"Did They really Discuss Sex Back then?" - Sexual Education at the Edge of Modernity

As a scholar currently working with issues of sexualities of the past and sex in the early 20th century, I often get peculiar questions. Among the most frequently asked is whether society really dealt with sexuality "back then"—a temporality that most often refers to Victorian times or, in Sweden, the late 19th century. People are often shocked to hear that sexuality back then was, just like in contemporary times, the talk of the town. What many people are particularly surprised to learn is that there were actually discussions on sexual education as early as the 1890s in Sweden—or perhaps even earlier, depending on how we define sexual education.

If we take our departure from the writings of historian of ideas Lena Lennerhed, sexual education or sexual enlightenment (in Swedish: sexualupplysning) is actually a very old phenomenon. If we believe that sexual education is about teaching people about the consequences and practices of sexuality from a matter-of-fact approach, we can find it in the early 19th century. During this time, doctors were convinced that masturbation posed a great danger that could lead to blindness, hysteria, and depression. Other parts of the medical profession believed that, in the worst-case scenario, it could lead to death.

Such thoughts have been proven wrong, and very few doctors a century later would believe that masturbation was physically harmful (though it was still believed to potentially lead to "sexual deviance" such as a large sex drive or homosexuality). Despite this, we can still see that the 19th-century campaigns against masturbation were actually the first examples of sexual education. This is because something does not need to be factually true in order to be considered knowledge—what matters is that it is perceived as true.

From the perspective of what we believe to be true today, sex education can be said to have evolved during the last decade of the 19th century. In the 1890s, there was a school subject called "hygiene" in many European countries that aimed to provide information on how to prevent diseases and create a hygienic lifestyle. At this time, Europe was also plagued by STDs, and the leap from preventing illness in general to preventing STDs was rather short.


One important aspect, however, is that the sex education taught in many schools at the turn of the century did not contain information on contraceptives. Instead, it seems that sex was mainly taught from an anatomical perspective, and very little attention was paid to how intercourse was actually conducted. However, in 1908 it was debated in the Swedish parliament whether or not sexual education should become mandatory in public schools. The naysayers to this idea won by a slim majority of only a few votes, indicating that the talk of sexuality was far less repressed than we sometimes believe.

The main motive for not allowing sexual education was a fear of "poking the bear that slept" when it came to boys. It was believed that boys had a stronger sex instinct than girls, and that providing information might trigger it. As a result, sexual education was given on a voluntary basis at girls' schools from the turn of the century. It should, however, be stated that this education did not include information, for instance, about contraceptives. Yet, what this illustrates is that sex was not as invisible in society as one might imagine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The use of history and why historians should mind the gap

Image
 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: a Background

Image
This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...
Read more