The Blue Monkey Review

I suspect that Pagina 12 must differ from most other Argentine daily newspapers. It carries a section devoted to “psychology” and seemingly draws opinion pieces from all over the western world. It also presents, from time to time, essays or interviews devoted to philosophy. In the Feburary 12 issue I noticed an article with the title, “Five imprudent remarks about Kant.” And, while I’m sure the article had been written for a general audience, it wasn’t “Kant for Dummies.”

The Pagina 12 for April 24, 2004 carried an interview with Fernando Saveter, a Spanish philosopher who recently presented a TV show in Latin America devoted to the Ten Commandments. The first line of the story points out that a basic premise of Savater’s thinking is his “agnosticismo confeso y militante.” So, he’s not talking about your father’s Ten Commandments. For Savater, the Decalogue, quite apart from its place in Judaism and Christianity, has become a moral reference point, allowing people in western culture to make a sharp distinction between good and evil. The commandments have persisted because human vices have persisted.

This short article contains some of the sharpest observations on the value of philosophy that I have seen in any popular format. Savater explains that we all ask philosophical questions concerning time, the universe, death. Philosophy contributes to human life by helping better understand life in this world.

Savater also includes an interesting observation on the development of western democracy. The interviewer, Silvina Friera, asked him how well the values of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, fraternity—held up in contemporary western societies. These should have all continued to be vital values, Savater responded, but “there is a very curious case. Now one would say liberty, diversity, and fraternity. Equality is viewed badly [sorry, bad trans.], even though it is much more revolutionary than diversity.” That statement alone should send you to the original.

Posted by at 8:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to the discussion that resulted from last week’s posting, I decided to improve my mind by reading Michel Foucault’s essay/chapter entitled “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish. It contains a remarkable discussion of an idea of Jeremy Bentham’s, the panopticon. This “all seeing machine” was Bentham’s plan for a prison in which the cells would be arranged in tiers around a central yard, with all of the cells having windows on the outside and inside. At the center of the circular yard would stand a tower with windows all around. This simple device would allow the warder (or anyone else) in the tower to see everything that the prisoners did, while the prisoners could not see the warder, could not even tell if it was the warder or someone else or no one at all watching them. Consequently, the constant visibility of the prisoners, and the invisibility of their guardians, would make control simple, almost automatic.

I don’t know if anyone ever built a prison on this design, and if so if the idea worked. Prison construction in the U.S. has boomed in recent decades, so a simple and automatic means of controlling the prison population would seemingly attract lots of attention. But the actual existence of a panopticon really is irrelevant as far as Foucault is concerned (though, he never tells us that in so many words, instead leaving the impression that panoptic structures are all over the place). Because the panopticon serves as a metaphor for the use of power in western societies since the 17th century. Foucault points to the persistent organization and ordering or humanity in every possible manner (but especially in imagination, in what we might call discourses, perhaps?). And this order serve to regularize and control the humanity that is so ordered. A system that orders must investigate, study, dissect, know what it is ordering—the subject must become transparent, seen in every possible way and at every possible time. Social structures flow into political structures flow into police structures. They are all panoptic, viewing everything from the obscure perch of social statistics or science, and they all serve to establish control over what they examine. At least, this is what I think Michel Foucault is telling us. It’s an interesting and useful perspective. In what follows, I want to try to use it to discuss a peculiarity of contemporary society known as “blogging.” And, of course, I want to take issue with it.

It’s hard to ignore the usefulness of the panopticon metaphor for understanding trends in contemporary society. It tells us that power is maintained by distinctions of knowledge; not just that I know more than you, but that I know about you and you don’t know about me. Foucault seems to have coined the term “surveillance society,” something that has come true in ways that Foucault, let alone Bentham, could not have imagined. Charles “Antipope” Strass, a Scottish writer, has inventoried the many forms of surveillance that have come into our lives in recent years or are potentially available for use. We’re all aware of the direct surveillance through cameras placed at intersections and other traffic areas, in banks, supermarkets, and just about anywhere someone might think about doing something wrong or even fun. So, metaphor shmetaphor, a shopping mall really is a panopticon. “They” can see you, and you cannot see “them.” Just as in the Bentham plan, you cannot even know if they are watching. How many of us would, let’s say, have sex in an elevator if there was a camera in the elevator? Okay, so a few of you would. But at least you’d think twice, right, and perhaps hang your underwear over the camera?

