The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD

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      This would not have been such a powerful influence if he had not later that year somehow influenced the U.S. Congress to pass the Comstock Laws that put into place his broad view of what was indecent and pornography. The statutes defined contraceptives as obscene and illicit, and it was a federal offense to disseminate birth control information through the mail or across state lines.Even medical textbooks that contained anatomy drawings could be censured.In 1890 the tariff act prohibiting importation of anything obscene was passed, and Comstock had the right to open mail for inspection.

      The laws he influenced continued to prevent the distribution of information on birth control years after his death. As late as the 1960s, thirty states had statutes on the books that prohibited and restricted the sale and advertisements of contraceptives. Even doctors in some states could not prescribe or discuss contraception. Samuel G. Kling gives a summary of laws as they existed in 1960s in his book Sexual Behavior and the Law.

      Not content with getting the laws passed, Comstock then obtained extraordinary powers as a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service to personally take legal action against anyone he considered to have been guilty of breaking those laws. Later Margaret Sanger was to flee the country under threat of imprisonment, and she was to spend time in jail for giving out birth control information.

      Comstock comes across as a fanatic, and in today’s culture it is difficult for my students to imagine a society in which a man with such extreme views could become such a powerful influence. He bragged that he had been responsible for 4,000 arrests and 15 suicides. As an aside, it is reported that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the FBI, learned much from Comstock’s methods.

      State laws restrictive of sexual activity

      Besides the Comstock laws, each state had it own laws as to the legality of certain sex acts. Adultery was illegal in all but five states, but the penalties were markedly different. West Virginia had a $20 fine, whereas in most New England states, it was a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Fortunately, these laws were seldom enforced even when they were called to the attention of the court. For example,in New York,adultery was the only grounds for divorce; and when admitted for the purpose of getting a divorce, the offender was not fined $250 or given the six months in jail the law stipulated.

      Fornication or sex between unmarried people was not a crime in 13 states, but the other states treated it as a misdemeanor with punishments of three months to a year in jail. The fact these laws were seldom enforced still indicates that personal sexual behavior was seen as being under the control of the state. Some states even had laws intended to control what a married couple did in private— there was to be no oral, anal or manual touching of sex organs under the laws on sodomy. Again these laws were seldom enforced except in the case of homosexuals.

      Medical men like Kellogg supporting these laws

      Comstock’s belief that abstinence was the only good sexual standard as a basis for laws was also supported by many in the medical profession. One major player in this game was John Harvey Kellogg, who ran the Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium and Health Spa established to promote holistic health. He had some very progressive ideas about diet and exercise along with a very negative attitude toward sexual behavior.

      He and his brother William invented the process for making cornflakes with the goal of lowering sex drive. John Harvey believed that the eating of meat increased one’s sexual desires and cornflakes was a good substitute. William, on the other hand, saw the commercial potential of cornflakes especially with a little sugar added, and he and John Harvey split up over this.

      John Harvey went on to write Plain Facts for Young and Old (1881), a book that is loaded with myths about the terrible effects of masturbation, birth control and too-frequent intercourse.

      A fictionalized story of his life is given in the book and movie The Road to Wellsville. He believed many diseases were caused by sexual intercourse and claimed that in their 40 years of marriage he and his wife had never had sexual intercourse. He advocated putting carbolic acid on the clitoris of girls to prevent “harmful” female masturbation.

      Similar information is given in William Walling’s Sexology (1904). The last paragraph on female masturbation begins, “We could give facts almost without number in reported cases, to show the prevalence and destructive nature of this vice among girls in our own country,but we forbear; the subject is painful and revolting even to contemplate. We believe we have said enough to terrify parents into the needful precautions against it.”

      Physicians providing masturbation to treat hysteria

      What I find really mind twisting about this extremely negative attitude is that masturbation was used as a treatment for the common problem of female hysteria by physicians of the time. What in the world did they think they were doing?

      In the last half of the 19th century many women suffered from “female hysteria,” a condition that involved a number of vague, but chronic complaints probably related to the society’s heavy repression of normal sexual desires.

      Sleeplessness, nervousness, and irritability were the main symptoms and were found to be successfully treated by the physician massaging the woman’s clitoris.With the massage the woman would have a sudden seizure and sense of relief of the symptoms. Since women were not supposed to have sexual feelings, the doctors did not believe it was an orgasm.

      Again it is hard to understand how doctors could be so strongly against masturbation but fail to recognize that was what they were doing. It also leaves the question that since it was such a simple treatment, why did doctors not train the husband to do it at home? Or even why did not the woman suggest to the husband that he could do the treatment? Go figure. For hysteria unrelieved by husbandly lust, and for widows, single and unhappily married women, doctors advised horseback riding, which in some cases provided enough clitoral stimulation to trigger orgasm.

      An interesting aside is that performing the manipulation of the clitoris was often a stressful procedure for the physician and his fingers got tired, thus the invention of the electric vibrator as a labor saving treatment aid. Vibrators became an immediate hit. Their use produced the seizure quickly, and in the early 20th century women found they could treat themselves; ads appeared in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue offering a neat compact vibrator with three applicators that was useful and satisfactory for home service for $5.95.

      As I write this there is an ad on television where the bride-to-be is very happy because she received three vibrators as shower presents. (For more on the history of vibrators, see Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ The Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, 1999).

      Sexual acts leading to pathology

      When I took my first internship in a psychiatric hospital in 1954, most of the psychiatrists had a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) by Krafft-Ebing on their desks or in their bookshelves. Besides information from his own patients and those of colleagues he did forensic work for the courts that brought him into contact with a wider variety of pathologies. One of his goals was to show the court that these were medical (that is, psychiatric problems) and not legal problems.

      Krafft-Ebing had a number of concepts we would consider very up-to-date today. For example, he saw normal men as attracted to certain features of a woman that he called fetishes that we have reconceptualized as being part of their love maps that attract them to one woman rather than another. He was also very aware of the influence of odors on passion and sexual arousal, treating these individual’s reactions as if they were normal. СКАЧАТЬ