Sex, Anthropology & Logic

Let us consider where hostility toward sexuality comes from. Such a reflection should probably begin with two well-known facts. In every society, there have always been people who made a virtue of abstinence. One need only recall nuns, celibate priests, and those who promoted asceticism.

It also turns out that honest answers to the question of how important sex is within a marriage or intimate partnership vary enormously. A considerable number of people assess both their sexual needs and their awareness of sexuality as rather low. There are also the so-called “white marriages.” Yet if we step back and look at the human species as a whole—or indeed at biological life as such—the significance of sexuality is beyond dispute.

Sexuality, inscribed into our bodies, our thinking, and our behavior, is one of the foundations of biological existence. It is a fundamental anthropological trait. Each of us came into the world as the result of our parents’ sexual activity. Sexuality also lies at the root of culture itself, as evidenced by the thousands of poems, novels, films, and television dramas devoted to it.

It is therefore striking when sexuality becomes stigmatized. And yet across the centuries, this has happened many times.

A Historical Sketch

Sexuality was not perceived negatively in ancient Egypt, Greece, or Rome. Later, matters became more complicated.

Sacred texts, together with what historical research tells us, testify that the moral teachings flowing from all three monotheistic religions are marked by distrust toward unrestrained sexuality. As is well known, the Old Testament, which shaped the customs of the Jewish people, is rigorous and puritanical. The New Testament contains the famous Sermon on the Mount, which deepens and intensifies the demands previously expressed. Islam emerged several centuries later, and as we know, it has often proved even more restrictive in matters of sexual morality.

The course of civilization after the fall of the Roman Empire—that is, the realities of the Middle Ages—reveals a paradox. Ascetic ideals were relentlessly preached, yet people continued to be born. There was, then, a clear gap between actual human behavior and the doctrines publicly proclaimed.

When speaking of the Middle Ages, one must also note that this was the age of the “witch hunts,” that is, the outright physical persecution of those whose behavior was deemed deviant or condemned. As one reads in Wikipedia: “Mostly women were accused, on the grounds that they were by nature morally weak, deficient in faith, gullible, and lustful, and therefore more susceptible to Satan.” Thus, witch trials—formally directed against heresy and pacts with the devil—often concerned people who had provoked suspicion through conduct related to the body and sexuality.

A characteristic feature of fundamentalists who condemn sexuality is that their hostility is directed above all at women. Part of this no doubt stems from anxieties tied to pregnancy, childbirth, and the raising of children.

Over time, however, the first glimmers of understanding—and even approval—of sexuality began to appear among writers heralding the Renaissance. I mean figures poised between the medieval and Renaissance worlds: Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The author of The Decameron, that great collection of tales about young women and men who sought refuge in Florence during the plague, was himself the illegitimate child of a Tuscan merchant and his lover. As Wikipedia notes, Giovanni Boccaccio, “although he did not reject Christian truths of faith or turn away from the Church, often mocked priests and monks who failed to observe celibacy and indulged in worldly pleasures while neglecting their religious duties...”

Renaissance authors frequently returned to the literature and culture of antiquity, which, as I have noted, accepted human nature and did not condemn sexuality as such.

Thus, already from the late Middle Ages onward, there was often a marked divergence between the views proclaimed by clerics and moralizers, and those held by the most enlightened minds of a given epoch. These tensions are symbolized by such famous figures as Leonardo da Vinci, Giordano Bruno, and Galileo.

A different understanding of human nature emerged even more forcefully during the Enlightenment. As Wikipedia puts it: “The men of the Enlightenment most highly valued what could be grasped by reason. A major feature of the Enlightenment was the secularization of European states and the formulation of the so-called ‘rights of man.’ The very name of the era in all European languages refers to light, understood as a force dispelling darkness and superstition. There prevailed a desire to free the mind from all kinds of error and prejudice, from the bonds of ignorance, intolerance, and fanaticism.” To approach the spirit of that age, one should become acquainted with the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.

Later, the Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism. The spirit of that era may easily be evoked by recalling that among its foremost representatives were George Gordon Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Victor Hugo. Broadly speaking, one does not find in the works of the Romantics a denial of human sexuality.