The Antipope page also points to uses that can be made of current electronic surveillance techniques that go well beyond cameras. For instance, Echelon is a cooperative project of U.S. intelligence agencies that “attempts to capture staggering volumes of satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic…” And, in case you’ve been living in a cave for 20 years and this is your first experience of the Internet since emerging, the worldwide web has provided yet another means of looking over the shoulders of ordinary people. David Engberg has constructed a “virtual panopticon” on the web and has also sounded the alarm about the ability of large, undemocratic organizations with little oversight to use the Internet for data collection.

But the structure of the panopticon as described by Bentham, and more generally the implications about the source of power and discipline as discussed by Foucault, conjure an image of a unified, centralized power. I’m not sure this is Foucault’s intent—surely he understood that power has many centers, and not all of them collaborated. He recognized that discourses, although tools for elites, could be turned to the advantage of those being discoursed about, that is, the objects of panoptic investigation. Still, in the essay on “Panopticism,” Foucault’s image of the emerging panoptic state is Napoleonic France, with its administrative center in Paris and a unified rule extending to all of the departments. How well does that fit the United States, where 50 republican governments compete for attention and funding from the federal government; where a single senator, “in the greatest deliberative body in the world” can bring the legislative business of government to a standstill as long as he or she keeps talking; where federal agencies can ignore legislative mandates and where Supreme Court majorities can overturn legislation.

The decentralization and fragmentation of power hardly means that it doesn’t exist. But in the case of the surveillance society, fragmentation means that those under surveillance have many choices about how they will choose to present themselves. When I brought this issue up with the small but ardent blogging community at Seton Hill University, Dennis Jerz immediately pointed out that the blog was a presentation of self, a selection and persona made available to the WWW. The panoptiblog of the Internet allows all of us to see the blog-selves of all other bloggers, but that will include only what the blogger decides to share. After all, I don’t post my journal online (something we can all be happy about).

But the WWW also makes clear that many people want to be observed, want to place themselves under surveillance. Not just with web pages and pictures of pets, but with video cams. They want to reveal as much as they can; they want us to know as much as we can, about them. Is this narcissism or exhibitionism or some other therapeutistic illness? I don’t think so. We live in a society where being seen makes us real, more real than those who remain unseen, unknown. And that isn’t just a reflection of panopticism. In a democracy, we give power to people about whom we know a lot, sometimes more than we want to know. And our ability to observe and monitor our leaders allow us, however inefficiently, to patrol the uses of power. We also turn our hearts and pocketbooks over to people about whom we know an awful lot, whether they are movie stars or sports heroes. The asymmetry of knowledge is all on the side of the masses, while fame fortune and power is all on the side of those observed.

Can I finally leave Foucault alone? Keep watching Blue Monkey or you might not find out.

Posted by at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Michel Foucault and The History of Sexuality

Before the Nazi occupation, Edmund Bergler was one of the leading psychoanalysts in Austria. He had studied with Sigmund Freud and at that time was assistant director of the Psychoanalytic Clinic in Vienna. Later he would immigrate to the United States and assume an important role in maintaining Freudian orthodoxy in the New World. In a 1937 article on “The Present Situation in the Genetic Investigation of Homosexuality” [Marriage and Hygiene 4: 16-29] Bergler provided a short account of five homosexuals convicted under Austria’s sodomy laws. The court offered the five men the choice of undergoing treatment to cure their homosexual drives or go to prison. One of the men chose treatment but disappeared soon after it began. The other four chose prison. On the face of it, this story is a testament to the satisfaction that these men must have taken in their homosexual lives. But for Bergler, the story (amazingly) supported his view that “there are no happy homosexuals.” Bergler claimed that guilt drove these men to atone for their wrongdoing. Through a long career, Bergler maintained his view of homosexuals as unhappy “injustice collectors” who provoked conflicts that they could then claim as persecution for their homosexuality.

In the early twentieth century a majority of psychiatrists and physicians supported the view that homosexuality indicated maladjustment, at best, or, at worst, mental illness. This psychiatric viewpoint can stand as an example of a sexual discourse, a concept developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality. Foucault’s idea of discourse stands alongside liberalization and revolution as one of the major theoretical tools used today to understand the history of sexuality. Today Blue Monkey will attempt to explain Foucault’s idea of sexual discourse, and to explore its implications for the history and sexuality. We will return to Dr. Bergler and his psychiatric colleagues.

