute or sexual behaviour, but rather a continuum of women-identified practices and lifestyles that constitute lesbianism. Cook forcefully argues that ‘women who love women, who choose women to nurture and support and to create a living environment in which to work creatively and independently, are lesbians’." [mijn nadruk] (153)

[Wonderlijke manier om het seksuele aspect weg te praten vind ik. Op die manier is alles seks en zijn alle vrouwen lesbisch. Dat etiketje 'al of niet lesbisch' vind ik niet zo interessant. Wat ik zou willen weten is of die Victoriaanse vrouwen elkaar op wat voor manier dan ook seksueel plezier bezorgden. Het is toch duidelijk wat dat is, dat is niet alleen maar gezellig samenleven en bij elkaar in bed liggen slapen. ]

"Do we take sexual intercourse or other forms of genital contact as the signifiers of sex acts? Or should we expand the category of sex to incorporate a large range of sensual and erotic acts and experiences? If the latter, how far do we go in expanding the definition before it loses all meaning, and we begin to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of some significant relationships in the past?"(155)

[Precies wat ik bedoel. Volgt een stuk over de vrouwenbeweging voor stemrecht uit die tijd, waarbij toenmalige 'feministes' in feite in het conservatieve kamp opereerden met klasse- en zelfs rasgebonden ideeën.]

"Feminist support for new abolitionist and social purity campaigns such as the Comstock Act (1873) in America, their opposition to the Contagious Disease Acts, support for raising the age of consent for women, and their involvement in rescuing ‘fallen women’ and encouraging moral self-restraint have been seen as puritanical. Historians have highlighted the strong evangelical and social purity beliefs of many feminists. Worse, while social purity provided feminists with a language to challenge male authority, it also put these reformers into a larger framework of medico-moral ideas and practices, which constructed a dominant discourse of sexuality with distinctive ‘class articulations’.
In America social hygiene campaigns of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were also entwined with the politics of race. Progressive and feminist efforts to regulate prostitution and venereal disease were energized by pervasive fears about the threat to social order posed by immigrants and African Americans. Reformers feared that white slavery and racial minorities promoted venereal disease, rape and inter-racial sex. As a bulwark against these threats they promoted images of white purity. Racist anxieties underpinned feminist sexual conservatism.
This characterization of feminist campaigns for abolition, social purity and suffrage has been challenged. A number of historians, such as Sheila Jeffreys, Margaret Jackson and Lucy Bland, have argued that there were radical and genuinely feminist aims within these campaigns. " [mijn nadruk] (156-157)

[Het is jammer dat dit boek het complete plaatje wil laten zien van opvattingen - wat goed is -, maar geen keuzes maakt voor de 'beste opvattingen' - wat te gemakkelijk is. Wat zijn 'echte feministische doelen'? Welke waarden en normen liggen er aan ten grondslag? Etc. ]

"In other words, there were different strands to the social purity campaigns. The conservative, evangelical element of the social purity movement was largely concerned to eliminate vice through ‘protective’ legislation for stricter policing of prostitutes, the closure of brothels, and tougher penalties for the publication and sale of obscene material. Such campaigns punished women who were reliant on prostitution for their livelihood. Feminists focused more on the problems of the sexual double standard and enforced ‘sex slavery’ for women. "(158)

[Dat laatste blijft dan toch tamelijk vaag. Wat deden ze in de praktijk dan? Zo gauw het een verzet wordt tegen mannen wordt het interessant - bijvoorbeeld in de strijd om de prostitutie niet de prostituees maar wel de hoerenlopers willen aanpakken en de hele achterliggende ideologie van mannelijke seksualiteit. Die feministes waren er inderdaad. Maar een heleboel vrouwen in die 'purity and hygiene' bewegingen waren bepaald niet zo progressief. Ook dat moet dan hardop gezegd worden en niet toegedekt worden met allerlei vage theorietjes en verontschuldigingen omdat het vrouwen zijn. ]

