Phi Alpha Theta

FAQ

Undergraduate History Honors Society

University of California, Berkeley

Tuesday, March 13, 2001, 5:19 PM

[Arrived on time for the Henkin lecture on the history of sex]

[Jaz introduces him...]

[Thanking Shirley Le for inviting him to speak and for designing the flyer which drew such a big crowd]

Thank you all for coming...

I don't think people would have come if I lectured about the post office...

No, this is not a lecture about how historians have sex, which is what some people think it is, judging from the looks I have been getting

My work is really isn't about sex…but it is on the periphery...my last book was about street signs in 19th century New York...my current work involves letter writing and the post office...my first book was on promiscuity...I write about things related to it..

Discussing the problem of whether Berkeley's history department should have someone doing the history of American sex...

There is a fear of this dystopian vision of a university where people care more about sex then religion...

The field does remain marginal, especially in the eyes of practitioners...and also in the eyes of media...

So I want to discuss with you the forms of resistance...Why is the history of sex a field which encounters so many obstacles?

One is what we might want to call the butthead syndrome...I refer to the sadly departed MTV animated cartoon...the effects of laughter which accompany any discussion of sex...the "heh heh..."

That is charitable to Butthead...in the case of Butthead, the laughter is the recognition of some kind of superior knowledge he and the audience have...whereas in the case of many historians and media critics...the laughter is ashamed and nervous...but I don't want to talk about that today...

There is the argument of whether sex is less important because it is epiphenomenal...this is especially strong among Marxist historians, who prefer to deal with hard facts...they see people's personal sexual obsessions as fluff…

I don't want to talk about that today...but it is disappearing as a serious objection to the study of the history of sex.

Nonetheless...

I want to talk about two more interesting problems...

One is the idea that somehow...we can't imagine the past sexuality of other societies...we can't imagine sexuality as subject to historical change.

One is to imagine that people in the past had anything resembling the sexual experiences we have...

this is related to the difficulty with regard to thinking of our parents having sex...this in turn is related to the need for an affinitive rupture in order to sever ourselves from our parents, the past, in order to define ourselves...

There is something jarring about the appearance of whatever would otherwise be familiar sexual details...Let me read to you from an old document...

What's shocking about my reading that is not so much the transgression of the norms of public discourses...we have all heard these things in public places...this is our language, and yet it is being spoken in the 19th century.

Here is from a document from a Nevada bachelor...again, what is transgressive is the repetition of the words....

The most jarring thing about it is the similarity...we don't expect people until the post WWII period for people to speak our language of sexual discourse...this is a huge obstacle to thinking of human sexuality of having a past...

Then there is the opposite....the problem of thinking of sex as being any different...

Probably they did exactly the same thing...

We assume that sex is rooted in a constant unchanging dimension of biology...the survival of the species depends on it...so we don't expect anything new under the sun...

Obviously then sex would have no history!

Maybe people gave birth and married at different rates...but the heart of the sexual experience has to be the same...

The historian of sexuality is out of a job if they expect that nothing in the past could teach us about sex!

Both these attitudes...are misguided in my view, but they shape the view we view sex...Let me look at the fourth formidable obstacle...

Sex is private. Therefore it is inaccessible to historians.

Much of what I am going to talk about today is this perceived obstacle.

Given the fact that sex is so fundamentally private...

We tell the history of many things that have private dimensions! No one would object to a class on the history of Protestant thought...

It is a serious objection...probably the most serious objection to the study of sexuality...it's private. We might be able to figure out something...but the essence of sex is the experience of sex...the desire, the gratification...how could we write a history about that? Only the person experiencing it could have any knowledge of it.

Thinking about privacy is not an obstacle requires thinking about privacy.

By the way, feel free to interrupt me with questions...

Privacy is a complicated concept. We use it in many senses...we use it to mean solitude and seclusion...

But we mean it to much more than the right to solitary acts...

But we also use private to describe things that are intimate...things shared between one or more people...

We also use it to describe the proprietary nature of privacy...

We need to study all these things...since they all constitute the objection that we can't study the history of sex because it is private.

Some of...these meanings of privacy DON'T apply to sex transhistorically. This is the first way to break this down.

The idea that sex takes places in secluded places is a modern experience...many things before the present which we consider private were actually performed in public, like wiping your nose. This goes for several sexual acts...

Also, norms about sex were class-specific.

The first place to start...this objection is not true transhistorically, it's true only because our culture has proscribed it.

But shouldn't it still be mainly private since cultures have so many taboos around relationships...things that would force it underground?

Surely something about it must be private?