Discourse can be a synonym for speech or even discussion, though it will help if you think of a discourse as everything that makes a particular discussion possible—the background ideas of the participants, the shared vocabulary, the common motivation to understand some complex field. But even though this general definition will help make Foucault’s theory clearer, it only takes you part of the way there. For Foucault and those who use his work, discourses always exist within a matrix of power relationships. “The ‘economy’ of discourses—their intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation, the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie them and which they transmit—this, and not a system of representations, is what determines the essential features of what they have to say (68-69).” Accordingly, the elites who develop discourses have not only a goal (to discover truth) but an agenda (to establish or maintain power relationships).

Foucault makes it clear, however, that discourse never works in just one way. “We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it (101).” A discourse can express the needs and goals of an elite, but the discourse itself can become a tool for those excluded from the elite. So, to take an example unrelated to sexuality, the rhetoric of liberty that colonial elites used to protest British taxes had a different impact when taken up by urban, working class movements in the same time period. The streams of protests against British “tyranny” ran together into the Revolutionary War, but quickly diverged once the British threat withdrew.

Of course, I’ve simplified all of this. Foucault’s work is subtle, dense, difficult. You would swear at times that it hadn’t yet been translated from French, or that perhaps it had been translated into several other languages on its way to becoming English. For instance, the idea that I discussed above is what he calls “Rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourses.” I could cite other examples, but I think I’ve already convinced you that you should be happy you are reading this in Blue Monkey. I also think we know enough now to unpack some of the implications of these ideas for the history of sexuality.

First, if you want to embrace Foucault you have to kiss liberalization (in all its variants) goodbye. Liberalization only makes sense if you begin with a repressive regime in sexuality, one that prohibits through social censure and law non-marital sex acts and even discussion of sex. According to Foucault, rather than silencing discussion of sex, the 19th century middle-class institutionalized this discussion in sexual science. In fact, physicians and psychiatric specialists created sexuality, a term that was still new in the 19th century. Rather than conceive of sexual pleasure, the medical experts sexualized bodies. People had not only “sex” (what we might call gender, i.e. identification as male or female) they had sexuality, that is, a tendency toward certain kinds of sexual acts and partners. I’ve mentioned Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis before in Blue Monkey, but there was a small company of sex experts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who catalogued non-standard sexual practices and pronounced on the causes and mental health consequences (usually negative) of these practices.

According to Foucault, then, Edmund Bergler and his psychiatric colleagues participated in a longstanding discourse, or “strategic unity” known as the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasure (105).” Foucault also uses the term “medicalization,” one that you might see applied in many other contexts. In the example we have, psychiatrists “medicalized” homosexuality, studying it, supplying a theoretical explanation for the development of homosexual practices and people (remember, this discourse sexualized bodies—no more distinction between practice and person), and offering to fix it through “corrective technology” (psychotherapy and other means too horrible to repeat). This seems to qualify as repressive, but these views seem mild when compared to the harshness of sodomy laws in force in most western countries (in mid-century U.S., the least term of imprisonment among the states for sodomy conviction was three years—many states still had life imprisonment on the books) and the hatred and fear of homosexuals (homophobia) that stood as a norm in western culture.

Foucault notes that this psychiatric discourse became a “stumbling block” for the psychiatric establishment when sexual minorities used the scientific study of sexuality to press for more liberal laws and for more openness. Later in the 20th century the scientific study of sexuality, especially homosexuality, and psychiatric opinion moved in the direction of viewing homosexuality as a normal variation in human sexuality. Bergler and others fought this within the American Psychiatric Association (APA). But by the early 1970s psychiatrists and activists successfully pressured the APA to remove the pathological designation for homosexuality when the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual was revised.

So far, Foucault seems to offer an accurate map or process for mapping sexual history. Foucault, however, was no historian. Rather, he used history to bolster his theoretical exploration of the workings of power. But unless you are a committed Foucauldian (yes, a real word), you have to see something suspicious in claiming the primacy of discourse when you study sex. American sociologist John Gagnon has said, “I think that the impulse to reduce things to texts, discourses, is an error. Because what social life is really about is performances. It’s really people performing in social spaces.” For those of us who are part of some kind of intellectual elite, it’s probably refreshing to think that what we say is in dialogue with this matrix of power relationships. In other words, our discussion of sex makes a difference. I’m sure there is some truth in that claim. But consider how you learned about sex. For most people, sexual knowledge does not arrive as part of an integrated system, and it doesn’t come piecemeal as bits of a system. Probably you picked up tons of bad information from peers and from barroom chat, and only slowly pieced together a workable idea. And, if you are like most people, part of piecing things together included some on the job training. You can call it a discourse if you want to; or, you can claim that boundaries in what you know are set by discourses. But I think you have to begin with that belief in order for it to really commend itself to you.

