Sex In The Western World

Jean-Louis Flandrin, S. Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783718652013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134346172
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Christianity
• Index: History

First Published in 1991. In this book the author looks at the history of sexuality, discussing topics of love from the 15th century onwards, sexual morality and marriage, ancient and modern adages conernong procreation as a part of society and the sex lives of single people.

Chapter 1
Why Study the History of Sexuality?

As twentieth century Europeans, we are conscious of our long history and, like the noblemen of old, we are quite proud of it. Their history was for them proof of their nobility; ours has for a long time made us feel that we were "civilised", as opposed to those people supposedly without a history, and whom we referred to as "primitive" or "savage" . How could such pride be justified? The ways of thinking, feeling and acting which formerly marked the nobility were not acquired in one generation; nor were those of the modern Western world. Yet we ourselves have for a long time asked only that history soothe our vanity, like those gentlemen who gloried in the heroic deeds of their ancestors but cast a modest veil over their family's slow passage from the commonest of the common ranks to the nobility. We have not troubled ourselves to determine how we became what we are, how much our present and our future depend on the past, and to what extent those who do not have the same history as we do can be or become similar to us.

Let us carry this comparison a little further. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those noblemen who complained so often about the adversities of the time never tried to find out whether the dying out of so many illustrious families was not, in part, the result of patterns of behaviour peculiar to the nobility — such as economic or demographic behaviour — which, along with the ideals of nobility, they had inherited from their ancestors. Have we not similarly inherited from the past those difficulties which confront us in our daily lives?

It is widely believed today among Western peoples that we have specific difficulties relating to sex, and that they are attributable to our fundamentally Christian moral traditions. But will we overcome our difficulties by ruthlessly renouncing our forefathers' morality and by attempting to adopt that of the Nambikwara or other peoples reputed to be close to nature? In reality, we are not free to deny our heritage: it is an integral part of us. The more we try to ignore it, the more we are its prisoners.

Furthermore, it surprises me that in a century when psychoanalysis excites so much enthusiasm, there is so little consciousness of the power which the past exercises. There is something illogical in scrutinising so attentively the past experiences of individuals undergoing psychoanalysis, and yet paying so little attention to their collective past, or at least to that of it which survives in our culture.

No man behaves naturally, in the sense that all human behaviour has been moulded by a culture. All cultures have evolved progressively and have been profoundly marked by past organisations and traumas. From birth, we have been surreptitiously pervaded by the past, through literature, morality, law, language, sciences even, technology and the arts, all that which makes up our culture. May I be forgiven for going into such detail about that which is self-evident. But when I hear sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, sexologists, journalists...and many historians speaking of sexuality, I get the impression that they forget these obvious facts. By not paying the past the attention it deserves, they prevent us from liberating ourselves from it.

I do not accept just any analysis of the past. Too often, it seems to me, history functions like a faulty memory, which only retains that which hurts us — ancient hatreds, distrust of previous generations, misplaced loyalties — and increases the tendency to see the present as a simple repetition of the past. On the other hand, when the past permeates through ways other than history — through language, literature, morality, law, etc. — as is the case with sexuality, among other things, then history could have a therapeutic function. By acknowledging what we have repressed of past events, by showing the relationships which existed between a given ancient attitude towards sexuality and other aspects of Western culture, whether or not still in existence today, history should allow us to reassess our value system, and thus to overcome present difficulties.

It is not the responsibility of the historian alone to take charge of these reassessments. Even less should he be expected to surround his contemporaries with insurmountable dilemmas, allegedly confirmed by history. Thus, he will not conclude from the obvious relationship in Western societies between the increase in marrying for love and the upsurge of divorce, that we must either return to the "marriage of convenience", or ignore what is unacceptable in so many contemporary divorces. It is enough that he knows how to find suitable material from the past to sustain reflection on present problems, and how to go deeper into the field to loosen the ties which are strangling us. The various chapters of this book will, I hope, be able to contribute by modifying our visions of love, of marriage and marital relations, of the parent-child relationship and of the sex lives of single people in a culture forgetful of history.

Love has for centuries been the favourite subject of poets and novelists, hence probably of their public. There is nothing new, in this respect, between for example the sixteenth and the twentieth century. But is it really the same sentiment which has been called "love" throughout this period of five hundred years? Have the reasons for loving and the objects of love remained the same? Has amorous behaviour changed? In order to answer these questions fully, more in-depth studies than those found in the first section of this book would be necessary. They do, however, bring to light unmistakable differences in how love is represented, in society's attitudes towards it, and even more obvious changes in its role in the choice of partner and in sexual relations between partners.

