You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (28 page)

These attitudes were influenced by an English humanist philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. In the late 1700s, Bentham created a theory of ethics called utilitarianism. Under this theory the goal of laws was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This was an alternative to the religious-based codes whose goal was to mold a godly society.

Bentham believed government should not concern itself with moral crimes such as those related to alcohol, suicide, or consensual sex. He believed that these crimes were usually petty, that individuals knew what made them happy more than politicians did, and that in this area politicians were prone to trample on liberty due to a “thousand little prejudices.”
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These crimes would later be called victimless crimes because the only “victims” were the people choosing the actions.

In the early nineteenth century Bentham’s godson, John Stuart Mill, would further develop the concept of a government based in humanism. Mill was passionate about liberty and believed that individuality and “experiments in living” needed to be protected from the government’s enforcement of conventional morality.
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His line drawing on criminalization can be abbreviated to “Your rights end where his nose begins.”
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Whereas Christianity had based its primary source of knowledge in the Bible, humanism based its primary source of knowledge in science, and by the eighteenth-century the reemergence of science had produced profound technological advances.

In 1776 James Watt’s refinement of the steam engine sparked the Industrial Revolution that would fundamentally change the way people lived. Other eighteenth century innovations, such as crop rotation and the horse-drawn hoe, replaced inefficient family farms with large commercial ones. The unemployed farmers moved to the cities for work in the new factories.

The growth of factory-based cities changed numerous power relationships. In the growing middle class the dynamic between spouses was altered. Previously farmers and textile workers worked at home where domestic duties and toil for income blurred. Now the husband left home for the factory and the wife stayed behind to handle responsibilities such as raising children. He was now the “breadwinner.”

Cities also undermined community control. The great size and diversity of city populations provided anonymity and choices that were unavailable to young adults in smaller rural communities. Men were increasingly free of parental control in the cities, as the dispensation of hereditary land lost its importance.

This freedom would not remain unencumbered. The aspiring elitists of the growing urban middle class wanted to distinguish themselves from those above and below them. True to their Puritan forebears, they did this by clamping down on sexuality. The strict propriety that arose is now known as Victorianism.
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In addition, the theme of “mind your business” that sparked the birth of our country and the humanist ideals of Bentham and Mill would soon wither under the new strategy of religious moralists—the moral crusade. These political movements would now define the battles over sexual freedom.

The rich middle-class men of the eighteenth century aspired to be upper-class, but affluence did not suffice. The upper class was still defined by the aristocracy and landed gentry, who both inherited their wealth. Both groups considered commerce dirty, and resented the power accumulating in the social class below them.

Since these new-money men could not marry the actual princesses of the aristocracy, they made princesses of their wives. In an attempt at aristocratic prestige, they used their wealth to treat the middle-class wife as a “lady.” The middle-class wife had domestic servants to handle all the chores and to raise the children. Shielded from the “harsh reality” of the outside world, she could not go outside without a chaperone for protection. She was not educated,
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and was discouraged from taking an interest in anything of substance that might “corrupt” her. Unfortunately, unlike the actual ladies of the royal nobility who had the resources to travel and entertain themselves with or without their equally carefree husbands, the middle-class gentlewomen were caged pets.

Under the new secular vision of society, it was no longer enough for religious moralists to base criminal sanctions solely upon their interpretations of the Bible. To keep the government in the bedroom, the moralists needed (1) to find victims and (2) find science to “prove” they were harmed.

The coddled Victorian middle-class woman would be the first to fit the bill. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century the concept of the delicate and virtuous female expanded to include sexuality.
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New scientific understanding of male sperm and the female egg debunked the belief that a woman had to orgasm
to conceive.
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This myth had forced men to concern themselves with the sexual pleasure of women when procreation was intended. Now that female orgasms were no longer necessary or “natural,” moralists were able to deny females their sexuality.

The medieval view of women was that they were as lustful as men.
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The new “scientific” view spread by moralists was that women did not have sexual feelings. The Surgeon General under President Abraham Lincoln, William Hammond, wrote that it was unlikely that women experienced the slightest degree of pleasure even one-tenth of the times they engaged in sex.
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Another doctor wrote that excessive sexual engagement and arousal could contribute to cancer.
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The view that female sexual desire was an illness led in 1868 to doctors prescribing clitoridectomies. They would diagnose a woman by manually stimulating her breasts and clitoris. If they observed a reaction they would excise the latter. The astounding naiveté of the times is demonstrated by the women who thought their clitoridectomy scars “as pretty as the dimple in the cheek of sweet sixteen.”
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These men of science did not always hide their bias. The widely read nineteenth-century physician William Acton wrote, “the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind . . . . Love of home, of children, and of domestic duties are the only passions they feel.”
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The doctor’s overarching commitment to the patient’s health, which dated back to Hippocrates, was now secondary to sexual morality.
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Protestant leaders used these new “scientific” findings to anoint females as the protectors of morality. Eliza Duffey wrote in 1873 that “The purity of women is the everlasting barrier against which the tides of man’s sensual nature surge.”
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Men used this ideal to defend the double standard.