"The Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed in 1885. But feminists became involved in a host of other struggles over sexuality and morality in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Raising the age of consent, in an effort to protect young girls from seduction and sexual abuse, was one. After Stead’s sensational revelations [W.T. Stead ‘The Maiden Tribute in Modern Babylon' 1885 - GdG] feminists and new abolitionists succeeded in raising the age for sexual intercourse in England from 13 to 16 years in 1885, although it remained at 13 years for sexual assault. In the 1880s and 1890s American purity groups succeeded in raising the age of consent from as low as 10 in some States to between 14 and 18 years. Other campaigns focused on the problem of incest (outlawed in Britain in 1908), and the need for women doctors, police and prison guards to safeguard prostitutes from the degradation involved in being searched, interrogated and imprisoned by men. Underpinning all these feminist campaigns was the idea that men assumed sexual rights over women, demanded sexual services, and enacted laws to protect their access to clean women. For feminists, it was necessary to demand that men reform themselves.
Feminists considered women naturally chaste, more moral and civilized than men. It was the task of men to bring themselves up to the level of women. In making masculinity the central issue feminists turned Victorian sexual ideology on its head, accepting its central premise, but drawing a very different conclusion. Not all feminists, however, accepted that women had weaker sexual inclinations. For example, American medical pioneer Elizabeth Blackwell believed that the sexual instinct was as strong in women as it was in men, but the conclusion she drew on the basis of this ‘fact’ put her in the feminist mainstream. If women had a powerful sex instinct and could tame it, then the obligation was on men to do likewise. To this end feminists supported societies encouraging male chastity. They also resorted to such tactics as picketing brothels and publishing the names of prominent male clients of such establishments, to shame the hypocrites, embarrass the legislators and encourage male continence. " [mijn nadruk] (159-160)

[Op die manier wordt de strijd tegen de uitingen van mannelijke seksualiteit bij vele van die feministes een strijd tegen seksualiteit op zich en tegen zelfbeschikking van vrouwen waar de leeftijd van 'consent' wordt verhoogd. Wat progressief lijkt is uiteindelijk toch conservatief en middenklasse-idealen van zelfbeheersing en onthouding worden aan iedereen opgelegd.]

"Overcoming the inequalities in the institution of marriage became a central plank of Victorian feminism."(160)

[Dat lijkt me een goed streven en is in heel veel landen nog steeds actueel.]

"Victorian women may have grappled with fundamental feminist dilemmas of equality and difference, but their answers were often repressive, condescending in matters of class and race and rooted in a Victorian belief that the sex instinct could be overcome."(161)

[En 'should be overcome' zou ik willen zeggen. Het is normatief.]

"In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries sexology and psychoanalysis transformed the terms of debate about sexuality. The ideas of theorists, such as Havelock Ellis, Iwan Bloch, Augustin Forel, Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter and Sigmund Freud, had a profound impact on feminist ideas, objectives and strategies in Britain, Europe and North America. Sexology and psychoanalysis eroded feminist beliefs in women’s sexual difference, purity and continence. Although there had been a few Victorian feminists, like Elizabeth Blackwell, who believed that women possessed sexual passions, their conclusion that women (and men) could triumph over animal appetites was also challenged by the new sexology. " [mijn nadruk] (161-162)

"By the 1890s the ‘new woman’ had emerged as a figure in both fiction and non-fiction to describe ‘what many regarded as the worrying changes in the behaviour, the activities and the demeanour of women’. This economically independent, socially active, athletic, politically forthright ‘modern girl’ rejected marriage as sexual slavery in favour of sexual freedom. Although some saw the ‘new woman’ as synonymous with feminism, this figure was the source of considerable dispute within the woman movement."(162)

"These ‘sexual moderns’ demanded sexual pleasure for women and an end to the ‘myth of female sexual passivity’. Many of the disputes over sexuality were fought out in the pages of new journals such as Freewoman in England and The Woman Rebel in America. In these forums feminists debated the question of the harmfulness of abstinence, the benefits of pleasure and issues such as auto-eroticism and inversion. Contributors frequently invoked the ‘scientific truths’ advanced by sexologists like Ellis." [mijn nadruk] (162-163)

"In the early years of the twentieth century American bohemian and socialist feminists, such as Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman, Henrietta Rodman, Beatrice Hinkle and Marjery Dell, flocked to Greenwich Village in New York in pursuit of sexual equality and social reform. They followed the lead of earlier advocates of ‘free love’, such as Victoria Woodhull, and were inspired by the work of Swedish sex reformer Ellen Key, promoting the ideal of ‘free love’. In 1914 they established a new feminist club ‘Heterodoxy’, promoting free speech, sexual autonomy and sexual equality."(163-164)

"What appears in the early-twentieth century is a growing fissure in international feminism, between Victorians committed to sexual abstinence and restraint as the means of escaping sex dominance and moderns who sought to claim sexual equality as the means to emancipation. "(164)

(169) Chapter 9 - Imagining perversion

"By some estimates there were more than 10,000 monographs and articles relating to sexuality published in German alone between 1886 and 1933, 1,000 on homosexuality between 1898 and 1908. In turn the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries have been of intense interest for historians of sexuality."(169)