How do historians get at that?

So I want to discuss with you the sources historians use...the ways we penetrate the veil of privacy.

We look at diaries...which are partially desacralized forms of confession. The historical record is full of people who would document their private sexual experiences...people not only counted their orgasms...but they wrote elaborately about it...

[One guy] wrote 2.5 million words about his sexual life...

These are the things which people do write about.

Including in 19th century Victorian societies which we imagine as incredibly prudish and reserved.

One person we know well...Mabel Loomis Todd...this ambitious and middle-class New England woman...wrote this diary in which she documents her life...she used the pound sign to record every time she had an orgasm.

So there are diaries...by the way, Todd had a relationship with Emily Dickinson's brother which she felt free to talk about...we learn a lot about her culture...we can learn a lot from a document which pierces the veil of privacy...

In addition to diaries, there are letters...some are more coded than others...sometimes they use ciphers!

These letters tell us very interesting things....there was this unusual exchange between two Southern aristocrats in 1826...presumably Governor Hammond took pains to conceal these letters later in his life...but for most people in most times and places there is a sexual paper trail.

We shouldn't see diaries and letters as an unimpeachable authority...since they are as constructed as anything else...but historians tend to rely on them that way....

Even historians who believe that we don't know what we we want rely on letters and diaries because they know has to come from you...through the process of psychoanalysis...so that's why they privilege these kinds of documents...

I want to cover other sources...

First of all, much of the history of sex is not based on confessions and letters at all...it is based on demographic evidence...birth rates, marriage rates, age of menarche, age of menopause...

We can measure these things accurately since they are recorded quantifiably...

Especially since most societies record marriages, that data is very useful...that is an aspect of American sex life which is public data....

For example...historians have deduced that 1/3 of the sexually active population may have been engaging in sex on the eve of the American Revolution...since 1/3 of the brides at that time were pregnant...That is a conservative approach...

So a significant part of history of sex has to do with the quantifiable part...the part which can be tethered to birth and marriage.

Then there are court records. That is very interesting...Just because sex is private doesn't mean it is always private...indeed it becomes public when it becomes someone else's business.

Court records don't tell us the typical behavior since they record only transgressions...but they can still give us clues as to regular sexual behavior...[relating the story of a 16-year-old in Plymouth who admitted to extensive zoophilia]

They tell us extensive information about everyday practice even though they are from the perspective of a hostile authority.

There are confessional manuals which prepare priests for the kind of things people will confess...

Several historians have pointed out that the penitential requirements for a woman having sex with a woman were far less severe in the pre-modern period than for a man having sex with a man....

For example, look at our speed limit laws and our signage...it would be wrong to say that Americans are obsessed with speed or that they drive at a legal speed all the time, but we can deduce some things. The same goes for sex...

Much of what we know about prostitution comes from investigative reports...

Much of what we know comes from commissions created to study the lives of prostitutes...hundreds of pages have entered the historical record as a result...

In 1919, the Navy investigated homosexuality in Newport, Rhode Island. Then there were numerous investigations of what the Navy was doing...the end result of the affair was 3500 pages about men having sex with men in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1919.

Then was the issue of what was proper courtship behavior in this period. Much of that was unearthed during investigations into whether illicit prostitution was going on in various ordinary environments...usually these were motivated by benign impulses...social workers have taught us a lot since they not only wanted to suppress vice but they wanted to learn about people....

Near the end of the 19th century, a physician, Celia? Mosher was interviewing her patients about their sexual lives going back as far as the 1840s and 1850s...

There is medical literature, which is interesting as it covers all kinds of practices...it is one of the greatest repositories of information for many, many, centuries of history...it is important for elaborating certain norms and frameworks.

Tom La Kern has been writing about this a lot...how one can envision the biology of sex…

What else...we have literature...a very important source of information about sex...

A lot of what we think we know about sex in the past comes from literature...especially for the ancient period.

But literature is important in more modern periods...it not only shows us what people were thinking, it shows us what people were reading. One thing that is fascinating about my period, mid-19th century America, is that there was an extensive amount of sexual material we would consider pornographic in a great number of popular novels...

Okay, which brings us to the subject of pornography, a major source which historians have used.

Pornography is not a recent development...pornographic pictures and texts have probably enjoyed an audience for forever...but they have seen a major expansion with the rise of print culture...

[Discussing how pornography was a factor behind the French Revolution...]

Pornography in whatever period...it tells us a lot about a time period...

Visual depictions of sex occur not only in pornography proper but in paintings...we have all gone to a museum as kids and giggled...

Even paintings wind up being documents of everyday life.

