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The History of Sexuality: From Ancient Polymorphous Perversity to Modern Genital Love

Brett Kahr
Volume 26, Number 4, Spring 1999

Some years ago, the Israeli poet Zygmunt Frankel wrote very wry, untitled verse, in which he asked:

"With all the
pills
IUDs,
condoms
diaphragms,
safe periods
coitus interuptus, [sic]
abortions,
accidents,
wars,
and emigration,
why is the bus so crowded?"
- Quoted in Pitt-Kethley, 1992, p. 415.

One need hardly consult a psychologist or a sexologist in order to answer this question. The crowded bus to which Frankel alludes, a very apt metaphor to describe our planet, has become so congested because generations of men and women have practiced procreative sexual intercourse for approximately one hundred thousand years. Without doubt, we know a great deal about sex and sexuality as it is performed today. Our marketplace has become swamped with books, magazines, instructional videos, sex education classes, television programmes and newspaper reports, not to mention the time-honoured oral transmission of information, enlightening us about every imaginable aspect of sexual relations ranging from interactive computer sex to the ravages of child sexual abuse in its all too numerous forms.

But though each of us knows a great deal about sexuality in the late twentieth century, we have very little understanding, I suspect, about its historical origins. And with the possible exception of computer sex, virtually every action, position, or disposition in which we now engage can be found in the literature or on the pottery or cave paintings of our ancient ancestors who lived two, three, four, and five thousand years ago. A brief glance at the writings of our foremothers and our forefathers reveals an intimate acquaintance with such diverse aspects of human sexual behaviour as marriage, divorce, adultery, incest, child sexual abuse, onanism, mutual masturbation, fellatio, cunnilingus, sodomy, vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, interfemoral intercourse, rape, prostitution, contraception, menstrual purification, celibacy, pornography, heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, circumcision, impotency, pregnancy testing, sexual therapy, aphrodisiacs, mechanical aids, basic gynaecology, infectious diseases, paraphilia in its many forms, and of course, kissing, cuddling, fondling, and caressing.

Although historians from Suetonius to William Gibbon to Michel Foucault have always relished a healthy appetite for details about sex through the ages, within recent years, the history of sexuality has become an increasingly professionalized field of enquiry all its own. Even the most rapacious reader will be hard pressed to remain abreast of the mushrooming literature, published under such tantalising titles as From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (Bremmer, 1989), Eunuchs for Heaven: The Catholic Church and Sexuality (Ranke-Heinemann, 1988), and Whores in History: Prostitution in Western Society (Roberts, 1992), the latter volume written by a former stripper. These works have a very broad appeal, and the majority of the new titles have appeared under the imprint of mainstream publishers, and not under the auspices of academic presses. Many of the books have received reviews in newspapers such as The Sunday Times, and in magazines such as The Literary Review.

Yet in spite of the burgeoning interest in what our forebears did or did not do in the bedroom, or indeed in other parts of the house, the historiography of sexuality can be a very tricky enterprise indeed. As one scholar has noted,

Writing about the history of sex is difficult. The dangers in sounding too earnest, or puerile, or boastful, or prudish are bad enough. The worst peril of the lot is for the writer's personal notions of joy to take over the book. It then turns into a prolonged, inward fantasy masquerading as some great book about the human condition. (Davenport-Hines, 1992, p. 3).

Not only do we confront the problems of individual moral bias, but the question of evidence remains particularly fraught. The craft of history can be difficult at the best of times, but when confronted with something so private as sexual acts, and something even more concealed, namely sexual fantasy, then the endeavour becomes increasingly tortuous. As we know, most ancient sex took place behind closed doors, with no witnesses other than the participants themselves, almost none of whom left any traces of their adventures. With modern radiological and tomographic techniques, Dr. Rosalie David and her colleagues at the University of Manchester can actually ascertain the cause of death of a mummified Egyptian, but such reconstructions tell us nothing about the quality of Egyptian orgasms or about the nature of their fantasy life. As the Princeton University scholar Professor Lawrence Stone (1987) has commented, when physical data does survive from historical lovemaking, we must recognize that such data can be highly selective. Most letters and diaries contain no references to sex, but when these gems do appear, they tend to have been penned only by men, and then only by wealthy, aristocratic men. In light of this, how can we possibly assess the sexual experiences of a young, impoverished peasant girl who could neither read nor write, and perhaps not even speak?