"Other historians, however, have questioned the idea of a decisive break between Victorian ignorance and a new age of ‘scientific’ understandings of sex. Frank Sulloway, for example, has argued that Freud was deeply influenced by the vast range of pseudo-scientific ideas that were popular in nineteenth-century Europe and America. More importantly, Michel Foucault has argued that the fundamental tools of psychoanalytic practice – talking, transference, dream analysis and free association – have their roots in older technologies of confession rather than a new scientific approach to sex."(169)

"Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sexual sciences constructed ideals of normality and perversion and bequeathed a discourse of sexuality, forms of treatment, practices of self-examination and sexual typologies that have shaped sexual moder- nity in profound ways. " [mijn nadruk] (171)

"Thus in literature and in courts, prisons, hospitals, clinics and private practice, doctors were confronted with the spectacle of criminals and patients exhibiting perverse desires and suffering sexual fixations. This was the seedbed for sexology. Prominent psychiatrists, such as Krafft-Ebing, were scrupulous accumulators of case details. "(175)

"The science of sexual pathology, however, was controversial. Krafft-Ebing wrote some sections of his treatise in Latin, partly to shore up claims to scientific authority and partly to disguise the sensational aspects of his cases. This did not stop some reviewers from declaring his work ‘repulsive’ and ‘nauseous’. Freud faced continued criticism throughout his career from sections of the medical profession, which condemned his obsession with childhood sexuality and the sexual origin of neurosis. Havelock Ellis struggled to find a publisher for his work on sexual inversion, and after its publication The Lancet declared it ‘odious’. A few years later George Bedborough, Secretary of a free-thought group, the Legitimation League, was prosecuted for selling a copy of Ellis’ ‘lewd, wicked, bawdy’ Sexual Inversion (1897).
Slowly sexology made headway. Ellis’ seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928) found an appreciative audience and he was widely praised for his pioneering efforts. Sex researchers, such as Bloch, Moll and Stekel, commanded respect and journals and monographs in sexology proliferated. In 1911 Hirschfeld established an Institute for Sexual Science in Germany and three years later The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded. In 1921 the first of a series of World Congresses on Sex Reform met, and in 1928 the World League for Sexual Reform was established. Similarly, the International Psychoanalytical Association thrived between the wars and found strong adherents, especially in America in the 1930s."(176)

[Ja, wat is er nieuw? Mensen willen die dingen niet weten die hun vanzelfsprekende zekerheden aantasten. Dus verzet, veroordeling, argumenta ad hominem, en zo verder. Toch geweldig dat die houding het onderzoek uiteindelijk niet tegen heeft kunnen houden.]

"Perverse sexuality was seen as a symptom of a larger moral decay. Otto Weininger’s misogynist and anti-Semitic tract Sex and Character (1903) declared that all organisms were fundamentally bisexual and sexual union was akin to murder. The only solution was to transcend sexuality."(177)

"Sexologists attempted to observe and explain and their work was shaped not only by the wider climate of opinion but also the concrete experience of daily clinical work. How, then, did sexologists respond to the evidence before them and the broader cultural climate that framed their inquiries? How did they explain sexual pathologies and what were the consequences of their conclusions? "(178)

" The key question for many sexologists was the extent to which perversions were innate or acquired. Were perverts the victims of heredity or was their ‘illness’ environmental or psychological maladjustment or personal and familial trauma? While biological theories supported hereditarian conclusions, medical injunctions to cure fostered a faith in the capacity of sexologists to treat sexual afflictions. Sexology was polarized. On one side, there were strong adherents of congenital perversion, such as Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis and on the other, psychoanalysts and other advocates of psychotherapy such as Carl Jung, Stekel, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich and William Healy who emphasized the psychological dimensions of sexual development."(178)

" Ellis became a voice for ‘sexual liberalism’ in Britain and America, challenging Victorian ideas that women were asexual. Instead he supported campaigns for effective birth control, partly on eugenic grounds, but also to enable women to experience sexual pleasure without the fear of pregnancy."(181)

"Ellis became a critic of ‘degeneration’ theories and a firm proponent of social tolerance for ‘deviants’. For sexologists like Carpenter, Hirschfeld and Ellis, biological determinism was a reason for social tolerance. If homosexuality was sanctioned by nature then it should not be punished.
The language of affliction, disease and treatment, however, indicates the paternalism inherent in much sexology. Although many sexologists were socially radical in their conclusions, advocating decriminalization of sodomy and tolerance for inverts and other ‘perverts’ there was a patronizing tone to their claims, born of a sense of therapeutic mastery." [mijn nadruk] (181)