On the whole, the status of love in the sixteenth century was more complex than nowadays. There were those who extolled the virtues of platonic love and those who favoured the most carnal love. Ecclesiastic or secular moralists, on the other hand, tended to condemn amorous passion in all its forms, without troubling themselves to distinguish — as has often been done in the twentieth century — "real love" from simple desire.

As far as secular culture — as shown by proverbs and laws — was concerned, it was particularly a question of limiting love's role in the formation of marriages. The purpose of marriage was to establish alliances between families and to ensure the handing down of inheritances, so therefore those who married for love alone in fact risked undermining the social order. If young people could not be prevented from falling in love, they could at least be made to understand that their love affairs were only tolerable outside of any matrimonial intent.

For its part, the Church condemned all profane love as incompatible with sacred love. It particularly stressed the dangers of love between man and wife, no doubt considering that too many of the faithful were unaware of them: "That husband is a sinner who, transported by excessive love, made love to his wife so ardently in order to satisfy his desire, that, were she not his wife, he would wish to be involved with her" wrote a sixteenth century preacher. Throughout the Middle Ages, theologians had repeated that ancient axiom, handed down by St Jerome: "Adulterous is also the man who loves his wife too ardently". It is only recently that the Catholic Church has praised marital love, following the Protestant example. "Conjugal relations are immoral when there is no longer any love", write today's theologians, because they are an "expression of love". And a high-ranking prelate asserts: "God's first requirement of lovemaking is that it be based on love". This goes against traditional attitudes, which no religion does willingly.

According to ancient Christian morality, sexuality was given to us only for procreation and it is a perversion of God's work to use it for other reasons. This doctrine, which implies continence during all periods when conception is impossible or untimely — during pregnancy, menstruation, the period of "impurity" after childbirth, the years of breast-feeding — and which advises total continence to couples once they have children,¹ is rational and consistent but too austere to have been well followed: St Augustine recognises this unequivocally. Therefore, as far back as the theological renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, theologians feared that this excessive austerity took from marriage its role as remedy for those weak people incapable of living in continence. Gradually, they recognised married couples' right to "administer the remedy of marriage" at any time, even when conception was impossible or untimely, i.e. dangerous for the woman or the child. This liberalisation undoubtedly had beneficial effects upon faithfulness and the stability of marriage, but it introduced elements of inconsistency into the doctrine. The period from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century sees increasing conflict between the sexual rights of married couples and their duties towards their children, and this process seems to me to have encouraged the use of contraception in marital relations.

Patriarchs rejoiced at an increase in number of either their children or their flocks. Both were felt to be a benediction, an obvious increase in power, rather than an encumbrance. Whether our contemporaries have many children or none at all, they tend to consider them more as a burden, something which restricts their freedom and wealth, and certainly does not increase their power. Granted, there are still good reasons for having a limited number of children, yet in the minds of our contemporaries, the reasons for not having any often seem to predominate. I note that Moheau himself, in the eighteenth century, found such reasons predominant, and that as early as the seventeenth century Colbert thought it necessary to tempt married couples with money in order to encourage large families. Today however, the ancient attitude remains among most Third World peoples, irrespective of their religion.

Could the fertility of marriages in a society be explained simply by the absence of effective contraceptive techniques? I am not questioning the importance of knowledge of the techniques in this field any more than in others, and I have shown elsewhere² how learning about more effective contraceptive techniques could upset traditional customs and fertility. I doubt, however, that this explanation of technical ignorance alone is sufficient: a society which really wants to curb its fertility finds a way; and conversely the failure of birth control programmes in the Third World proves that making effective contraceptive techniques available to couples is not in itself, enough to change their fertility rate. Is the key not a changing of the parent-child relationship?

In fact, the sense of responsibility towards the child seems to have increased from the end of the Middle Ages until the present day: this can be surmised from numerous indicators discussed in the third section of this book. In it I do not state — as some writers have done recently³ — that paternal or maternal love was unknown before the mid-eighteenth century: there is unequivocal proof of its existence at much earlier periods. Seventeenth century parents, for example, were often reproached for excessive love of their children: Mme de Sévigné is a well-known example.⁴

However, the question I am dealing with here is the status of the child vis-à-vis his parents, not the existence in a specific person of strong paternal, maternal or filial emotions. Let us examine again the Holy Scriptures: Abraham's sacrifice is only a great ordeal because he is passionately attached to his son. But what distinguishes this patriarch from a father today is that he does not feel he owes his son anything. It is to God, the creator of all beings and particularly of Isaac,⁵ that he owes everything. Whereas today we feel a special sense of duty towards those who owe their existence to us arid who are dependent upon us, ancient culture, until recently, spoke only of man's duties towards his creator.