Moreover, even if we possessed scrupulously detailed notes on a steamy session of Anglo-Saxon fornication, let us not forget some very important considerations such as the novelty of bathing during most of this millennium, the first bidet having appeared in France only as late as 1726. Did the Mediaeval and Renaissance nostrils adapt to their urine-stenched and vermin-infested partners and surroundings, or did these people retch with revulsion as their lovers approached? We have always assumed that Queen Elizabeth I of England never married due to reasons of statecraft, but at the risk of being flippant, perhaps a hygienological interpretation might also be considered, taking into account the sovereign's blackened teeth, her foul breath, and her deeply encrusted facial makeup!

Finally, we must appreciate that any single piece of evidence will offer no more than a soup spoon of insight. Professor Stone (1987, p. 350) has reminded us that at any time in history, "There is always a licit sexual culture side by side with an illicit one liable to persecution and punishment, and in between the two a grey area, often a very large one, in which the two come together," and that in each era of history, "there has been a dialogue between the competing cultures of eroticism and asceticism." In other words, for every decadent and dandified Oscar Wilde, a prudish prig such as the Marquess of Queensbury has invariably lurked in the shadows.

But assuming that we can marshall all the facts that we need, and then interpret them with creativity and caution, let us ask an even more pressing question. Why on earth should we want to study the sex lives of dead people? Is the history of sexuality little more than a perverse, necrophilic indulgence, or can we in fact learn some valuable lessons from the wisdom and the foibles of those who preceded us? Evidently, I subscribe to the latter interpretation, ever mindful of the sage advice of Titus Livius, better known as the Roman historian Livy, who offered the following explanation:

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

Let us now begin to study some of the specific ideas and practices of historical sexuality in greater detail. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Hebrews, and other cultures which flourished in the last millennia provided us with a rich heritage of art, politics, philosophy, technology, and so forth; but most of these peoples also engaged in extremely bloody and murderous behaviour on an indescribable scale. The most widespread atrocity involved the callous extermination of literally millions of babies and children for ostensibly religious reasons, sacrificing one's offspring to appease the gods, or to thank these deities for a good crop. We would now refer to such butchery as infanticide and filicide. Indeed, a wealth of historical and archaeological evidence has confirmed the verity of these practices (Brown, 1991; deMause, 1974, 1990; cf. Kahr, 1993, 1994). One need only recall the popular figure of the infamous queen Medea who killed her two children in order to spite the husband who had abandoned her for another woman. And let us not forget the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, son of God, whose death we continue to commemorate in a most compulsive way. One can of course regard the Crucifixion as a form of infanticide, for in the mind of the ancient Christians, God the father had permitted his favoured son to die an atrocious death. Moreover, we all recall the Biblical tale of Abraham, ever ready to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar.

In addition to the proliferation of neonaticide and other forms of child murder, our most ancient ancestors practiced cruel slavery, monarchical tyranny, or restrictive oligarchy, as well as routine wars of extermination on an almost daily basis (cf. Sagan, 1979). Needless to say, such commonplace violence filtered into the sex lives of these people. For starters, buggery and child sexual abuse reigned supreme, particularly among the males (Dover, 1978, 1988; Africa, 1982), though we have abundant evidence regarding the routine sexual molestation of small girls as well as boys (deMause, 1974, 1991; Kahr, 1991). In antique Egypt, girls could be deflowered in arranged marriages at six years of age. In Rome, the prostitute Quartilla, the Priestess of Priapus, a character from Petronius' The Satyricon, expostulates: "May Juno strike me down, if I can remember when I was a virgin." The Emperor Tiberius even enticed young babies to fellate his penis, as though providing them with a nipple upon which they might suckle. Parents regularly colluded in the sexual initiation of their children by older men, and they became outraged if these seductions did not occur. Consider the well-known diatribe from The Birds by Aristophanes:

Well, this is a fine state of affairs, you damned desperado! You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the bath, and you don't kiss him, you don't say a word to him, you don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And you're supposed to be a friend of ours!