"The place of Freud in the history of sexuality and sexual science has been the source of considerable dispute. Unlike the work of other early sexual theorists, such as Ellis, Hirschfeld, Weininger, Marie Stopes or Krafft- Ebing, which remain the focus of largely historical interest, psychoanalysis continues to command contemporary authority and relevance. There are, of course, many recent critics of Freud who argue that psychoanalysis is unscientific, and a fiction that has polluted literary and critical theory. As we have also seen, historians such as Frank Sulloway have argued that psychoanalysis is tainted by nineteenth-century biological determinism. It was not a genuine break with Victorian medicine. Similarly, poststructuralist and feminist theorists have interrogated the masculinist structures of Freudianism." [mijn nadruk] (186)

[Nee, echt? ]

"Increasingly the sex sciences sought to investigate the sexual behaviours of ordinary men and women. "(188)

(189) Chapter 10 - Normalizing sexuality

"Mapping the boundaries between normal and abnormal became a central preoccupation of sexology. In America, in particular, significant resources were devoted to treating sexual problems and charting the contours of everyday sexual experience. Large surveys set out to establish the range and variety of sexual practices in the general population. Such surveys have proved to be invaluable sources for historians of sexuality seeking to chart changing sexual habits, practices and beliefs over the twentieth century. Equally important, the results of these surveys were often surprising, challenging prevailing discourses on sexuality in fundamental ways. " [mijn nadruk] (190)

"In the 1920s and 1930s writers such as Theodore van de Velde and Marie Stopes in Europe and Britain, and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius, Margaret Sanger and Max Exner in America, spread the message of marital sexual pleasure.
Their books, articles and talks reached a wide audience, and the extensive correspondence generated by their work indicates that many women and men were keen for advice on how to improve their sex lives. This work was controversial. Sex reformers such as Stopes and Sanger, for example, supported birth control, insisting that sex should be for pleasure as much as procreation, effective prevention easing anxiety about the possible consequences of intercourse, a view condemned by religious and moral authorities. Both Stopes and Sanger were prosecuted for sending ‘offensive’ material through the mails and faced civil actions attempting to drive them out of business. Despite continued opposition and criticism the movement for greater marital sexual pleasure and fertility control gathered momentum. Effective birth control allowed couples to explore the pleasures of the marital bed and many of the popular sex advice books, such as Stopes’ Enduring Passion (1928), focused on techniques for achieving sexual fulfilment." [mijn nadruk] (190-191)

[Religieuze en morele autoriteiten waren indertijd waarschijnlijk dezelfde mensen. En het is typisch dat ze er tegen zijn dat mensen genieten van seks. Wat vinden ze dat eng! Wat een foute mensen zijn dat. Op die manier houden ze namelijk ook opvattingen in stand over hoe vrouwen en mannen moeten zijn en is gelijkwaardigheid tussen hen ondenkbaar. Vrouwen moeten vooral veel kinderen baren. Alsof de wereld zit te wachten op nog meer mensen. En zo voorts en zo verder. ]

Zoals gewoonlijk interpreteren historici de ontwikkelingen verschillend.

" White [2000 - GdG], however, is too focused on ideas and the heroic struggles of significant sexual radicals, failing to see the broader social and cultural contexts underpinning the emergence of sexual liberalism. Other historians, such as Steven Seidman, Kathy Peiss, Jeffrey Weeks, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, have argued that liberal sexual attitudes spread rapidly through the growth in mass media. "(191)

"The shift to sexual modernity, characterized by love, sexual pleasure and individual satisfaction, however, was protracted and contested. While reformers like Sanger and Stopes were active public figures commanding a wide audience, there were many religious, temperance and social purity groups that stoutly opposed what they saw as a dangerous decline in moral standards. From the 1910s to the 1930s antiprostitution and other social purity campaigns remained active. There were also continuing efforts to stamp out vice, regulate dance halls more closely and, in the 1930s, attempts to censor magazines, books and films, to safeguard moral standards. Similarly, eugenicists warned of the dangers of indiscriminate sex amongst the ‘unfit’ and inhabitants of inner city tenements. In some jurisdictions laws were enacted to prevent intercourse with ‘deficients’ and efforts to sterilize and segregate the unfit resulted in closer scrutiny of the lives of the ‘lower orders’.
These contests over sexual morality raise important questions for historians. Was there a general transition towards sexual modernity in the twentieth century? While most historians point to increasing liberalization in ideas and practices how far these extended is open to question. While modern attitudes were prevalent in cities such as London, Berlin, Paris and New York, these ideas and practices do not seem to have spread at the same rate elsewhere. Is it possible to make a general claim for a transition in sexual attitudes with so many potential regional differences? Or were the frameworks for sexual modernity, as the important work of historians such as Beth Bailey suggests, shaped as much by local circumstances as the ideas of sexologists and sex reformers?" [mijn nadruk] (191-192)