Paradoxically, Christianity, which has made such use of this principle, is perhaps also the originator of the converse principle. God, it says, is the true creator of children; he only entrusts them to us, and we owe it to Him to look after them with care and love. This idea was expressed as far back as in St Paul. But it is not until centuries later that the parent-child relationship is truly changed by it, perhaps not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, it is not until this period that catechisms and sermons really develop this theme.⁶ The next step seems to me of less significance: once the sense of responsibility was well instilled and new parental patterns of behaviour moulded, it was of little importance whether one felt accountable to God or directly to the child. The fact is that the child could henceforth be considered a burden too heavy to carry and married couples thus had reasons for avoiding procreation within marriage.

This is even more true since attitudes towards death changed during the eighteenth century: recent studies⁷ show that, without in principle ceasing to believe in God and in eternal life, people appear to have no longer accepted the deaths of loved ones with as much resignation. Although these studies do not tell us a great deal about reactions to the deaths of infants, it seems to me that they confirm the hypothesis that people were not as resigned as formerly. A century earlier, the idea of the child's innocence was a reason for accepting its departure for the beyond; henceforth it is a reason for no longer accepting it. It became fashionable for young mothers of the socio-cultural elite to nurse their babies themselves and, during breast-feeding, to refuse their husbands anything which could lead to premature conception, considered to be dangerous for the infant. According to eighteenth century confessors, it was one of the main reasons for couples practising coitus interruptus. This evidence would need to be corroborated, but such a task is not impossible.

If the fertility of marital relations in ancient culture was due only to the absence of effective contraceptive techniques, then extramarital relations ought to have been equally fertile. Most historians and demographers appear to have adopted this vision of things, and they have based discussions on sexual activity outside marriage on the illegitimate birth rate. If, on the other hand, the fertility rate is thought to be related to people's intentions, then the hypothesis of lower fertility for illicit sexual activity must be considered, since the purpose of the latter was traditionally "pleasure alone", whereas the purpose of marital relations — according to ecclesiastic and secular moralists — was procreation. Equally, a discussion of single people's sex lives cannot be based on the illegitimate birth rate alone. This is what I wrote in 1969, in Contraception, Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Christian West, which is reprinted in the second section of this book. In this section I also questioned the idea put forward by J. T. Noonan that the classification of contraception and masturbation among the "sins against nature", considered as the most serious of the sexual sins, discouraged not only married couples, but also fornicators and adulterers.

This chapter was intended only to revive research, as I clearly stated in the first and last pages. Moreover, having at that time no clear idea as to what the sex lives of single people might have been like, I was incapable of putting forward new theories to contrast with those I was criticising. Therefore it is difficult for me to comprehend, even today, why from 1972 onwards, several historians⁸ considered it worthwhile attacking my alleged theories. It is true that, since they themselves devised these theories and expressed them to their own liking, it was then easy for them to ridicule them. Under such duress, I was forced to throw myself into the debate concerning the sex lives of single people which forms the fourth section of this book. I do not know if I should in the end rejoice that I was thus given the chance to write, or regret the controversial journey taken by my contribution to this research and the relinquishing of that which I was doing at the time on marital relations.

By way of a summary of the main conclusions, I will first stress again the limits and dangers of a purely quantitative approach. Everyone has a sex life. The question is to find out what it consists of, i.e. what forms libido takes beneath the double influences of repression and eroticism which exist, more or less openly, in all cultures; how sexual desire is structured, to what extent it reaches its goals, and the result for the subject and for the objects of his or her desire.

I will then repeat that the interval between sexual maturity and marriage lengthened — in France, and undoubtedly in several other Western European countries — from the early Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century,⁹ particularly for young women. Lastly, from the last centuries of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, the sexual behaviour of single people seems to have changed dramatically beneath the effect of increased repression.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, young men from the towns frequented prostitutes freely — they were, in fact, plentiful and cheap whereas "honest" young women could not practise any but "solitary pleasures" without great danger to their honour. In the country, there was a different pattern; relations with prostitutes were unquestionably less common; but young men and women of a marriageable age were free to go around together and to engage in quite serious flirtations, in some regions at least. Everything dealing with this question remains however hypothetical: for the time being we only have information on these activities for a small number of provinces, generally peripheral to the kingdom of France, and the evidence about young people's sexual practices is debatable.

Better information is available, however, on repression: the closing of municipal brothels as early as the sixteenth century and the marginalising of prostitutes; the suppression — at very different times depending on the region — of the ancient liberties of courtship, the strict banning of pre-marital cohabitation and concubinage, all under pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1 Why Study the History of Sexuality?
• I. LOVE
• II. SEXUAL MORALITY AND MARITAL RELATIONS
• III. THE CHILD AND PROCREATION
• IV. THE SEX LIVES OF SINGLE PEOPLE
• Notes and References
• Index