Although many sexually active people knew the sexless female to be a myth, the propaganda still had a demonstrable effect on women’s attitudes. Previously there were more women trying to divorce because of their partner’s impotence than men trying to divorce because of sexual deprivation. In the Victorian era this reversed.
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When Dr. Clelia Mosher interviewed some women born in the early 1800s most of them believed sex was a necessity only for men and that a woman could “do without.” Only half of the women expressed sexual desire and only half could say they found sex agreeable at least occasionally.
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Another sex researcher spoke to
a seventy-year-old woman who was married in the middle of the Victorian Era and was the mother of several children. She revealed something that would have been shocking even to the colonial Puritans—she had never seen a naked man.
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Women were not the only ones to lose their sexuality in the nineteenth century. Children of both sexes would lose theirs as well. Sexual desire begins in humans with the onset of puberty around the age of thirteen, and youthful sexuality has been openly recognized throughout history.

In ancient Greece the sexual relationship between a man and his adolescent protégé was more hallowed than between a man and his wife. In ancient Rome, a boy’s first ejaculation was celebrated at the Liberalia, a festival in honor of the god of fertility. Throughout the Middle Ages children were exposed to sex and nudity simply because privacy and clothing were frequently luxuries.

In addition, medieval children were often married off as soon as possible. With an average life expectancy of only thirty years and high infant mortality rates, it was important to begin childbearing as soon as possible.
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The common minimum legal age for marriage was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys.
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Because of this, many boys and girls were undoubtedly married and sexually active
before
beginning puberty. (Before the 1900s female puberty came years later than it does now.)
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Surprisingly, America’s current obsession with the sexual purity of children is not rooted in a fear of them having sexual intercourse, but with them pleasuring themselves.
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The concept that would torture children’s conscience for over two centuries began in 1710 with the publication of
Onania; Or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution
.
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As its title suggests, it was primarily a religious attack on masturbation but also contained “scientific” supporting evidence. The immensely popular tome asserted that masturbation caused memory lapses, acne, impotence, and insanity.

In 1758 a well-regarded Swiss physician, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, affirmed
Onania
’s claim that masturbation was unhealthy. He added his own collection of dangers, which included tuberculosis, jaundice, incontinence, and loose teeth. Dangers specific to females included cramps, ulceration of the womb, lengthening
and scabbing of the clitoris, and a crazed libido that he called “uterine fury.”
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Tissot’s endorsement of masturbation’s peril opened the gates for others. Masturbation was eventually to be blamed for seemingly every affliction. A partial list included constipation, rickets, epilepsy, vision and hearing problems, headaches, abnormally sized penises, nymphomania, irregular heartbeats, sickly offspring, feeble-mindedness, and early death.

Two dietary institutions were created out of this war on childhood masturbation. The graham cracker was invented in 1829 by the religious zealot Sylvester Graham, in part because the bland cracker was thought to cool the body’s passions, as opposed to meat and spicy foods, which would incite them. Dr. John Kellogg had a similar intent when he invented corn flakes in 1896, unintentionally launching the breakfast cereal industry.
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If corn flakes did not serve their purpose, Kellogg recommended an enema.
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The actions taken against masturbation were not limited to diet. Things to avoid also included tight lacing, featherbeds, licentious novels, and irregular bowel movements. Devices employed were chastity belts for girls, spiked penile rings for boys, and straitjackets for both. Although not common, extreme surgical methods used on the genitalia were cauterization (burning), infibulation (sewing the vagina shut), clitoridectomy, and castration. These heinous mutilations are no longer practiced, but one body modification that rose to American prominence in an effort to reduce masturbation is still with us—circumcision.
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In the late 1800s the ballyhoo over childhood masturbation began to subside. Germs and viruses were discovered and they eventually exculpated masturbation from many of its alleged crimes. Although masturbation continued to be blamed for illnesses that could not be explained, primarily mental health diseases,
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by the 1920s masturbation was accepted as a safe emergency sexual release when done in moderation. However, as late as 1940 the United States Naval Academy still mandated that admission candidates be rejected if the examining surgeon found evidence of masturbation.
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It would not be until the mid-twentieth-century sex research of Alfred Kinsey revealed that almost everyone was doing it that experts finally considered it completely harmless.

By that point attitudes about childhood sexuality had been set. Childhood was to be completely devoid of sexuality. This enforced purity had philosophical as
well as medical roots. A concept had spread through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that children would not become sexually active if they were not exposed to sex. This was based on the concept of the
tabula rasa
, or blank slate, introduced by the humanist John Locke in 1693.
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The popular view gradually became that parents and educators were responsible for a child’s development. The historic image of the wild child who needed taming was now replaced with that of an innocent vessel whose shortcomings were merely reflective of those around it.

By 1875, the Victorian sex expert William Acton would lay out the current fundamentalist Christian view: “With most healthy and well-brought-up children, no sensual idea or feeling has ever entered their heads, even in the way of speculation. I believe that such children’s curiosity is seldom excited on these subjects except as the result of suggestion by persons older than themselves.”
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