[Inderdaad: hoe ver gingen die sexologen in hun opvattingen over seksualiteit. Zo progressief - wat dat dus ook moge zijn - waren ze toch ook weer niet. Garton geeft voorbeelden: ]

"While some recent studies have stressed the political and social radicalism of sexology, other historians have tended to focus on the limitations and conservatism of sexual liberals. There were clear links for instance between eugenics and sexology.(...) Similarly, Stopes stressed the importance of sexual pleasure within marriage rather than pleasure itself. More fundamentally for these sex researchers (as for many subsequent historians), sex and heterosexuality were synonymous with intercourse.(...) they failed to overturn the entrenched masculine relations of power that subjugated women." [mijn nadruk] (192-193)

"Nonetheless, sexologists, sex reformers and scientists interested in the nature of sex and sexuality were instrumental in developing new discourses about sex of enormous significance in the twentieth century. Patients, however, were also crucial to sex research. The growing emphasis on sexual companionship in public media highlighted widespread sexual dissatisfaction. Disgruntled seekers of sexual satisfaction went to doctors complaining about their sexual lives. Many women reported that they failed to achieve orgasm and found intercourse distasteful. Men were frustrated about impotence, unresponsive wives and infrequency of sex within marriage. Sexologists sought to explore the roots of sexual dysfunction and many of the answers they found dramatically changed ideas about sex and sexuality. " [mijn nadruk] (193)

Naast de therapie grote invloed van de endocrinologie, de psychologie, de gynecologie, de culturele antropologie op de beeldvorming over seks.

"The discovery of hormones, however, both confirmed and challenged pervasive ideas that there were fundamental differences between the sexes. While endocrinology indicated that there were male and female hormones, some researchers concluded that they were mixed in a fluid system of internal secretions, suggesting that sex differences were matters of degree rather than absolute difference. Hormonal research also fostered the idea that sexual dysfunction, and possibly perversion, was a consequence of imbalances or deficiencies in these secretions." [mijn nadruk] (193)

"Gynaecological research also reshaped ideas about sexuality. In the 1920s Robert Latou Dickinson investigated the physiology of intercourse, observing the vaginas of women who masturbated. Similarly, Ernst Boas plotted pulse rates during intercourse. Research into the physiology of sex indicated that masturbation did not impair, but actually enhanced the capacity for orgasm during intercourse. Such conclusions raised interesting questions about female sexual response – was penetration essential for female satisfaction? Were women sexually unresponsive or did the fault lie with men failing to take female arousal seriously? More radically, some physiologists asked whether female sexual response was more determined by culture than biology?
Other disciplines also stressed the cultural dimensions of sex. Social science research raised questions about the relationship between modern life, morality and sexuality. For example, anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead, studied Pacific Island com- munities and claimed to find havens of sexual freedom. Here young men and women supposedly grew to sexual maturity free of the excessive repression of Christian sexual morality. This anthropological research suggested that morality, gender and what constituted acceptable sexual practices were bound more by custom than nature." [mijn nadruk] (194)

Alle kennis en adviezen hieven de de ellende op seksueel vlak niet op. Dat komt bijvoorbeeld doordat veel van de auteurs (als Freud) bleven hangen in het belang van geslachtsgemeenschap en geloofden in het bestaan van het vaginale orgasme.

"But whether it was inherent or learned, sexologists commonly believed in vaginal orgasm and the primacy of sexual intercourse in ‘normal’ sexual development."(195)

[En dat is dus weer bijzonder normatief. ]

"As we have seen in an earlier chapter, radical feminist historians, such as Sheila Jeffreys, Lillian Faderman and Margaret Jackson, have pointed to discourses on frigidity and vaginal orgasm as further evidence for their argument that sexology was conservative and heterosexist. For them, sexology pathologized spinsters and reluctant women, depoliticizing forms of resistance to the ‘heterosexual coital imperative’.
This powerful critique uncovers some of the key ideological assumptions underpinning inter-war sexology. But Jeffreys, Faderman and Jackson overplay their hand. They lump all expressions of female sexual dissatisfaction with heterosexuality into forms of resistance, despite the evidence that many women were troubled by their sexual life and sought advice from experts to improve it. Moreover, not all sexologists laid the blame on women."(196)

[Dat lijkt me terecht. Als je bijvoorbeeld Freud leest zie je de vooroordelen en de onkunde als het gaat om vrouwelijke seksualiteit. Ik kan me dan ook wel voorstellen dat die auteurs wat doorslaan in hun oordeel en generaliseren.]

