Jad Adams
BODY LANGUAGE
How much of a sexual revolution did we really see in the past century? Romance, monogamy, family and coupling are in the 21st century, as they were in the 19th century, still central to Western culture.
Far from sexual freedom breaking the family, one of the most important sex reforms still under discussion is to enable same-sex and transsexual marriage, and equal rights to adoption. This looks more like former outcasts wishing to enjoy the comforts of conservatism than a radical agenda.
Angus McLaren, a Canadian history professor, sets out in his book, Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History (Blackwell), to examine the sporadic panics associated with sexuality in the 20th century, but is most interesting when he describes the norm.
At the beginning of the century there was a dismissive attitude to women’s sexuality. Some commentators felt manifestation of female sexuality such as lesbianism, prostitution and nymphomania were evidence of the same pathology: the hypersexual female, identifiable to an expert by her morbidly enlarged clitoris.
The war, like other great crises, tended to reinforce traditional sexual roles, so president Theodore Roosevelt could say: “The woman who flinches from childbirth stands on a par with the soldier who drops his rifle and runs in battle.”
Paradoxically, the war also provided widespread opportunities for deviancy: for inter-racial sex, homosexuality and casual sexual encounters, though these were usually lacking in romance. As one boy soldier recounted after his first experience of intercourse: “It’s a bit like pulling your thing, but you have someone to talk to.”
The pioneers of sex education also told their own sex stories and propagated new ones. Marie Stopes, Margaret Sanger and Alfred Kinsey all created personal myths to justify their sex work. The early birth controllers created their own sexual orthodoxy closely based on the values of family. Sanger and Stopes said they were women who had already tried unsatisfactory methods, who were married with children, and who wanted contraception in order to become better wives and mothers. No one, it appeared, ever wanted contraception in order to enjoy extramarital sex.
Later birth-control enthusiasts have chosen to play down the very strong racial element in such organisations as Stopes’s Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, which was concerned with eugenics and limiting the families of the poor, not sexual radicalism. The Nazis operated the most extreme programme of sterilisation, though the first law providing for the sterilisation of the feeble-minded was passed in Indiana in 1907.
The affluent post-war period saw the “eroticisation of marriage” – the notion that a good sex life was a marital requirement and a man who complained about the frigidity of his wife was compared to a musician who attributed his lack of success to his instrument. It was still, therefore, the man who was performing and the woman who was sexually receptive. Even throughout the supposedly liberated 1970s there was frequent complaint in feminist magazines about men’s poor sexual technique and little realisation that sex required two people to be adroit.
Time magazine declared in 1984 that the sexual revolution was over, killed by Aids, the rise of the Christian right and the election of people such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who wanted government “out of the boardrooms but back in the bedrooms” of their nations.
McLaren remarks at the end of his wide- ranging and masterful analysis that the death of sex was somewhat exaggerated – the newly invigorated right was on the march, but the public’s views were becoming more liberal. Despite the homophobic attention given to Aids, the result of the epidemic has been increased tolerance of homosexuals and wider discussion of varied sexual practices.
Such sexual openness has led to the subversion of the “safe sex” Aids message so that oral sex, instead of being a form of sex for lovers in states of advanced intimacy, has become within one decade a form of heavy petting that could be freely indulged by teenagers so that a girl could still consider herself a virgin (or a politician could claim he had not committed adultery) as the sex was only oral.
To use an observation from the previous century: shut sex out at the door as you will, and it will come in by the window.