Children suffered untold cruelties, as did the slaves, who could be exploited sexually by their masters and mistresses at any time. Women of Greece and Rome and Egypt fared not much better. Wives would remain at home, regarded solely as childbearers and as housekeepers. The Egyptian scribe Ani recorded the following maxim, which summarizes the Egyptian views of women most succinctly: "Marry a wife when you are young. She will bring your son into the world." The ancient husbands never remained faithful, lavishing far more affection on young boys, or on the prostitutes known as the hetaerae. When the men would copulate with their wives, they tended to prefer anal intercourse, or coitus a tergo, vaginal penetration from behind. This arrangement precluded much intimacy during sex, and certainly eliminated any facial contact between the two participants. As one commentator remarked, the men had a good view of their wives' buttocks, whereas the women looked at nothing whatsoever (Tannahill, 1980; cf. Manniche, 1987). One classical scholar, Professor Eva Keuls (1985), author of The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens, has provided us with a compelling account of how much women suffered in a climate dominated by the figure of Zeus, a philandering scalawag whom Keuls has branded as a master rapist. Professor Keuls has offered a rich description of the marginalization of females, swamped by phallic imagery at every turn, as in Delos, where huge stone phalloi proliferate. And whenever more feminine, vaginal imagery does appear in Greek architecture, as in the box-like temples, huge phallic pillars always adorn and encircle the perimeter.

But the ancient women had to endure further indignities: in particular, the socially sanctioned sharing of their men with both male and female lovers. If a Babylonian wife could not bear a child, she would be forced to supply her own husband with a substitute spouse. The Egyptians could divorce their wives if they could not prove their fertility, a strategy which King Henry VIII of England used to good effect in the sixteenth century. Furthermore, fidelity seems to be a relatively recent concept. As the historian William Gibbon noted, in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire only Claudius, of all the rulers, never cheated on his wives by taking a male lover to bed.

In addition to the humiliation and denigration, we know that ancient women certainly suffered from battering by their men. Medical, anthropological, and archaeological investigations have disinterred numerous female corpses with extensive fractures on the arm, inflicted by blows as these women attempted to protect their skulls. No wonder the women of Lysistrata rebelled in such a hostile manner.

Medical science, dominated in large measure by magical, animistic thinking, did little to alleviate the plight of ancient women. If an Egyptian woman needed a pregnancy test, her physician would have advised her to urinate on wheat and barley seeds. According to the doctors, the water of a pregnant woman would cause the seeds to sprout. No doubt manyfamily rows ensued as a result of the unreliability of this test. For contraception, the Kahun Papyrus recommended that women insert a concoction of paste and crocodile excrement into their vaginas, which they cannot have found very pleasant.

Fiona Pitt-Kethley (1992) has provided translations of no fewer than fifty-one extracts of Greek, Hebrew, Hindu, and Roman writings in her comprehensive book, The Literary Companion to Sex: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry. She has referred to these texts as "the most open and unashamed about sex" (Pitt-Kethley, 1992, p. xvii) of all the historical writings that she surveyed. I would agreed wholeheartedly with Pitt-Kethley's estimation, and I would add only that these very antique fragments might also be described as the most violent, and also the most perverse, encompassing such varied themes as rape, lechery, blackmail, whipping, infidelity, duplicity, voyeurism, retribution, and deadly seduction. Of course, one will readily encounter such themes in more contemporary literature, but not with the same frequency or insidiousness that one finds in this period. Furthermore, one searches in vain for any signs of tenderness or deep, respectful warmth. Instead, one finds characters such as Zelicha, the wife of Potiphar, threatening to kill the young servant Joseph should he not capitulate to her adulterous whimsy; or one meets the young Theodora, whose capacity for intimacy could be described as grossly impaired, having intercourse with forty or more partners in one evening.