Foucault’s views about the history of sexuality also prove to be a poor fit with what we know. Let’s begin with the “psychiatrization of perverse pleasures.” Foucault refers to the growing body of medical literature on homosexuality in the 19th century as though the work began about the time of the Congress of Vienna. But medical interest in homosexuality waited until the second half of the 19th century, with the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a practicing homosexual. At that time there did not even exist a name for an individual who preferred sex partners of the same gender. Ulrichs offered the term Urning as means of describing himself and his tribe. He pleaded for understanding and for revision of the Prussian statutes against sodomy. Medical experts turned to the issue of studying persons with “contrary sexual feelings” and provided the label “homosexual.” Krafft-Ebing’s work, Psychopathia Sexualis, appeared in 1887. In it he offered the theory of degeneration as an explanation for homosexuality. In this view, certain mental illnesses developed over generations, as the genetic material (still speculative at that time) weakened with the stresses of city life and low living. Psychiatrists generally had abandoned this theory of mental disease by the turn of the century, about the time it became popular in literary Naturalism. To his credit, Krafft-Ebing eventally abandoned degeneration and moved toward the view that homosexuality was a natural variation in human sexuality.

Krafft-Ebing’s shift in views tells us something important, and suggests something even more important. If we want to think of scientific investigations of sexuality as discourses, then we have to recognize that they keep shifting and adjusting as they acquired new information. Henry Minton’s book on the history of sexual science in the U.S. offers abundant evidence that scientists like George Henry [Sex Variants (1941)] changed in his understanding of and sympathy for homosexuals as he worked with homosexual over the course of his scientific studies. In other words, sexual science seemed to behave like a science, however primitive, and to develop better understanding of phenomena as research continued. It is also the case that views about perverse pleasures varied greatly among researches. Magnus Hirschfeld, himself homosexual, worked tirelessly for homosexual rights. Havelock Ellis, the most widely read medical writer on sex before Freud, held fairly liberal views of male homosexuality. Freud also wrote privately that homosexuality was no shame, and in 1930 joined other prominent Austrian intellectuals condemning the current law against homosexual conduct as an “extreme violation of human rights.”

Foucault’s other “strategic unities” describing the development of sexuality in the 19th century seem to this writer to misconstrue or leave out the most important changes. He talks, for instance, about the “hysterization of women’s bodies,” a phrase that seems to mean the growth of the idyllic household with the self-sacrificing mother at the center. The negative of this image was the morbid, hysterical woman. True, the 19th century gave its highest emotional honors to “motherlove.” Call it a discourse if you want, but in the U.S. this cult involved women embracing their roles and responsibilities as mothers and also accepting the ideal of passionlessness, of a special purity associated with freedom from sexual urges. On some level middle-class women recognized that the repressive demands of passionalessness and motherhood also gave them some control marriage. Throughout the 19th century women made use of this moral leverage outside the home, in reform work and in the creation of news spheres of influence. Certainly women suffered from ill-health in the 19th century, and the network of water cure establishments in the Northeast attest to the need for rest and attention. But hysteria seems more like an imposition of French experience on western women generally. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, hysteria became a part of the fabric of daily life in France. Mental ill health had its vogue in the U.S., too, but it was too late to join the hysteria boom.

In fact, the 19th century did give rise to a discourse on sexuality that reflected astonishing agreement among experts and that also flooded the marketplace of ideas with popular instruction. Beginning in the 1830s in the U.S. dozens of textbooks and pamphlets terrified readers with dire warnings of the threat of masturbation to the health, sanity, and life of American youth. Some of these works were European imports, and most carried the names of medical men. The dangers of masturbation could not, apparently, be overstated, with some authors equating its ravages to the great plagues of the past. The prognosis for habitual masturbators was simple and irrevocable—weakening vision, loss of intelligence, insanity, death. Authors could always point to the pervasiveness of the practice in asylums for the insane.