This brief overview of cultural transformations thus points to a recurring struggle: the struggle of successive generations of writers and thinkers against the severity of clerical doctrines and the moralizers who echoed them.

Modern Times

As we know, in Great Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria of Hanover, who ruled from 1837 to 1901, a distinct moral code took shape. Indeed, one speaks of the Victorian era. Of this period Wikipedia writes:

“At that time, a rigorous morality prevailed, proclaiming the need to conceal or even suppress feelings... Numerous social conventions were in force; in polite society, for example, one was not allowed to speak of pregnancy... Contemporary medicine treated female sexual desire as an illness... In law, this was reflected in the strict regulation on obscene publications, the so-called Lord Campbell’s Act, passed in 1857, which remained in force in Great Britain until 1959... The ideal Victorian woman was resourceful, diligent, responsible, and the guardian of domestic warmth and morality. She was contrasted with the image of the fallen woman, devoid of moral sense—a woman lost in luxury and bodily scandal.

Paradoxically, prostitution flourished in the Victorian era... Men dominated in those times. Society was thoroughly patriarchal. Male bodily needs were therefore treated with indulgence, including homosexuality, even though in theory it was punishable by imprisonment...”

This characterization of the Victorian era helps one imagine the broader contours of morality in other nineteenth-century societies as well. Throughout the Western world, things were much the same. The morality of the United States was puritanical—and, despite appearances, in many circles it remains so to this day.

Repressed needs, emotions, and desires found an outlet in the services of prostitutes, as has often happened in historical periods when public rhetoric denied natural sexuality. The usefulness of “fallen women,” coupled with their humiliation and exclusion to the social margins, and the immense hypocrisy surrounding public discourse on prostitution, form an extraordinarily revealing subject of inquiry. One should remember, moreover, that the Old Testament passages concerning so-called harlots are not unconditionally condemnatory.

In more recent history, especially in the twentieth century, there were brief periods in which this rigid morality softened. Cultural memory preserves the atmosphere of the interwar 1920s and 1930s. To evoke the spirit of those years, one might mention the novels of Colette, the works of André Gide, the plays of Bertolt Brecht, or the screen presence of Marlene Dietrich. The mood of that age is perhaps best captured in the famous film Cabaret, with Liza Minnelli in the leading role. Of Colette’s work it has been said that it is marked by a “complete freedom of sensuality, understood as a call to recognize the rights of the body over the spirit and the rights of women over the rights of men.”

It is worth noting that Colette and Marlene Dietrich were perhaps among the first women in the history of literature and public performance to make people aware of the significance of female bisexuality. The recently made biographical film about Colette illustrates a famous episode from her life: the scandal caused by her public kiss with her partner, the Marquise de Belbeuf, during a performance at the Moulin Rouge. The audience was shocked, and the head of the Paris police intervened.

Today, however, it is probably worth recalling that within the often-cited acronym LGBT, the letter B refers—in a certain sense—to a disposition of mind that, according to the research of the aforementioned Zhana Vrangalova and dozens of other scholars, characterizes about 25 percent of women.

Mentioning the interwar years also brings us, whether we wish it or not, to the interesting issue of how sexuality was treated by authoritarian regimes.

After the period of the Weimar Republic came, as we know, the grim historical catastrophes of Nazism and the communist system. Neither in Hitler’s Germany nor in the Soviet Union was sexual freedom encouraged.

In the countries of the so-called socialist bloc, dependent on the Soviet Union, the media promoted restraint and a puritanical posture. Those who looked—so far as it was then possible—toward the cultural productions of the West were struck by the growing relaxation of morals there, something that may be illustrated by the films of stars such as Brigitte Bardot, Marilyn Monroe, and Sophia Loren.

Today, most communities in European countries—or at least those citizens who identify with broadly liberal currents of thought—are averse to restricting the freedom to cultivate, or even simply to express, one’s sexuality. Contemporary literature and cinema testify to this.

At the same time, however, one must note the emergence of new moral tendencies: feminist campaigns such as the “Me Too” movement, anti-sexism, increasing vigilance over the forms of sexual expression, and the criminalization of prostitution in some Scandinavian countries.