The ancient mixture of infidelity, episodic and transient sexual contact, the easy alternation between male and female partners, the penchant for children, and the preference for the anus to the vagina, clashes most stridently with our more modern notions of intimate, adult sexuality. The anonymous poem, "On a Clyster," contains the following revelatory lines:

I only, am allowed to fuck a wife,
Quite openly, at her own mate's request.
I mount young lads, those in the
prime of life,
Old men, maids - at their grieving
parents' behest.

Here we see that the urge for sex can be gratified quite readily by any person or object, irrespective of age, gender, or orifice, in the manner that Sigmund Freud (1905) described as polymorphously perverse.

Freud's pupil, Melanie Klein (1935), the well known child psychoanalyst and theoretician, very usefully distinguished between two types of human relationships, namely, whole-object relationships, and part-object relationships. A whole-object relationship consists of two people interacting with one another in a full, respectful, empathic way. By contrast, a part-object relationship involves one person using an aspect of the other person for private gratification, often in a narcissistic or ruthless manner; for instance, a man may invite a woman on a date with the sole hope of sleeping with her, a perfect illustration of a part-object interaction whereby the man concentrates his thoughts on the woman's genitals, disregarding her as a whole, full, rich being. Klein's conceptualization of the part-object best describes ancient sexuality wherein lovers become receptacles for one another's sexual organs, rather than people to be enjoyed in their own right. In part-object interactions, one also finds a blurring of bodily boundaries between the two parties, and one can see ancient women as mere extensions of their husbands' bodies. In Egypt, for example, if a man committed a crime, his wife and children would be sold into slavery, a perfect illustration of boundary blurring which the Mayan people of Central America also practiced. And the Hindu custom of suttee would dictate that when a man died, his wife must also die by throwing herself onto the burning funeral pyre.

Much of ancient life simmers with a deep, pervasive sense of anxiety and terror. Most of this dread stemmed from the deep childhood fears of being murdered amid the widespread infanticide rituals perpetrated by ancient mothers and fathers alike. If one begins life with an awareness that one's nearest and dearest might pull out a sacrificial knife at any moment, this will cause extensive damage to one's capacity for anxiety-free sexuality in later life; hence the ancient need for polymorphous, infantile sexuality, and the preference for submissive, controllable "partners" who could be dominated with ease and discarded at will. In this way, one could gratify one's biological urges, without becoming too emotionally attached to another human being.

As child-rearing practices improved in the early Mediaeval period, parents no longer murdered such a large proportion of their children; instead, they abandoned them routinely to monasteries, nunneries, and later, to professional guilds. The lives of children would be spared, but at a price; also, the tight swaddling bandages that proliferated during the Middle Ages dictated that most infants would grow up smeared by their own faeces and urine for much of the time, causing tremendous revulsion in the caretakers when they would unwrap the swaddling cloths at infrequent and irregular intervals (cf. Kahr, 1998). Such early impressions contributed greatly to the rise of shame, at that point an historical novelty.

During the Middle Ages, sex continued, but any acts of the flesh would be tarnished by depressing affects of shame and disgust as the Church fathers spoke about the infant as a revolting object born between urine and faeces. St. Augustine, perhaps the most renowned figure of this time, condemned sexuality, as did many other clerics. Jerome referred to intercourse as something unclean, Tertullian found it shameful, Methodius branded it as unseemly, Ambrose vilified sexuality as a defilement, and Arnobius called it filthy and degrading. Origen of Alexandria worried so much about the sinfulness of sex that he castrated himself in order to become more fully abstinent. Interestingly, one can trace the etymology of the word "pudenda," or female genital region, to this period of history. Quite tellingly, pudenda derives from the Latin pudere which means "to be ashamed."