"The interest of both reformers and historians in female delinquency reflects the centrality of sexuality in defining ‘deviancy’ in women. While Victorian and Edwardian reformers and doctors saw sexual expression as natural for men, female sexuality disturbed ideals of appropriate female behaviour. For historians this represents an opportunity to explore the ways in which reformers, sexologists, criminologists and psychiatrists problematized female sexuality. Medical and criminological discourses on female sexuality in the early decades of the twentieth century were shaped by two pervading tropes – the ‘frigid’ middle-class woman and the promiscuous working-class girl. Both required correction." [mijn nadruk] (198-199)

"The findings of many of the early surveys ran against the grain of moral reform discourses that condemned sex outside marriage and urged sexual restraint within marriage. Sex research became an integral part of sexual modernity." [mijn nadruk] (201)

[Daarom zijn die groepen altijd tegen onderzoek. Ze willen dingen gewoon niet weten. Lekker gemakkelijk.]

Eeb belangrijk persoon in die geschiedenis van grootschalige onderzoeken was Alfred Kinsey.

"His two major publications, Sexual Behavior of the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953), excited extraordinary scientific and popular attention. These studies were based on an unprecedented sample of 18,000 cases, compiled largely through extensive interviews, covering more or less the full social spectrum, unlike earlier studies which had usually be confined to one social group, most commonly college students. Within weeks of publication the male volume was on the best seller lists. The findings were controversial. Religious groups and conservatives decried the volume’s ‘disgusting prurience’, declaring it to be an ‘attack on the Western family’ and Kinsey a ‘menace to society’.
The criticism was not confined to moral conservatives. A few sociologists disputed the interview and statistical methodologies that framed the findings and psychoanalysts generally criticized the arid ‘materialism’ of the analysis, which challenged psychological theories of sexuality. Prominent literary critic and liberal social commentator, Lionel Trilling, argued that while Kinsey’s work purported to be scientific, ‘it editorialised freely’ and was actually ‘full of assumption and conclusion’. In the US Congress Kinsey was condemned as a communist, and there were efforts to have the Postmaster General ban the transmission of the Female Report through the mail. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, Congressional efforts to investigate the financial aid provided by the Rockefeller Foundation for Kinsey’s research, led to the cancellation of this source of funding. Kinsey, deeply embittered, died two years later." [mijn nadruk] (203)

[Ik kan me iets voorstellen bij die laatste opmerking dat Kinsey verbitterd stierf. Het is altijd hetzelfde met openheid over dingen: conservatieven willen geen openheid en spelen de smerigste spelletjes om onderzoek tegen te houden of belachelijk te maken. Er zitten altijd aanvechtbare dingen in onderzoek. Dat grijpen critici vrijwel altijd meteen aan om het hele onderzoek te verwerpen. Daar is niets positiefs aan. Kinsey probeerde in ieder geval dingen op een rij te krijgen. Zwakke plekken hier kun je oppakken en je kunt proberen het onderzoek beter te doen en die zwakke plekken te vermijden. Dat is onderzoek doen en dat brengt ons verder. Maar natuurlijk willen conservatieven helemaal niet dat we verder komen in onze kennis en begrip van zaken als seksualiteit die ze het liefst wegstoppen.]

"Kinsey transformed the discipline of sex research. Although subsequent researchers were often critical of his methods and interpretations, Kinsey’s concepts and conclusions captured them. Much of the sex research of the next few decades was dedicated to confirming, refining or refuting his findings. To do this many later sex researchers engaged in large-scale sample surveys of broad cross sections of the population, much as Kinsey had done. Thus Kinsey’s methods and questions came to shape the direction of both supporters and critics."(208)

[En zo hoort wetenschappelijk onderzoek ook te verlopen.]

Na Kinsey werd er ook allerlei ander onderzoek opgezet vanuit andere interesses, zoals Masters-Johnson, en onderzoek door vrouwen vanuit feministische hoek zoals Shere Hite.