Foucault pays some attention to this outpouring of medical literature, mentioning in one sentence the war against onanism which “lasted nearly two centuries (104).” There certainly existed tracts against “solitary vice” in the 18th century, but the really earnest struggle against it came over a few decades in the 19th century. By the early 20th century, most authorities had retreated from the most extreme claims, and many had only moral qualms about the practice. Karl Krausz, for instance, the Viennese pundit, noted that most men would find it difficult to give up the pleasure of their own company for marriage.

Finally, Foucault has little to say about marriage. His work is almost silent on the one topic about which there has been a flood of commentary since the early 19th century, a flood that has continued to grow up to the present time. This forecloses discussion of romantic love, courtship, changes in socializing among men and women, and the practice of real-life sexuality within marriage. Perhaps it is unfair to expect Foucault to deal with all issues. But this should make clear that for Foucault talk about sex is more important than the day to day grind of having sex and then of dealing with the social and reproductive consequences. I think this oversight should make clear the limits of his ideas generally.

Posted by at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Last week we took a tour of the idea of liberalization in the 20th century as it applies to sexuality. Clearly, both behavior and attitudes about sex and sexual behavior have changed enormously in the century we just left. Liberalization, however, generally contains an idea of progress, a sense that there is a direction for sexual relations. We can only find directions of change and meanings like progress retrospectively and then retrofit those directions and meanings onto a much more chaotic set of developments. Depending on the timeframe you examine or the point of view you take on any set of changes, you may have a difficult time believing in the liberalization model when you go to bed at night.

Another way of understanding changes in sexuality in the 20th century is through the notion of revolution. This has become a well-established image in historical change, as in “the scientific revolution,” “the industrial revolution,” “the democratic revolutions.” It is also at the heart of Marxist thought, where revolution results from the continual conflicts generated by changes in economic systems and their associated class systems. The analogy with sexuality works fairly well. A set of repressive ideas and systems are challenged by innovators, new ideas, social change, and raw libido until the old sexual system caves in and startling new practices and ideas prevail. We’ve all taken for granted, for most of our lives, that a sexual revolution tore through American society in the 1960s (or thereabouts) that has given us the sexual freedom we enjoy today. Revolution may work as a stand-in for liberalization if you don’t feel you can abandon it entirely. Rather than a steady progression from repression to freedom you can see repression wrecked by the forces of sexual revolution, resulting in the freer standards and actions that most of us (except parents) agree make life better. So, if we want to think seriously about sex in the 20th century, we have to look at revolution.

Historians today do not give much time or attention to sexual liberalization, except to attack it as an intellectual red herring. Revolution, on the other hand, enjoys wide acceptance. Most social historians would agree that the 20th century gave us two sexual revolutions. Judge Ben Lindsey, writing in the 1920s, had already begun to chronicle the “ways, customs, purposes, visions, and modes of thought” of the “flapper-flipper world” that had challenged the wisdom of the adult world. Historians such as Gilman Ostrander, Paula Fass, John Modell, and Kevin White (and Spurlock and Magistro) have generally agreed that economic and social changes, ranging from urbanization to mandatory school attendance (with a mix of World War and technology) undermined Victorian attitudes and replaced them with a far more open and permissive attitudes toward sex. In 1900 a girl who stayed out all night, kissed, petted, and drank with boys could end up in front of a juvenile court judge and face a sentence to one of the new reformatories designed especially for girls and young women with precocious sexuality. By 1925 a girl who acted the same way might be elected prom queen. Now that is a revolution!

The second 20th century revolution began in the 1960s and continued into the 1970s. Beth Bailey has recently chronicled the changes in the university town of Lawrence, Kansas. The youth culture that opposed segregation and war in Asia also took aim at the repressive sexual attitudes of postwar America. A growing segment of adolescents and young adults assumed an entitlement to sex before marriage, and by the 1970s even young women rapidly gave up prospective marriage as a necessary rationale for intercourse. The birth control pill became available, in theory, in 1960, and by the 1970s was available in practice even to unmarried women. Abortion, illegal everywhere in 1960, was legal everywhere in 1973. Even gay sexualities gained more visibility and legitimacy following the Stonewall riot of 1969 and the gay pride movement of the 1970s. Taken together, the sexual revolutions of the 1920s and the 1960-70s can provide sufficient explanation for the end of Victorian morality and the kind of physical intimacy that we practice today.

