The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution

"I think it’s a valuable synthesis for a public audience, as well as containing lots of the author’s own research, but to talk about this as the first sexual revolution, with this flowering of sexual liberty, raises lots of questions. The first question is, ‘For who?’ And the next, ‘at what cost?’ Essentially, the story he tells is of the removal of sex and sexuality from the context of religious morality and discipline to the private space of the individual, where the individual has the ability to make personal choices, not based on theology or doctrine, but based on their own desires. So, it tells a tantalizing story, one that appears to uncover the roots of the Western world’s apparent sexual liberty. That’s the first revolution. It comes before the 1960s. For Dabhoiwala, it happens from the middle to the end of the 18th century, but it’s a long process. It’s a really ambitious book, and he has to be congratulated for its range, because it talks about this change across the 17th and 18th centuries. He uses a huge range of different kinds of historical documents: art history, visual culture, print culture more broadly, court records, diaries, letters, autobiographies. He argues that along with sexual liberty goes sexual expressiveness, but also sexual explicitness. For example, he discusses changing ways of talking about sex, and of depicting sex, including what he calls mass culture and pornography. Much of this feels very modern and very familiar to us. This is about a flowering. It is as if the lid is taken off, and people are at liberty to follow their personal desires. “The 18th century is often regarded as a period where the body becomes even more important, as a kind of naturalised, physical thing, in defining who we are” There are some important caveats to the story, though. Very importantly, Dabhoiwala is careful to show that this kind of sexual freedom isn’t actually just a liberation of human sexual urges. He says that the shape of sexual expression is socially constructed, and perhaps most importantly that this newly open, sexually expressive culture is both gender- and hetero-normative. In other words, embedded within this apparent free-for-all and liberty are quite deep-seated and inflexible ideas about gender, masculinity and femininity, and also very powerful ideas about who one should properly desire. That is, one should, of course, really only properly desire a member of the ‘opposite sex’. For example, towards the end of the book he discusses the increase in the persecution and disciplining of homosexuality as part and parcel of this Enlightenment ‘freedom’. In other words, this is a story that appears to show the origins of our free Western culture, but it’s a distinctively 18th-century modernity and the freedom is not for everybody. Not everybody is at liberty to enjoy sexual liberty . That liberty is much more easily accessible if you’re a man. And liberty is not accessible to you—at least not without fear of persecution—if you desire somebody of the same sex. I find that hard to answer, because the book talks about lots of different types of women, and how this story affects them is just vastly different. He does talk about ‘harlots’ and prostitutes, and actually a lot of the author’s early work was on prostitution, so he knows a lot about the subject. This category of ‘prostitute’ is a crucial element of the story, because it’s the prostitutes who were thought to serve this apparently natural male libido. They’re essential, if men are going to have their release. Other women have different roles to play in the story. In the chapter on celebrity, for example, there are women who can manipulate their sexual attractiveness in ways that can bring them benefits—fame, celebrity, a fantastic leading role on the stage. We might see those women as being empowered by this sexual expressiveness. But of course, as ever, for women to present themselves as sexual objects is a very limited kind of agency. In the end, it feeds into this deeper idea that women are there for the pleasure of men. I would be really interested in seeing a history of female pleasure; not just sexual pleasure, necessarily, but we could start with that. As yet, there isn’t one. I suppose I would’ve liked to have seen more attention to female sexual desire and sexual pleasure in this work. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One of this book’s limitations is that he buys into an Enlightenment idea of what sexual liberty actually is. For many people at the time, sex, sexual relationships, and sensual relationships were actually very properly situated within the institution of monogamous heterosexual marriage. Whilst we might see that as conservative, for the vast majority of people in Europe, certainly in Britain, it was the route to personal fulfilment, as well as emotional and financial security. That was also the route to a religiously satisfying life. The idea that in the 18th century, sex, sexuality and the body could be removed from a religious and moral context is, I think, an over simplification. There’s a great book that I could have chosen by Joanne Begiato and William Gibson , Sex and the Church in the Long Eighteenth Century: Religion, Enlightenment and the Sexual Revolution . It’s a big, wide-ranging book and the piece of the picture that Dabhoiwala doesn’t account for, which is that still, for almost everybody in British society at this time, the Christian Church—and usually a Protestant one—is the way in which they view the world. And that includes what they do under the covers with the people that they love. Yes. Absolutely. You mention Wollstonecraft. She’s a great example. People completely understood that women also had sexual desires and there are lots of intimate sources—diaries and letters—where you see women and men, husbands and wives, talking about this. Sometimes they’ll talk about it covertly, and sometimes they’ll talk about it more explicitly. Well, if they’re doing that in letters, they’re certainly doing that when they’re together. So, I think it’s absolutely the case that people understood this. But again, it’s about an appropriate and fulfilling context in which those desires and those kinds of pleasures can be satisfied. And that is still, for most people, marriage. Wollstonecraft is a really interesting example, because one of the things that that Mary Wollstonecraft talks about in really powerful terms is the way that women’s bodies and sensuality have been perverted by trying to satisfy the eyes of men. She gives us a wonderful account of the damage women do themselves when they objectify themselves for the pleasures of somebody else. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women , she doesn’t talk about what women should do to cultivate their own sexual pleasures or let them flourish in any explicit way. But she’s writing directly to women, irritated with those who assist in their own objectification. She’s very clear that she thinks they should stop behaving in this way. She wants them to think of themselves as independent agents and stop preening themselves for the eyes of somebody else. Wollstonecraft is an excellent example of someone who—probably implicitly—wrote about women’s own desires and pleasures and satisfactions away from how they might be constructed by men."