The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD

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СКАЧАТЬ about the teacher and I told her that he has been teaching the class since 1969. She said he must be a dirty old man. Her final comment, I think she was trying to lighten the mood, was to say that she couldn’t believe someone would turn the book in as used.”

      “I was having breakfast with my parents and they were asking how my classes were going, so eventually we discussed this class. We got on the subject of pheromones and my dad asked what they were, so my mom replied that they were ‘sex hormones.’I though my dad was going to have a heart attack because he doesn’t ever want to hear anything about sex regarding any of us kids, especially me because I’m the baby. I just laughed at them both and gave a better explanation than my mom did and my dad seemed much more comfortable at that point.”

      There are still the basics.

      I’m still optimistic that our basic inborn drive to set up a bonded relationship will carry us beyond this phase of open sexuality. I believe a basic instinct exists for us to pair off in order to provide a safe environment for our children. If this is not done, those who don’t commit to having and raising children will simply drop out of the gene pool.

      “This morning I saw a couple heading into the General Classroom Building. They had been walking together and were separating. I noted it was amazing how you can tell a couple’s relationship just by watching them for a couple of seconds. He likes her, she likes him, but the relationship is new and neither one of them have the courage to vocalize their feelings. It’s the smile on their faces and the tuck of their heads as they turn away that tells me this. They walk away from each other in a sort of euphoria, not noticing anyone or anything around them.”

      “I’ve heard Dr. Anderson talk about love maps before and since then sometimes I catch myself having reactions to people. Like that guy that is in every woman’s life. The one that she will always hold a special place for and she can‘t describe exactly why. Whenever he comes around she loses feeling in her body. Her heart beats faster and everything is a little hazy. Is there a way to remedy that? Can you stop yourself from having such a reaction around this person? I wish there was. Then maybe I wouldn’t feel so helpless.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      THE VICTORIAN ANTI-SEX MOVEMENT

      What were the sexual attitudes and standards before the major changes took place that I discussed in the previous chapter? In many ways, a hundred years ago our society was amazingly anti-sexual with the anti-sexual faction of society enforcing their beliefs with strict laws against anything related to sex.

      Sexual information taboos

      In the late 1800s women lived in a world where even for someone to give them information about sex was a dangerous endeavor. Sharing sex information about birth control, sexual pleasure and sexual anatomy could result in jail time. This was partly a result of the Comstock laws that were in force at the time, which in some states remained on the books as late as the 1960s. This possibility of arrest for sharing information about sex increased both the fear and ignorance of the public about sex (D’Emilio, & Freedman, 1988).

      The freedom for women to explore their own sexual responses and become orgasmic was a process that involved overcoming fear, ignorance, strictly defined social roles, and legal barriers.

      Another source of fear about sex was unwanted pregnancies.The provision of birth control information, even by doctors, was illegal, but even more damaging, some doctors saw such information as dangerous because they believed that anything that interfered with pregnancy was dangerous for the woman.

      Advice about sexual behavior was heavily loaded with moral admonitions. For example, William H. Walling, M.D. in his book Sexology (1904) in reacting to birth control says,“The most judicious method of avoiding offspring is entire continence during the time it is desirable or necessary to remain exempt. All other methods of prevention of offspring are disgusting, beastly, positively wrongful, as well as unnatural, and physically injurious. Some of them are so revolting that it is impossible to imagine how persons with the least pretensions to decency can adopt them. Any deliberate preparations with such an object savor too much of cold blooded calculation to be even possible with pure-minded people.”

      Another more famous writer of the period, John Harvey Kellogg in his book, Plain Facts for Young and Old (1881) gave similar advice.

      With this background of what we now see as misinformation and laws against freedom of information, the United States entered the 20th century with the realm of sexual behavior filled with fear, ignorance, stupid laws, multitudes of non-orgasmic women and a double standard of frightening proportions.

      A Madonna-whore dichotomy existed in which only sinful women enjoyed sex and decent women did it only as a marital duty. Sex was a man’s right and a woman’s burden. Today we Americans are shocked at the treatment of Muslim women in such countries as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but American women into the early 20th century were in many ways treated in a similar fashion.

      To be realistic, these strictures obviously did not limit all women’s sexual responsiveness. Even given the restrictions, many couples found each other sexually responsive and both partners enjoyed sex.

      However, evidence from modern sex researchers, such as Helen Singer Kaplan in her 1979 Disorders of Sexual Desire on women’s lack of sex desire, indicates that when faced with repression women will often respond with a lack of sex desire or have an aversion to sex.

      Other evidence, such as Becoming Orgasmic: A Sexual and Personal Growth Program for Women (1976) by Julia Heiman and Joe LoPiccolo, indicates that sex education about their bodies and permission to explore their responses is very important in helping women discover their sexual responsiveness. The Victorian era offered neither permission to enjoy sex or information about their bodies that would help women achieve satisfactory sex.

      The power of social expectations

      Women’s sexual responsiveness was tightly restricted by the social norms and expectations of the time. A married woman had few legal rights, and an unmarried woman had few options for supporting herself, teaching being one of the few occupations open to her. Once married, her property became her husband’s, and she could not vote or sue. The woman’s role was to have and care for the children and tend the house. She could not sue for divorce; and if her husband divorced her, all property and custody of the children belonged to him.

      At this point in time I’m sure it is almost impossible for a modern woman to understand how restrictive roles were and how these limitations could exist without being questioned by most women. But most people have trouble thinking outside the box society places them in, and those that did like Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger were roundly condemned in their time. Another social expectation was that a “decent woman” would not want to interact freely in the sex act.

      A number of people with extreme views, even for their own times,became the arbiters of the country’s sexual standards in several fields. Anthony Comstock help set the legal standards, Richard von Krafft-Ebing the psychiatric standards, and John Harvey Kellogg the health and medical standards.

      Comstock and sex information

      Comstock believed that strong legal controls should be placed on the distribution of any material that was obscene, lewd or lascivious. This included any written material or pictorial about sex including information on birth control. In 1873 he created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice СКАЧАТЬ