But, while the sexual revolutions seem to explain everything, for such important developments they can be devilishly tricky to pin down. When did the revolutions occur? We talk about the 1920s and the 1960s, but there are claims for a sexual revolution in the late 19th century. Pretty much everyone agrees that the 1930s to early 1940s were pretty un-revolutionary, but Pitrim Sorokin was already writing about The American Sex Revolution in 1956. At the OAH two weeks ago Alan Cecil Petigny presented a paper on the rapid changes that took place in American sexual mores during the 1950s. Afterwards, in his comments, he pointed out that it was in the 1940s that illegitimacy and pre-marital pregnancy rose more rapidly than ever before or since, suggesting that the revolution had begun long before acid-dropping hippies declared “make love not war.” And you can also easily argue that the real changes took place in the 1970s. Or, take another look at the chart showing the increase in 19-year old women who had engaged in intercourse. From its baseline in 1906, the line of increase rises without any apparent hesitation until in levels off in the 1980s. So what sends the percentages upward so relentlessly if not a revolution with widening consequences as the century goes on? This all suggests a kind of Trotsky-ist permanent sexual revolution.

But what, exactly, do we mean when we talk about a “revolution?” In political history this issue has demanded careful attention. Back in the late 1970s, when I was earning a master’s degree in history, revolution had a charisma that I’m not sure it still holds. Marxist historians contrasted “real” revolutions like the French one and the Russian one with sort of half-baked revolutions like the American one. My only sense that these invidious comparisons still hold meaning is the persistent debate of “how revolutionary was the American revolution?”

In the history of sexuality, however, we need to ask what it is that we consider revolutionary? I’ve noted the remarkable change of attitudes from 1900 to the 1920s. Sociologist Ira Reiss, in Premarital Sexual Standards in America asserted that in 1960 when the book was published, the United States held to the formal standard of abstinence but also practiced an informal double standard (i.e., abstinence for girls and women, but promiscuity for boys and men). Yet even at that time it was clear that most women must have accepted some version of what Reiss called “permissiveness with affection,” since most women by then lost their virginity to lovers or fiancés before marriage. Permissiveness with affection, in fact, has become the accepted standard for sexual relations unless you are an evangelical minister or a politician.

So when, and how, did this standard become, uh, standard? And why do we so readily accept coitus as the sine qua non of physical intimacy? Because permissiveness in the form of kissing and petting became the common, almost universal practice of teenagers by the 1920s. And it wasn’t permissiveness with affection, either. Once we abandon a coito-centric view of sexuality, new possibilities arise (so to speak).

Revolution certainly helps us make sense of change in sexual beliefs, attitudes, and practice. Change apparently happens pretty rapidly, after a long period of mounting opposition to prevailing standards. And when change comes, it also seems to come in attitudes and behaviors of all kinds. Still, revolution seems clearer and more powerful as an explanation the further we stand from it. Like liberalization, we need to retrofit it to our understanding of the past. There now exists another widely accepted view in discussions of sexual change. We’ll take it on next week.

Posted by at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

During the research for my last book I kept finding unexpectedly rich sources dealing with the affection of adolescent girls for other girls. What I read in the diaries of these young women seemed to me to contradict current common knowledge in the historical literature, though when I wrote about these relationships I offered some anodyne comments that made no controversial claims. Nevertheless, since the publication of New and Improved I have given more thought and study to these relationships. This has resulted in a paper at last year’s Society for the History of Childhood and Youth, an article in History of Psychology , and a reference article in the forthcoming encyclopedia, Homosexualities.

But, as my friend James Reed said in his comments on the SHCY panel mentioned above, since its resurrection in the 1960s social history has relied on an assumption of social continuity. That is to say, any real social issue that you investigate as a historian can, potentially, open avenues to every aspect of the culture. My preoccupation with adolescent crushes has done that for me, drawing me further and further into issues of sexuality in the twentieth century U.S. It struck me that it might be useful to spend some time writing about this, as a means of ordering some of my own thoughts as well as providing interesting copy for regular and irregular readers of Blue Monkey. What follows will examine the model of “sexual liberalization” and show how current sociologists and social historians have treated this idea.