"Another important development in sexology, however, was the increasing significance of women in sex research. In the 1970s some of the most important sex survey research was undertaken by women such as Mary Sherfey, Lonnie Barbach, Mary Calderone and Helen Singer. This work sought to redress the ‘harmful’ view of female sexual passivity that had been the focus of twentieth-century sexology. Some feminist sex research, notably Shere Hite’s, was also critical of Kinsey’s conclusion about the biological differences between men and women. Hite worked from an assumption that women had an equal sexual capacity to men, investigating women as independent sexual agents. She stressed, more than Kinsey did, the importance of clitoral stimulation and the capacity of women for multiple orgasm. She also concluded that women were frustrated in their sexual relationships with men. For Hite, it was not the different sexual response of women that explained fewer orgasms, but the failure of men to understand female sexuality. Women lived in a culture that fostered dependence rather than autonomy. Thus, for Hite, the problem for female sexuality was cultural rather than biological."(208-209)

(210) Chapter 11 - Sexual revolution

"In 1962 journalist Helen Gurley Brown advised ‘nice single girls’ to say yes to sex. Men, she declared, were ‘a lot more fun by the dozen’. Similarly Hugh Hefner, publisher of Playboy, attacked the ‘ferocious antisexuality’ and ‘dark antieroticism’ in America, trumpeting the ‘end of Puritanism’. One of the most popular cultural narratives of the late-twentieth century has been the 1960s and 1970s as an age of ‘sexual revolution’. In the 1960s sexual liberalism may have become a very public discourse, but as historians such as David Allyn have argued the nature and forms of this revolution were contested. " [mijn nadruk] (210)

Die seksuele revolutie werd helemaal niet zo breed gedragen en was ook niet zo uniek als vaak beweerd. Sommige historici hebben het dan ook over de tweede seksuele revolutie na de eerste in de 1920-er jaren. Het hangt er maar vanaf hoe je dingen definieert natuurlijk.

"Recent research using police, court and prison archives, and more importantly the increasingly rich twentieth-century oral history record, has enabled historians to explore a range of hitherto barely glimpsed sexual cultures. This work has uncovered many sexual subcultures, in cities and rural areas, which forged networks of relationships and sexual practices that defied, parodied and sometimes ignored the ideas of both middle-class moralists and sexual reformers.(...) Such research throws up important questions about whether the concept of revolution itself, either a single revolt or a series of them, is an adequate metaphor to encapsulate the history of late-twentieth-century sexuality."(212)

[Nee, als je naar de praktijk kijkt zijn dat soort sjablonen gewoonweg te gemakkelijk en generaliserend.]

Oorzaken kunnen gevonden worden in: zwakkere gezagsverhoudingen (bv. ouders), kinderen die eerder zelfstandig zijn (de arbeidersmilieus), de algehele malaise van oorlogen, en zo verder.

"Films, music halls, dance clubs and advertisers identified this new market and sought to exploit it, until moralists sought to censor this sexual rebelliousness in the 1930s."(213)

"The nationalizing and internationalizing forces of federal government, global trade, consumer society, and mass media undermined the ability of local elites to control the boundaries of their communities, propelling the spread of new sexual customs to small towns. Rather than a revolution, sexual modernity seeped gradually throughout American society."(214)

"After World War I the growing visibility of gay and lesbian cultures forced heterosexuals to differentiate themselves more clearly than ever before. Gender stereotypes became more central to heterosexual identity. Men were more inclined to assert their difference from gays, by ‘eschewing anything that might mark them as queer’. The homosexual type, according to Chauncey, was not the product of sexologists but of gays themselves. The emergence of this figure forced ‘straights’ to adopt styles of dress, speech and walking that clearly distinguished them from gays. Moreover, the emerging gap forged between ‘normals’ and ‘gays’ fostered increasing intolerance and more intensive policing. Rupp has called this the ‘heterosexualization’ of American culture, making exclusive desire for the opposite sex the key to gender identity. In this context the growing popularity of premarital sexual intercourse amongst middle-class men and women, uncovered in the surveys of researchers like Kinsey and Chesser, might be seen as in part a response to the shifting boundaries of what constituted gay and lesbian life." [mijn nadruk] (216)

"The important historical work on the emergence of sexual modernity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain and America suggests that the 1960s and 1970s sexual revolution was less revolutionary than its most fervent prophets claimed. While historians differ over the definition, timing and impact of various forms of sexual modernity, it seems clear that there were vibrant and active homosexual and heterosexual cultures, committed to an ethic of sexual pleasure well before the ‘sexual revolution’. (...)
Nevertheless, the sexual revolution associated with ‘the pill and permissiveness’ does stand out as an unprecedented moment of cultural spectacle. Sex came to the forefront of public debate in the 1960s and 1970s." [mijn nadruk] (217)

