Sex Positivity, and by the polarised nature of the two, sex negativity or erotophobia, can be traced back a long way. The specific terms and the debate about the sociological impacts of both of them may be much more recent, but the terms have been retroactively applied to cultures as far back as ancient Greece.
Despite the fact that no explicit debate was drawn, positivity and freedom about sexual lifestyles has been widespread, to various reactions. Ovid, who wrote in the first century CE, published a work “Ars Amatoria” which aimed to provide education about how to find, seduce and keep ones lovers. This is often cited as maligned and leading to his exile because of the subject matter, though recently this claim has been called into question. However, being persecuted because of writing regarded as sordid is not an isolated incident. The famous author the Marquis de Sade wrote two novels contrasting how a virtuous woman is lead to despair, whereas her nymphomanic sister is successful and happy. The books, published anonymously, lead to an arrest warrant being put out for the author. In a summary of sex positivity made in 1990, Warren Johannsson talks about the utopianisation of a sex positive culture. He suggests that this was started by 18th century ethnographers who lauded cultures not tainted by the competing asceticism of the protestant and catholic churches that were in contemporary England. However, the point was made that often the rich western explorers had doors opened up to them through their wealth that may otherwise have not been available. Indeed, leading ethnographers Bronislaw Malinowski and Havelock Ellis who wrote in 1929 when the field was considerably more professional found that tribes in Melanisia, located in modern-day Papua New Guinea, respected monogamy within marriage just as much as their contemporary western societies.
The explicit debate between various approaches to sexuality, was, perhaps, first popularised by psychoanalyst William Reich. Reich’s early work was lauded, but his later studies discredited him after he attempted to fit his theory of “orgone energy” to explain phenomena such as the sexual libido and why the sky is blue. He was born in the late 19th century in Austria and was very radical, following the ideas of Marx and other socialist revolutionaries. His description of views on sex summarised two different views: the positive, which recognised the inherent value of sexual expression, and the negative, which he claimed caused sexual prohibitions as a means of exerting social control. In his 1936 work “Die Sexualität im Kulturkampf,” he discussed how sexual neuroses stem from this kind of sexual restriction both from the macroscopic governmental level and a more microscopic level of patriarchal control in the traditional family set up. He listed six points which he thought restricted sexual expression and hence damaged the mental health of many individuals:
- Monogamy
- Suppression of Infant Sexuality
- Lack of Sexual Education
- Criticism of non-heteronormative lifestyles
- Illegality of Abortion
- Marriage as a legal institution
These six tenets often form at least some of the basis for modern sex positivity movements, which nowadays shape themselves as cultural, sociological and sometimes political causes as opposed to the often hedonistic artists who discussed sexual politics in times gone by.
No comments:
Post a Comment