A Companion to Global Gender History. Группа авторов
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and Eastern medicine relied on a common, androgynous body with differently positioned but homologous reproductive organs in each sex, the vagina being an inverted and internalized penis and so forth. Physiological differences were explained by relative humoral balances, heat, or measures of yin or yang. In the eighteenth century, however, Western scientists amassed evidence appearing to demonstrate that women and men’s bodies were decisively different, particularly in skeletal structure and in reproductive function. Women’s wider hips, menstrual cycles, and weaker musculature, their changeable emotions and putatively weaker reasoning were regarded as naturally determining women’s domestic and procreative functions, while men were believed better equipped for the rigors of social struggle. Male and female bodies were described as incommensurable but complementary, with the strength of physical attraction dependent on the relative differences in masculine and feminine traits.
The rather sudden appearance of a “two‐sex” system essentially locked men and women into a form of biological determinism that experts, and, increasingly, individuals throughout society believed to be their sexual destiny. Coincident with this sexual materialization of gendered bodies, women and men’s sexualities were held by medical specialists to be markedly different. Unless overcome by abnormal uterine furor, women were characterized as passive, inorgasmic beings, men as aggressive, opportunistic ones. These views confirmed and legitimated women’s confinement to the domestic sphere at a time when greater numbers of middle‐class folk could live on the husband’s income alone. Though they were enjoined to be punctiliously discreet, far from repressing discourse about sexuality, middle‐class people were obsessed with sexual health and hygiene, wrote manuals and tracts, and spoke endlessly about the ways that sexual excess, masturbation, or, contrarily, a misguided abstinence, could lead to weakness, sterility, and “degenerate” offspring. It is not likely that contemporaries thought of these rules as sexual in nature – the word “sexuality” itself did not circulate widely until the end of the nineteenth century – but as hygienic tactics for disciplining bodies, diet, and even desires as a way of maintaining a viable procreative economy.
Inevitably, what began as a regimen for bourgeois self‐ and class‐improvement became, in the course of the nineteenth century, a set of biomoral criteria used by the respectable classes to justify intervention in the lives of sexual “others.” These “others” were initially the traditional class rivals of the bourgeoisie: vice‐ridden and profligate aristocrats, drunken and disorderly proletarians, and bestial peasants. New public health and educational officials believed each class “type” could profit, in its respective way, from exposure to bourgeois values and hygiene; the earliest welfare state ventures for the poor, single mothers, and abandoned children dished out bourgeois moral precepts along with other forms of support. Sexual segregation and differentially gendered curricula became the rule in the new public schools, paralleling developments in society at large.
Additional sexual “others” were located. Chief among these were prostitutes, who had always been considered a moral scourge, but who were now accused of spreading venereal disease throughout respectable society. Some continental European states regulated and medically segregated prostitutes; even liberal Britain experimented with obligatory inspections in mid‐century. Only a few outspoken women, such as Josephine Butler and Christabel Pankhurst, pointed out that there would be no prostitutes if there were no male clients for them. European Jews escaped from the ghetto into citizenship in the nineteenth century only to find that they were demonized as sexual predators with abnormal erotic tastes and appetites. Indeed, ethnic minorities in all populations were presumed to be the most likely recruits for the brothel or perpetrators of violent rape. Finally, to an extent and with a zeal moderns find extraordinary, masturbators were diagnosed as mental or hereditary defectives whose habits were leading them to certain doom, and whose progeny, if they could have any at all, were certain to be born defective. Medical advice in this instance supplemented traditional religious suspicions of sensuality by fiercely indicting this solitary behavior that circumvented “normal” procreation. Doctors were known to prescribe electrified penile rings or clitoridectomies to worried parents as ultimate solutions.
One of the most sinister aspects of the construction of sexual “others” in nineteenth‐century Europe was the way that notions of race and ethnicity helped constitute both the ideals of virtuous sexual self‐mastery and the negative stereotypes of depravity and loss of control. Western colonialism had been supplying cultural representations from less “civilized” parts of European empires for centuries, but in the nineteenth century, coeval with the development of Darwinian and other biological notions of organic evolution and race, Europeans made racial distinctions part of their conceptions of moral and sexual respectability, selfhood, and citizenship. Ann Laura Stoler has written persuasively about the ways that ideas of sexual purity and the avoidance of external pollutions – a central feature of bourgeois moral self‐discipline – were paired with binary opposites constituted by the presumed depravity and uncontrolled eroticism of colonial people of color. The long Western fascination with the harem, and the actual practice of otherwise respectable colonial officials keeping “native” mistresses, fueled the imaginations of colonizers and European administrators worried about their nationals “going native.” They were encouraged to write laws for their colonies that segregated colonizers and colonized peoples, denied citizenship to non‐Europeans or people of mixed race, and prescribed family and pedagogical regimes for colonists of an archetypal “Dutchness,” “Frenchness,” or “Englishness” that existed nowhere in the home country, but that became, for everyone, models for comportment (Stoler, 1995: 107–11).
The materiality of race and its palpable appearance in Europeans of mixed parentage helped establish a representational benchmark in the European imagination of the virtues of purity and the consequences of pollution. When racial stereotypes were conflated together with middle‐class notions of sexual self‐control, competence, and citizenship, we can better understand why people of color, whom Europeans otherwise reviled as lazy and irresponsible, seemed, as sexual beings, to pose a direct threat to the sexuality of Europeans. The phobic anxieties of Europeans about race and race‐mixing, and their resistance to extending full rights to native peoples over the long run of Western imperialism, was an integral aspect of the history of sexuality.
The most important conceptual revolution in the history of sexuality took place in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. We still live today with the consequences of the discovery of the “perversions,” as a nomenclature of sexual variations and as identities that possess the power to encompass selfhood. The men who described and catalogued the varieties of sexual life were medical experts whose work coincided with one of the historic crests in the prestige and power of science. The vocabulary they used was the pathological terminology of the clinic, and though many of them were deeply sympathetic with their patients, believing penal sanction inappropriate for most of them, the discourse of pathology and norm they employed exerted a powerful influence over popular belief and usage.
Perverse behavior, obstinate and against the grain, is as old as humankind. Some of this has inevitably taken the form of sexual contrariness, but it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that such behavior came to be regarded as a “perversion” enacted by a “pervert,” in other words a behavior that became a kind of natural identity, whether inherited or acquired. Part of the explanation for this development lies in the social history of modern cities, in the explosion of modern consumer culture, and the evolution of new forms of individualism. Tastes, knowledge, and pleasures previously reserved for elites were now available for more general consumption. But the invention of the perversions was not a banal classificationism run amok; it was a systematic effort to distinguish “normal” from abnormal beings and to police the boundaries of respectability.
In the medical schemata of the era, perversions were excesses or deficiencies of normal organic functions. Excessive heterosexual libido led to nymphomania in women, satyriasis in men. Sadism (named by the sexologist Richard von Krafft‐Ebing after the Marquis de Sade) was an exaggeration of normal sexual aggression and dominance; masochism – pleasure taken in being dominated – was its contrary, passive expression. Deficiencies in what was believed to be the innate aim of sexual libido – to have intercourse with the opposite sex – produced