The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD

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СКАЧАТЬ on observation and facts and helped modify, albeit slowly, the attitudes towards sex. At about the same time Sigmund Freud was also bringing sex to people’s attention and allowing the intelligentsia to discuss the subject more freely. Of particular influence was his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, in which much of the content of dreams is related to repressed sexual material.

      Margaret Sanger facing off with Comstock

      Two women were very powerful influences on the Victorian anti everything sexual philosophy: Margaret Sanger with her push for birth control information and Coco Chanel with her freeing women from clothes that effectively made them prisoners.

      Sanger’s family situation had made her very aware of problems connected with a lack of birth control. Her mother had been pregnant 18 times, gave birth to 11 live babies and died at 45 from tuberculosis and cervical cancer. Although Sanger didn’t complete her nursing degree, she went to work in the slums of New York City.

      There Sanger met women who were worn out by too many children, including one case where a woman had been told by the doctor to have no more children or she might die; but he would give her no information on birth control because it was illegal. He told her to have her husband sleep on the roof. He didn’t; she got pregnant and died in childbirth. Motivated to do something about the problem, Sanger got into trouble with the law by writing a pamphlet for poor women entitled “Family Limitation.”

      In 1913 she began publishing The Woman Rebel, a monthly newsletter that advocated contraception in which she coined the term “Birth Control.” This was enough to bring her to Comstock’s attention, and to avoid prosecution she fled to Europe (D’Emilio, & Freedman, 1988). She used her time there to learn more about birth control and make contacts with leaders in the fight against censorship of sexual materials.

      Her relationships with several of her mentors went beyond the professional; she had affairs with both Havelock Ellis and H.G. Wells. Later after she returned to America, some of her contacts in Europe were to help her smuggle diaphragms into the U.S. Shortly after she returned, her five-year-old daughter Peggy died, a loss that she said haunted her for the rest of her life.

      In 1916 Sanger opened the first family planning and birth control clinic in the U.S. in Brooklyn. After it was raided nine days later, she served 30 days in jail. In jail she took the opportunity to give sex lectures to the women in prison with her.These were mostly very poor women and prostitutes, all of whom wanted to know more about sex. The prison authorities made her stop trying to educate them about sex on the premise the women were bad enough already.

      A bit later the heavy hand of Comstock was still on the case, and she was to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Many women showed up in the courtroom showing their support, and fortunately for Sanger, Comstock died. Seeing the support Sanger had from the community, the judge then dropped the case against her.

      In 1921 Sanger married the oil tycoon, James Noah H. Slee, who provided her with funds to do considerable international travel promoting birth control including seven trips to Japan. In 1923 she established the first legal birth control clinic in the U.S. with grants from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. This was done anonymously so that the public would not associate the Rockefeller name with the operation.

      She spent the rest of her life working to educate women and give them control over their bodies and their lives. Sanger died in 1966 at the age of 86, a few months after the Griswold vs. Connecticut decision that legalized birth control for married couples in the U.S.

      Coco Chanel creates a freer way of dressing.

      Women began to make real gains in freedom and access to knowledge about sex after World War I. One of the influences on how they dressed was the fashion designer Coco Chanel. “I gave women a sense of freedom, I gave them back their bodies: bodies that were drenched in sweat, due to fashion’s finery, lace, corsets, underclothes, padding.”

      Clothes in the 19th century were very restraining, not only covering women’s total body, but including a corset that squeezed their inner organs. Women frequently fainted during that period, probably related to the confinement, and they experienced many health problems, e.g., indigestion and childbirth. The times were ripe for changes in how women dressed, and women took to her innovations as they entered into the flapper period.

      Hendrik van de Velde gives instructions on how to do sex.

      Real advances in availability of information about sex came in the 1920s. A major contributor was a Dutch gynecologist, Theodor Hendrik van de Velde, who published in 1926 his book Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique. It quickly became a best seller, went into 46 printings in the original edition,and was translated into many languages. It continued to sell after WW II. The copy I own was revised in 1965, and it was revised again in 2000, a remarkable life for a book written that long ago. It was the kind of book that people were often given as a wedding present.

      The book wasn’t without problems from the legal and moral authorities of the day. The first printing had an insert: “The sale of this book is strictly limited to members of the medical profession, Psychoanalysts, Scholars, and to such adults as may have a definite position in the field of Physiological, Psychological, or Social Research.”Later in 1931 the Catholic Church placed Ideal Marriage on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

      As Van de Velde knew that writing a book of this nature would cause problems that might have interfered with his medical practice, he waited until he retired to write the book. As he says in his introduction, “There is need for this knowledge: there is too much suffering endured which might well be avoided, too much joy untasted which could enhance life’s worth.”

      Ideal Marriage is a textbook about sex written for the general reader and covers in detail the anatomy and physiology of sex and then goes into detail about the physiology and technique of sexual intercourse. He goes into great detail on sexual techniques, including such acts as cunnilingus, which he stresses should be part of the lovemaking. Where he really cuts away from the previous era is his insistence that the woman is a full partner in the act and not a passive receiver.

      His philosophy of mutual sexual pleasure is summed up in the introduction to chapter IX, Sexual Union. “For sexual union only takes place physiologically (i.e. according to the laws of Nature), rightly and suitably, if and when both partners fully participate and feel supreme sexual pleasure and complete relaxation or relief. If, anywhere and in any circumstances, the demand for equal rights for both sexes is incontestable, it is so in regard to equal consent and equal pleasure in sexual union, and in the interests of both.”

      Even with the wide acceptance of Ideal Marriage, resistance to women learning about their own physiology and sex in general was still strong, but a beginning had been made. At the University of Missouri, the chair of the Psychology Department, Max Friedrich Meyer, was threatened with firing when it was discovered in 1929 he had taught a sex class for women.

      He was later fired when a student, O. Hobart Mowrer, did a survey of sex in marriage. Mowrer was discharged from the university without a degree, earned his degrees at Johns Hopkins. Mowrer became a major figure in psychology and was later given a degree by the University of Missouri.

      Van de Velde’s was the major work breaking down the Victorian attitude that sex was for the man only, and not until Kinsey’s work 20 years later was there a more influential work on sex.

      The next major change in sexual behavior and attitudes would wait until the upheaval that occurred between 1968 and 1972, the topic in the next chapter.

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