To a great extent, the mediaeval philistinism seems almost comical. The Stoics and the Neo-Platonists exerted a terrific influence, urging asceticism and self-control at every turn, accentuating Plato's ideas on the supremacy of the soul over the body. If a man experienced a nocturnal emission, for example, he would be required to intone thirty-seven psalms upon awakening, ever mindful of Seneca's injunction that "pleasure is a vulgar thing, petty and unworthy of respect, common to dumb animals." In the New Testament Apocrypha we learn of sex as an "experiment of the serpent," and of the holy institution of marriage as no more than a "foul and polluted way of life." Well, by this time, the wild abandon of the Tiberian and Caligulan orgies had certainly disappeared, and the ability to control libidinal impulses became more pronounced. But sexual activity could only be practiced according to a harsh set of rules and restrictions. Thus, during the Middle Ages, the notion of abstinence days took root, and for many years Christians could not make love on Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, or Sundays, as well as during the forty-day periods of fasting before Easter and Christmas, and after Whitsuntide. Some adhered to religious dictates so forcefully that they refrained from lovemaking during the wife's breast-feeding period, which could easily last for a year or more during previous centuries (deMause, 1974).

The anti-sexual crusade of the Middle Ages co-existed rather uneasily with its more lustful counterpart, as exemplified by the growth of the prostitution industry (Rossiaud, 1984), and by the creation of such randy characters as Geoffrey Chaucer's irrepressible Wife of Bath who boldly asserted that if God had wanted her to be less wanton, he would not have brought her into the world at the astrological moment when Venus occupied the sign of Taurus. Although the Wife of Bath's appetite may seem a refreshing counterpart to the culture of chastity belts and flagellation, we must remark on her reliance on religious and astrological thinking, blaming God and the stars for her behaviour, rather than assuming any sense of personal responsibility as most individuated adults would do nowadays.

During the Renaissance, the segregated single-sex monasteries and nunneries began to collapse, and for the first time in history, women and men would routinely live with one another on a full-time basis, without fleeing to homosexual lovers as a matter of course. Although this newfound intimacy represented an historical advance which provided the basis for modern marriages, it did so at an unspeakable price as men resolved their terror of intimacy by perpetrating sadistic tortures on women such as the use of bridles and branks which pierced the tongue, ducking stools, and burnings at the stake amid the European craze of witchcraft. John Aylmer, a Renaissance churchman, pithily captured the prevailing attitude when he wrote that a good woman is like "an eel put in a bag amongst five hundred snakes," and that even if "a man should have the luck to grope out the one eel from all the snakes, yet he hath at best but a wet eel by the tail."

As scientific discovery began to take root, and magical thinking started to vanish, men could no longer blame their bad feelings on the stars or on the gods in quite the same compulsive way, and the so-called "weaker vessels" became the obvious targets. In Measure for Measure, William Shakespeare has described men as "great doers," and as creatures who go "groping for trouts in a peculiar river." These fragments offer some idea of how Renaissance men continually failed to understand women, regarding them instead as objects of obscurity who must be probed and prodded by a "rapier and dagger man," another one of Shakespeare's references to male sexual behaviour which teems with violence of an extreme nature. Of course, the mixture of sexuality and aggression during this period found no better expression than in the life of King Henry VIII of England, who had at least two wives murdered (scholars still dispute whether Queen Catherine of Aragon died from poisoning [cf. Fraser, 1992]); and no one complained, except perhaps the victims themselves.

Throughout the next few centuries, until relatively recent times, men and women alike would continue to struggle frantically to co-exist with one another, unable to tolerate intimacy without resorting to violence. As most people in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries suffered socially sanctioned beatings during early childhood, each grew up brimming with rage, which needed to be evacuated into the nearest receptacle, usually wives and children (cf. Taylor, 1985; Pleck, 1987). During the eighteenth century, the rapier and dagger man became immortalised as the Hogarthian rake, a rogue such as Tom Jones, MacHeath, Robert Lovelace, or Casanova who pursued wanton and voluptuous women such as Fanny Hill or Moll Flanders. But the roguishness and rakishness stayed within certain boundaries, and it never descended to the depths of Greek and Roman sexual chaos. During the late eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood insisted that fig leaves must be added to the nude, classical figures on his china; and in the end, even Fanny Hill, the pornographer's delight, chose to enter a bourgeois marriage with her sweetheart, Charles.