The average heterosexual on the street might assume that sex has no history, that it pretty much operates the same way in all times and places. True, sex acts have only a narrow range of possibilities (there are far fewer sex manuals than cookbooks in the world). But a moment’s reflection (or perhaps a look into Time magazine for pictures of Afghan women in burkhas or a National Geographic spread on Carnivale in Rio) should quickly consign the no-change notion to the list of intellectual Darwin awards.

Someone who thinks about sex as one element of larger social and cultural systems may arrive at some version of “sexual liberalization.” In this view, the 20th century begins in Victorian repression and then progressively, continuously, steadily becomes less repressed and more open to choice in sexual matters. Sexual choice has been aided and abetted by the expanding technology of birth control and abortion, by the growth of work opportunities for women, and the proliferation of divorce. The term works well whether you are a social conservative, who sees the liberalization of anything as bad, or socially liberal. But even someone who believes that decisions about sex and commitment should be made in a free market of desire and advantage will also agree that problems will arise if liberalization unravels all social constraints.

Liberalization provides an intuitively complete explanation for sexual change. Anyone who, as a teenager, argued with parents or other dim-witted adults about his or her apparel/piercings/music/politics/hairstyle or choice of companions will know that prior generations carry such backward, pernicious, and repressive ideas about life (and especially sex) that it should amaze us that the genus Homo still has a species to go with it. It's obvious that we are freer and generally better off today than ever. Even more compelling for adult members of the liberalization school is that almost any two-point measure irrefutably proves the theory. Compare 1910 or 1920 or 1930 to 1980 or 1990 or 2000 and you find that a) boys and girls are having sex as teenagers more frequently; b) that the average age for first intercourse has decline markedly (17 for white males, 18 for white females in the mid-1990s); c) more people use birth control and have abortions; d) more young women have children outside marriage; e) sexual minorities are more visible and have greater freedom to date and mate with the people they find attractive. In fact, the recent findings of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, that teenagers who take chastity oaths end up having sex as frequently as non-oath-taking teens, provides a perfect example of liberalization. Not only are lots of teenagers having sex—what is more compelling is the assumption, even among those who support and promote chastity, that teenagers will be the ones who make decisions about whether they have sex or not. At the turn of the century, almost no teenager would have been viewed as capable of that decision, and even the notion of decision-making in sexual matters would have seemed suspicious.

Pick at any strand of the liberalization idea, however, and the whole theory starts to unravel. Pre-marital intercourse always acts as a leading indicator in the free market theory of sexuality. Clearly, more people have sex before they marry these days. Yet, most men had sex before marriage through most of the 20th century, and the rates for women (even white middle-class women) increased very rapidly. (You can see this idea demonstrated graphically if you go to this chart.) In your mother’s generation, and even in your grandmother’s generation, at least half of women had carnal knowledge before marriage. Of course, all this knowledge existed within a well-accepted system (even though it didn’t accord with public morality) in which women generally gave sexual favors to men they expected to marry, and usually they did marry them. Men, you will be amazed to learn, generally assumed that they had a right to greater latitude in pre-marital sexual partners. The major change in this system began in the early 1970s as more women had sex with men they did not plan to marry. Even this change has not gone in only one direction. After a rise through the mid-1980s, percentages of women choosing to have sex outside marriage began to decline. For African-American women, those declines (albeit from a higher percentage) have been more dramatic.

Or, take the fact of rising rates of pregnancy among teenagers. This seemingly validates sexual liberalization in a manner that is not refutable (after all, knowledge of sexual activities depends on surveys, and everyone knows that the one consistent element of these surveys is that the people who take them lie, lie, lie). From the early 1970s, social scientists and policymakers identified teenage pregnancy as a huge and growing problem, leading to handwringing in the halls of Congress and in all the major media. The catchphrase “children having children” dramatized the situation, suggesting the health risks and social disintegration implicit in this alarming trend.

Yet, beginning with Maris Vinovskis in 1988, a string of historians and social scientists have eviscerated this “fact.” Teenage pregnancy rose rapidly, indeed, dramatically, from World War II until 1957, where it peaked. Since then teen pregnancy declined steadily until the mid-1980s and remained fairly stable for a decade. Sincel the mid-1990s both abortion and pregnancy rates for teens have steadily fallen, and are now at the level of the mid-1970s. What has changed has been the way that teens have managed pregnancy. In the 1950s teenaged mothers usually had husbands, and pre-marital pregnancy often led to short engagements and rapid wedding plans. Unwed mothers frequently gave up children for adoption. By the 1970s both of those approaches to pregnancy had declined. Fewer young women marry the fathers of their out-of-wedlock children, and an even more dramatic decline has taken place in the number of women who give up children for adoption. Even as the number of children born to teenagers has declined, the percentage of children being raised in non-traditional households has risen rapidly.

