Until the middle of the 17th century, almost everyone in Europe was convinced that sex was dangerous, that it could disrupt society. Sexuality therefore had to be curbed with might and main. In 1800, very little of these ideas was left. In the intervening period a revolution took place:sex became a private matter. British historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala wrote an acclaimed book about this upheaval:The Origins of Sex.
The Origins of Sex is Dabhoiwala's first book. The senior fellow at Exeter College in Oxford received critical acclaim for it. Critics praised his erudition and found his work 'inspiring and provocative'. A "big book" according to The Times that even called Dabhoiwala "the Stephen Hawking of sex." The 42-year-old author visibly enjoys the success of the book. He worked on it for ten years. “This is so much fun,” he says with gleaming fun eyes, sipping a cappucino in the Faculty Club of the University of Leiden where he receives Dutch journalists. “It's exactly what I wanted:to write an interesting book that is also easy to read. In Oxford I teach very intelligent students aged 18 and 19. They are eager to learn, but they are also easily bored. They often find the 18th century boring. They want to be stimulated, to read something entertaining. I recognize that, that's how I am myself. That's why I'm happy that I seem to have managed to write something that is scientifically interesting, but also a good read.”
Dabhoiwala formulates carefully, with an affected diction so recognizable to British intellectuals. Remarkably enough, he also speaks Dutch, almost without an accent. He spent his childhood with his parents in Buitenveldert, in Amsterdam. He attended the Vossius Gymnasium, where he was in the school newspaper editor with Arnon Grunberg. In the 1980s he returned to England for further education. He only speaks about his book in his native language. He thinks his Dutch is too bad for academic discourse:"I make terrible mistakes, I'm talking about 'brushing teeth', that sort of thing."
And then we die
To demonstrate how fundamental the shift in thinking about sex in the Western world between 1650 and 1800 was, Dabhoiwala contrasts two examples from his book. He first quotes the libertine John Wilkes, who sighs in 1763 in his erotic poem Essay on Woman:
Life can supply little more than just a few good fucks, and then we die
According to Dabhoiwala, such a line of poetry was unthinkable in the 16th century. “The fear of sex outside marriage was then so deeply entrenched in society that it had been completely internalized. Sex outside of marriage was forbidden by the Bible. But it was not just an individual sin, it was seen as a social problem, a harbinger of total chaos and anarchy. Social control of adultery was therefore ubiquitous and widely accepted.” Appetizingly, the British researcher describes how volunteers patrolled at night and at low tide to combat the great danger. Doors were opened unsolicited to check whether everyone was sleeping in their own bed. “Note, this was not an official police force. This was done by the community itself. Together they supervised compliance with the rules. Punishment was arranged through a concerted effort of church and state.”
Which brings the author to his second example, with which he also begins his book:the banishment and public flogging of Susan Perry and Robert Watson on Tuesday, March 10, 1612. Chained to a farm cart and stripped to the waist, Susan and Robert are taken to the border. from their hometown of Westminster. They are constantly beaten and are never allowed to return to their birthplace. Their crime? Making love without being married, resulting in a child. “In 1800, this became unthinkable,” explains Dabhoiwala. “Adultery will still be punishable, but there will be no more prosecutions or public punishments. It is not only apparent from the court records, it is also reflected in the figures. Before 1650 only 1% of children were born out of wedlock, around 1800 that is no less than 25%. The idea that sex is primarily a private matter is becoming more and more commonplace. And no matter how differently people think about sex and sex experience in our society today, this is a starting point that most of us can still agree with.”
Female chastity
The Origins of Sex may be full of amusing anecdotes and salient details, it is not a simple book. When Faramerz is asked to explain the central points in his work, ten minutes is not enough. The starting point of his argument is that sex moved from the public to the private sphere in the 18th century. Sexuality is increasingly seen as a natural activity that is enjoyable and not dangerous or bad in itself.
Its second central point derives from the two assumptions above. The sexual revolution in the 18th century is the start of an endless discussion about the limits of sexual freedom, and about what exactly is and isn't private. “That discussion continues to this day, and is therefore also a fundamental feature of our Western society. We don't want top-down regulation, but where the boundary lies between freedom and public morals, and what can and cannot be considered natural, has been debated since the 18th century.”