The greatest advance of the eighteenth century can be found in a most unlikely source. In 1760, AndrŽ Tissot, a Swiss physician from Lausanne, published his infamous anti-masturbation tract, urging generations of children to refrain from touching themselves. It may seem extremely strange to regard Tissot as a progressive thinker, because we all know about the psychological suffering that millions have endured in subscribing to the misguided belief that masturbation causes blindness and insanity. But Tissot not only instructed youngsters to refrain from fondling themselves, he also advised the boys and girls to forbid the adults from molesting them as well. Until this time, mothers and nurses routinely resorted to masturbation in order to put their children to sleep. Though Tissot's injunction against onanism may be seen as a regression in the history of sexuality, his widely disseminated tract also laid the foundations for the crusade against child abuse, a cruel institution which damages one's ability to enjoy sexual relationships in adulthood.

We can now begin to see a cycle emerging through the centuries whereby one generation will indulge in manifold passions, and the next crop will rebel, re-enacting that age old battle of the Freudian Titans, namely, the id and the super-ego. But though on the surface it seems that sex will always be a minefield of progression and regression, we do see some glimmers of hope in the Victorian era during the nineteenth century. We do, of course, encounter a myriad of depressing commentaries such as Sarah Ellis's remark of 1842 on the importance of women recognizing "the superiority of your husband simply as a man," or Dr. Alice Stockham's recommendation of 1894 that a woman should never copulate nonprocreatively, and never more than once a month, and never during menstruation or pregnancy. But amid such time-bound prudishness, we begin to detect the seeds of a small but noticeable capacity to tolerate difference. Aurore Dupin, better known as the French novelist George Sand, could at last wear trousers with relative impunity; Aubrey Beardsley could publish The Yellow Book; and Oscar Wilde, though imprisoned for his homosexuality, could at least live to tell the tale, whereas his homophile predecessors of previous centuries would have undergone extensive tortures and died in hideous executions. Had Wilde live one century earlier, he would have had to endure the pillories and the stocks, or perhaps burning at the stake. And though Maria Montessori had to study medicine in a darkened cupboard room, because the male medical students would not permit her to conduct dissections of naked cadavers in their presence, she did at least withstand this indignity, and she trod the arduous path so that future generations of Italian women could at last become qualified as physicians.

Throughout the nineteenth century, people struggled to situate themselves between conservative and liberal poles. On the outrageously awful side, women underwent surgery to remove some of their rib bones so that they could fit more snugly into their restrictive and hazardous corsets; and young boys had to survive the application of leeches to their genital region, a practice which doctors recommended in order to reduce the likelihood of penile erections. Women suffering from hysteria would be subjected to the odious practice of clitoridectomy, or in some cases, cauterization of the clitoris; and young Victorian men would be wrapped in sheets, or chained to walls, or fitted with metal-toothed penis rings to prevent masturbation, ever mindful of the warnings of Frederick Hollick, author of the 1852 Popular Treatise on Venereal Diseases in All Their Forms who spluttered on about the probability of "softening of the brain" and mental imbecility as a result of sexual activity. And untold numbers of men eliminated tea, coffee, alcohol, chocolate, oysters, eggs, cheese, asparagus, and flesh meats from their diets, on medical advice, in the hope that these ostensibly tempting foods would reduce the awful urge to touch one's penis. Women adopted not only their husbands' surnames, but they stripped themselves of any personal identity by assuming their husbands' Christian names as well, so that the great actresses of the day will be remembered as Mrs. Patrick Campbell and as Mrs. Theodore Wright.

On the positive side, however, the nineteenth century bequeathed to us the teachings of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis. Although Freud advised his sons to refrain from masturbatory activity (Roazen, 1969), and though he insisted on the importance of penis envy in women, he unleashed the wisdom which forms the very basis of modern psychology and psychosexual medicine. Only in the private and sacrosanct psychoanalytical setting that Freud created could bodily paralyses and other crippling symptoms be traced to infantile sexual traumas, which could then be alleviated through the talking cure of psychoanalytical therapy. And only Freud permitted women to train as fully fledged clinicians at a time when other professions barred their doors. When Freud learned that Helene Deutsch, one of the first Polish women to qualify as a medical doctor, had to work full-time in the psychiatric clinic of the University of Vienna for no salary at all, he whisked her away and created a paid directorship for her at his psychoanalytical Ambulatorium (Deutsch, 1973; Roazen, 1985).