Then there is popular media...vaudeville shows...

For example, there were naked pictures being passed out in the street...there was naked museum shows...jokes with complex sexual innuendoes...

Then there is slang and popular parlance, popular locutions.

Often it is the case that slang expressions indicate something about attitudes and expectations...

For example, male homosexuals in China were called men with a "cut sleeve," based on a story about a Han dynasty emperor's lover. A modern equivalent would be "coyote ugly," the term popularized by a recent movie.

In the early 20th-century, a term for one man giving a blow job to another man was "the 20th century way."...

So we can gain insight into people's attitudes and expectations...

Finally, there are contraceptive devices...

I was going to bring pictures, but Shirley told me you can't bring pictures...

There are these great pictures of anti-masturbation devices which were popular in 18th century Europe.

In some cases they have been found, these material cultural objects.

So what does this all add up to? So many of these sources seem to skirt the question of privacy....by pointing to what is public about sex. They are valuable not only because they offer clues to private acts...but because they are part of a larger public world of sex...a world of sexual discussion that forms the cultural context for sexual practices...and desires...

Think about how...say...the act of masturbation or adultery...are shaped by prevailing cultural discussions.

Your attitude about what you're doing has to be informed by some sense of whether it is transgressive or not.

To give you another example...history of courtship rituals....among young adolescents, college students...

These things are fascinating because we can understand them from our own perspective and we can see how they are shaped by taboos and customs...

In turn...how a person fared at the early stage...how they were conditioned by external pressures...governs how they function sexually later in their lives...

We ought to be careful about calling sex private.

The greatest contribution historians can make in my view, is not only about revealing things which were concealed...has been the recognition that things which appear to be private...are shaped by the way that sex is categorized in public culture...in magazines...media...public space...

Seeing sexual desire that way...as the product of sexual discourses helps us reapproach the earlier obstacle...if sex is rooted in biology, is it a transhistorical phenomenon?...

If sex is conditioned in part by all these forces, then it is not purely a biological drive. A major area of research is whittling away the area of sex which is the domain of biology, physiology and neurology...and moving it into the realm of social and psychoanalytic history...

[Discussing Tom LaKurt? contribution to the literature around biology]

He claims...that our very conception of our genitals is the product of cultural expectations...he bases this on how there was a shift in biology from essentially one gender...female genitals were not seen as very different from male genitals...to two genders, where females were seen as different...

So, so much of the history of sex seems to be about something other than the history of sex...some could say that this is academic alchemy to take sex and turn it into a story about something else...

The moral of the story...that so much of what historians is saying about sex is not about biological sex...is that...thinking of sex as a distinct and demarcated realm...as confined to the adult room of the video store...is a peculiarly modern way of thinking about sexuality. The whole idea of thinking of the sexuality which we have is not transhistorically true nor true of human beings in general....

One hypothesis in recent years...what we think of as sexuality...a network of desires and ideas at the center of our being...as well as the idea of sexuality at all...it would not made sense in other times and places...

There was a time when sexual acts were not seen as representing some inner disposition...

For example, historians have been arguing that homosexuality is only 100 years old...not in the sense that men and women have not always been engaging in sex acts with members of the same gender...what is different is what these acts signify.

For example, we think that people who are homosexual...it says something about their inner disposition...they all share a homosexual disposition. But that would not make sense compared to what we know about other societies...going back to the Newport example...for example, many men, sailors as well as married men...they not only think they are not homosexuality, they don't think their sexuality has any resemblance to the people they were having sex with!

Here's why...in those documents...there is a major difference between those who have a masculine and feminine role...

The slang give us some clues...there is a large amount of slang for the men who adopt a feminine role...but there was no special slang for men who were in a masculine role!...So for that culture...that tells us about gender construction...

There has also been a lot of research into ancient Greece...there was not the same dichotomy between heterosexuals and homosexuals...[describing how sexual taboos in this culture functioned in terms of class]

Sexual desires in that society were not constructed purely in terms of having sex with one gender or another....they would have seen our way of describing things as absurd...

[drawing an analogy to how we perceive criminals and victims in carjackings....] Sex in the Greek context was not a reciprocal act in a modern sense....

What I want to underscore with this example is that among the things which characterize the modern world is an understanding of sexuality as this thing which is part of you...this network of ideas and desires...if we define it that way then we can see it as private and inaccessible....

Historians in the future...if they occupy a future in which this model of sexuality no longer exists...will probably find our views strange.

So I'll stop there and see if you have any questions...

[Halted notetaking at start of Q&A session, departed 6:27 PM for 100 GPB]