Dabhoiwala emphasizes that sexual freedom was not acquired by everyone at the same time. For women, the new approach to sex did not even have a positive effect at all at first. The image of women undergoes a radical change in the 18th century:in the Middle Ages and early modern times she had always been the dangerous temptress whose insatiable libido had to be curbed, at the end of the 18th century she was suddenly the man who did. of lust, while woman is regarded as a chastity-inclined, morally superior being. Dabhoiwala describes this process in detail. “My book shows that freedom initially promoted inequality. Inequality between men and women, between rich and poor and also between homosexuals and heterosexuals. Because who was the first to benefit from increased sexual freedom? The heterosexual upper class men.”
Homosexuality
The sexual revolution of the 18th century initially had little to offer homosexuals either. The assumption, so characteristic of the Enlightenment, that everything natural was good by definition led to sodomy being branded by the vast majority of society as completely unnatural, and therefore had to be fought vigorously. In Britain, this led to legal persecution of gays well into the 20th century. It was not until 2003 that the law criminalizing the promotion of homosexuality in schools was repealed.
But at the same time, there was also the individual who dared to draw different conclusions on the basis of his enlightenment ideals. Dabhoiwala is proud to say that he has traced the first modern defense of gay rights in the writings of Jeremy Bentham. At the end of the 18th century, this reformer-philosopher came to the conclusion that there is no legal basis for prohibiting consensual sex between men. Even though Bentham himself found same-sex sex disgusting, he couldn't help but conclude that it is ultimately a matter of taste. And, he wrote, you don't persecute people who love oysters, do you?
Obviously
Dabhoiwala is frankly positive about the final results of the first sexual revolution. The revolution may have initially been accompanied by inequality, but eventually it brought self-determination for almost everyone in Western society. “We think it's normal that everyone should be allowed to decide for themselves what he or she does with his or her body, that women are not treated as second-class citizens and that as an adulterer you cannot be sentenced to death. But all this happened well into the 18th century.”
Dabhoiwala makes a comparison with democracy in this regard. It, like sexual freedom, has come about in jerky fashion, and we both tend to take it for granted. But is it really so obvious? Dabhoiwala says the web review of his book in The Guardian generated responses worldwide. Several people from different parts of the world tweeted, comparing their unfree sex life with the situation in Europe before 1650. They also wanted a sexual revolution. “There are clear similarities between pre-modern Europe and the situation in say Saudi Arabia or Iran. But it is too simplistic to look at other places in the world with disdain and say 'look how retarded they are and how enlightened and modern we are in the west.'”
It is also questionable to what extent Dabhowala can claim that he has described a Western revolution. Almost all of his source material comes from England, most of it even from London. Further research should show whether and how sexual freedom has come about elsewhere in the Western world. Dabhoiwala thinks the pattern will be similar in other European countries, although the pace of change will likely be different. But whether a similar process has taken place in Roman Catholic countries remains to be seen.
Whether we have a typical British or exemplary Western story in our hands here, The Origins of Sex takes the reader in a compelling way through the most diverse aspects of 17th and 18th century society. from the works of the great celebrated enlightenment thinkers to obscure diaries of whore runners (and sometimes a combination of the two). From court records of adulterers to the foundation statutes of shelters for prostitutes. From Richardson's widely read novels to the 'ejaculation scale' from a Scottish sex club. And from the collector's pictures of famous whores to the memoirs of the courtesans at the English court.
His observations are more descriptive than explanatory. The revolution is set against the backdrop of 18th-century urbanization and the rise of modern mass media. The incipient secularization and fragmentation of the church's power are making their mark, as is the thinking of the Enlightenment, with its focus on freedom of conscience and public morality. Dabhoiwala doesn't tell us exactly how all these processes interact, but it is obvious that society changes irreversibly and fundamentally during this period.
The book
Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The origins of sex. A history of the first sexual revolution (Allen Lane, 2012)