"While Freud and most of his fellow psychoanalysts, saw the ‘superego’ or the demands of civilized morality as a universal and necessary force, a few, notably Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim and Herbert Marcuse, saw sexual repression as a major mechanism of capitalist political domination. They insisted that modern civilization demanded excessive sexual repression, rendering individuals passive consumers of broader conservative social forces. Reich and Marcuse, in particular, sought to forge a link between psychoanalysis and Marxism. Thus modern capitalism and the patriarchal family were structures which alienated people from themselves. The pursuit of sexual pleasure then, became a means of resisting capitalist domination." [mijn nadruk] (220)

"The idea of ‘excessive repression’ and sexual pleasure as a form of revolution and resistance to the dominant social order inspired libertarian and bohemian groups in the 1950s. American psychotherapists, such as Fritz Perls and Norman O. Brown, also wrote influential books on the ‘evils’ of sexual repression. Like Marcuse they proclaimed the importance of ‘resexualizing the body’ as a strategy of resistance against the effects of capitalist modernity. Such arguments laid the theoretical foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. These theorists were widely read and their ideas were used to support new doctrines of sexual permissiveness and social revolution. Although Marcuse expressed some ambivalence about the sexual revolution, the tradition of sexual radicalism, born in a marriage of Marxism and psychoanalysis, was an important influence on many of the radical leaders of sexual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s." [mijn nadruk] (221)

" Drawing on the work of Marcuse and Reich, advocates of the ‘underground’ saw freedom from inhibition as the first step to a ‘new, freer, happier civilization’. But radical critics and subsequent historians have pointed to the severe limitations of this ‘revolution’. The links sexual radicals made between sexual freedom and political revolution were vague and based on poorly digested lumps of Marx, Marcuse and Reich. Much of the supposed radicalism of the ‘underground’ was subsumed in a wider, largely apolitical celebration of a ‘drugs, sex and rock and roll’ culture that lacked a coherent political program and was easily appropriated by commercial interests.
Another critical voice was feminism. Advocates of women’s liberation condemned both the ‘playboy fantasy world’ of mainstream culture and the sexual politics of supposed revolutionaries. The sexism of counter-culture advocates and the broader New Left, alienated many radical women. Black Power activist Stokeley Carmichael’s famous statement that ‘the position of women in the movement was prone’ was only one example of the pervasive misogyny of prominent men on the left. In his best selling Playpower (1971) Richard Neville’s celebration of gang rape and evocation of an idyllic world of freely available 14-year-old girls, reveals a radical politics that had manifestly failed to theorize sexual power relations. Part of the impetus for second wave feminism was the failure of the New Left to give space to the ideas, experiences and perspectives of women. Revolution seemed to some women to be sexual freedom for men and a new form of slavery for women." [mijn nadruk] (223)

Onderlinge verdeeldheid, maar ook de HIV/AIDS-epidemie maakten dat het enthousiasme voor de seksuele revolutie op een laag pitje kwam te staan. En daarnaast:

"More importantly, historians have detected a new sexual conservatism in the West. In significant parts of the popular media the 1960s revolution was increasingly depicted as a time of ‘moral decay’ leading to family breakdown, drug wars, rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases and social decline. The result, according to critics, was social and sexual misery, rampant sexual corruption, paedophilia scandals, rising rates of divorce and increasing social instability undermining the psy- chological health of children. There were calls for a return to a ‘new moralism’ and demands for stricter censorship controls, more policing of sexual deviancy and greater restrictions on access to abortion.
We should not take evidence of ‘backlash’ too far. While the movement for a new sexual moralism gathered pace in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in America, at the same time there are many indicators of increasing sexual liberalization." [mijn nadruk] (228)

[Jammer dat de auteur verder niet zo veel bronnen geeft voor die laatste ontwikkelingen in een meer conservatieve richting.]

(229) Epilogue

[Voor het grootste deel bekende en al eerder gegeven conclusies.]

"Nonetheless, the sharp disjuncture between the emphasis on continuity or difference inhibits as much as illuminates the history of sexuality. It is important to recognize that there are themes of long duration and others of marked specificity in the history of sexuality. For example, the intersections between sexual practices and codes of gender have shaped the history of sexuality in profound ways."(230-231)

"Greater recognition of the complexity of sexual history, however, has undermined old antipathies between essentialism and constructionism. "(231)

" Sitting alongside the history of sexuality of course there have been other historiographies that have had a great deal to say about sexuality – the history of fertility, family formation, birth control, feminism and postcolonialism to name but a few. These historiographies have crossed over into the history of sexuality adding new questions and perspectives. But even within the sphere of sexual history more narrowly defined, there are historians like Regina Kunzel asking new questions about ‘situational homosexuality’ and Stephen Robertson about the intersections between age, childhood and sexuality, that promise to open up new areas of investigation and debate." [mijn nadruk] (232)