Freud pioneered the right to refer to the genitals in vernacular German, rather than speaking of them in textbook Latin as his predecessors had done; and he confronted every aspect of sexuality in such a direct way and with such a passion for free speech that medical doctors formed picket lines outside the lecture hall in Vienna when Freud spoke (Campbell, 1992). He banished the clitoridectomies and the accusations of malingering, and he permitted his patients to speak, unharmed by knives or drugs. And his movement attracted many liberated and progressive thinkers such as Otto Gross, who campaigned against filling childrens' heads with foolish stories about storks, and Muriel Morris (later known as Muriel Gardiner) who dared to confront her headmistress at the University of Oxford by refusing to wear a hat out of doors, something that no respectable lady would have dreamed of doing in the early 1920s.

As the twentieth century draws to its conclusion, we can derive some comfort from the vast array of unprecedented psychological and sociological changes that we have witnessed during our lifetime. The chastity belts, bridles, branks, corsets, beheadings, burnings, penis rings, and anti-masturbational tracts of yesteryear have disappeared; and for the first time in human history, we have some semblance of equality between men and women, as well as a deep appreciation of children and of children's rights and welfare (Miles, 1994).

At last, women have begun to assume control of their own bodies and of their own reproductivity, as evidenced by the legalization of abortion, as well as the recognition of rape within the context of marriage. The latter became illegal in England only as late as 1991; prior to this time, a husband could fornicate with his wife with full impunity, irrespective of the wife's wishes in this important matter. Women can now work at high level posts, and they can even delegate their childcare to primary caretaker fathers. We have witnessed the increasing de-stigmatization of masturbation, homosexuality, pre-marital sexuality, children born out of wedlock, childlessness, and so forth, as well as the emergence of the "New Man" who now has the capacity to wash dishes, change nappies, and cry in public with relative ease. For those individuals who experience difficulty with sexual roles and gender stereotypes, we can now offer sexual education, sex therapy, and psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, as treatments for psychosexual or relational difficulties.

Of most importance, we have begun to protect the sexual futures of our children by recognizing the cruelty of child abuse. At last, after several thousands of years of neglect, we have come to regard the maltreatment of children as a crime, and we have finally begun to appreciate the deleterious consequences of child abuse. In short, after thousands of years of polymorphously perverse sexual activity throughout human history, we have now arrived at a stage in time where men and women have a greater likelihood of enjoying modern genital love. We can no longer treat one another as part-objects for the gratification of our own private desires. Thankfully, we have begun to evolve to a point of whole-object relatedness, wherein each member of the wider community will be valued for his or her particular gifts and skills, and tolerated in spite of any liabilities, vulnerabilities, or weaknesses. With the growth of psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytical treatment facilities, and with the continuous improvement in the quality of child care, we now have a splendid and precious opportunity to advance beyond the primitivity of our ancestors, and to derive greater fulfillment and satisfaction during our time on this planet.

Brett Kahr is a psychotherapist at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent's College, London, U.K.

I wish to thank Dr. Lawrence Goldie, Mrs. Jackie Goymour, Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Magonet, Mr. Lloyd deMause, and Mrs. Mickey Yudkin for their interest in this essay, and for their encouraging comments. I presented earlier versions of this paper on three previous occasions, first as "A History of Sexuality" at the annual conference on "Problems in Psychosexual Medicine" at the Institute of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the Royal Postgraduate Medical Federation of the University of London, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in London, on 23rd September, 1992. I also presented an extended version entitled "Towards a History of Sexuality: From Ancient Polymorphous Perversity to Modern Genital Love" for the Lecture Series on "Jewish Explorations of Sexuality" at the Sternberg Centre of the Leo Baeck College in Finchley, London, on 15th December, 1993, and a shortened version on "History of Western Sexual Practice" to the Kinneret Aviv branch of W.I.Z.O., also in London, on 31st May, 1994. I owe a debt of gratitude to the members of these various audiences for their appreciation.

Digital Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]

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