On the other hand, doesn’t teen pregnancy (today more than one-third of all illegitimate births are to teens) in itself undermine the premises of sexual liberalization? After all, choice should include the ability to control fertility, with greater control over time sustaining the growth of choice. The historical developments here could not be less sympathetic to a liberalization view. Abortion was legal everywhere in the United States in the 19th century, but was criminalized in state after state until the early 20th century. Illegal, clandestine, and therapeutic abortions continued, of course (millions during the decades when abortion was illegal) until in the 1960s California and New York liberalized their abortion laws. Roe v. Wade (1973), of course, overturned abortion statutes throughout the country. But abortion liberalization lasted only briefly. By the 1980s, anti-abortion activists managed to impose limits on public funding for abortions and to have states adopt parental consent laws. Even if parental consent is mitigated by judicial bypass, the process may seem too complicated for some minor women.

So far, of course, I’ve dealt only with heterosexual issues. For sexual minorities, the process of liberalization seems to hold the same clear direction and advantages. At the beginning of the last century, homosexuality could be famously referred to as “the love that dare not speak its name.” Most individual Americans would have assured you that s/he had never met a homosexual if, in fact, s/he knew what that was. Sexual categories were still vague in 1900—not that many years before the first medical article using the term heterosexual had referred to it as a sexual perversion. And people who didn’t fit the norm (i.e., marry someone of the opposite gender and have children) could be referred to as urnings, hermaphrodites, contrare sexualempfindung, or by any one of a dozen other names. I think we can all be happy that the term homosexual, popularized by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, took hold.

Although vibrant subcultures of gay men and lesbians existed in the large cities of the United States, individuals in small towns might never have a reference group or even a means of understanding him/her self. Autobiographies or novels from the early 20th century often depict moments of revelation when the young person opens up the work of Havelock Ellis or some medical text to discover an explanation and a source of identity. In fact, anyone finding his or her identity in Krafft-Ebing’s work (which, after all, was named Psychopathia Sexualis) would not likely leave with a very high self-esteem.

Although it is always dangerous and probably incorrect to say that nothing much changed during any period of history, the situation for homosexuals in the United States probably remained what I have characterized above until World War II. Military service gave unprecedented opportunities for gay men to meet other gays (and for some men to discover unexpected facets of their sexuality). The military, in fact, tried to screen out gay recruits with a brief psychiatric interview (with subtle questions, like, “Do you like girls?”) but Allan Berube has shown that this was relatively ineffective. After the war, homosexual activists began to work through organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis to change laws and to build networks among gays and lesbians. The Kinsey reports (on men in 1948 and on women in 1953) shattered the myth that homosexual experience was so rare it could be considered negligible. The controversial figures that Kinsey put forward of more than a third of American men having some homosexual experience during their lifetimes, and of approximately 10% of males who could be considered homosexual over some period of their lives, enraged conservatives and energized the gay organizations.

For gays and lesbians, it is tempting to draw a line from World War II to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and let sexual liberalization do the walking. Yet anyone who has a general view of that period knows that the line will not run straight. The Stonewall Riot at the end of the 1960s and the rapid growth of gay pride in the 1970s, and the rapid growth of vibrant communities of sexual minorities, ran into both conservative backlash and the chilling consequences of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Even though both gays and lesbians have far more acceptance in many areas today, and far more attention in the media, part of the drift toward acceptance has come as homosexual people act more and more like heterosexual people.

Take the following test:
They live in couples, they pay taxes, they buy homes, they raise children characterizes
a) heterosexuals; b) homosexuals; c) both; d) neither; e) all of the above.
The answer, of course, is E, which may, but probably does not, support a view of sexual change with expanding choice as its underlying reality.

Anyone with more than a few minutes on his or her hands, and the desire to salvage sexual liberalization, can reform the theory in a way that will work. As we know more and more about sexuality in the century of our birth, however, any theory of sexual liberalization must become more and more refined and complex, much like the epicycles of Ptolemy’s theory of planetary motion. To explain sexuality we need a new view, a whole new paradigm.

Stay tuned.

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