societies. The pathologization of the perversions was to a great extent a response to a perceived crisis in gender roles and widespread fears that “normal” sexual drives were being deflected from their rightful ends. Women were taking jobs and entering the professions in increasing numbers, and some were even bold enough to demand equal rights and the vote. In the years leading up to World War I, some European statesmen were convinced that the growth of perversions had lowered birth rates and weakened their nation’s defenses. Thus, sadomasochistic perversions that characterized women as whip‐wielding dominatrices and men as groveling slaves were a direct inversion of the gender hierarchy. Inversion in either sex was by definition sterile, as was a fetishistic obsession with shoes, nails, bonnets, locks of hair, or any other object that deflected “normal” vaginal intromission and ejaculation. The entire family of fetishes violated the gender order by focusing the love that men and women owed spouses and children on objects, or on the “wrong” sex.
We often hear more about women’s than men’s roles in challenging traditional gender boundaries at the turn of the century. But the decline in birth rates, the new attention given to homosexuality, the retreat of many young men into their clubs or colonial service rather than into marriage and family life provoked questions about the quality of masculinity and raised the specter of impotence. In an essay entitled “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,” written in 1912, Sigmund Freud offered the explanation that, ironically, men were often impotent with their wives and only virile with prostitutes or servants precisely because they and society had overidealized women as wives and mothers and could not imagine them as objects of lust (Freud, 1953, vol. IV: 210–12). From this perspective, neither the woman who adhered closely to the traditional image of the “angel in the house” nor the feminist who challenged it could engage the sexual attentions of the conflicted men of the age!
By 1900 or so the entire range of what we still take to be “perversions” were integrated into clinical practice and came gradually into discursive use in the broader culture. The word “heterosexual” was also introduced at about this time as a deceivingly neutral description of “normal” sexual aim. Scholars have speculated that the fact of giving a name and symptomatology to a feeling or disposition that was only vaguely understood might have helped shape self‐consciousness about personal identity, making people who engaged in homosexual behavior into homosexuals, lovers of pain into masochists, and so forth. No doubt the sexual scripts of the new medical discourse shaped, to some degree, actions and expectations in individuals, but scholars have persuasively argued for a complex way of thinking about how new socially constructed identities and tastes interacted reciprocally with medical terminology. This reciprocity seems particularly clear in the case of homosexuality. The medical correspondence that the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft‐Ebing had with his patients reveals a range of reactions to the medicalization of homosexuality from outright resistance to grateful acknowledgment (Oosterhuis, 2000: 223–30).
In the course of the twentieth century, science had an even more important effect on our understanding of sexuality than at any earlier time, confirming existing prejudices in some cases, unsettling them in others. Evolutionary biologists sorted out the nature of genetic inheritance around the turn of the century and began to speculate that sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism played important roles in organic evolution by ensuring natural variability and thus adaptability in the “higher” species. To some observers this confirmed the advantages of contemporary gender arrangements, though there was some disquieting evidence that female choice in courtship and reproduction was far greater throughout the natural world than once thought. On the “micro” level of scientific discovery, scientists in the 1920s and 1930s gradually pieced together the powerful role hormones played in human sexuality. Dubbed the “sex hormones” for their influence on sexual development and libido, synthetic estrogen and later testosterone were developed and manufactured in laboratories. As scholars of these developments have pointed out, it made no sense to gender testosterone “male” and estrogen “female” as we still do today, because they do not originate exclusively in the male or female gonads and, in any event, exist naturally in both sexes.
There is no doubt that the discovery of the complex chemical and genetic underpinnings of sexual desire and the sexual body have markedly weakened the gender orthodoxies inherited from the past by drawing our attention to the extraordinary variability in the anatomy and physiology of sex. We must also note, on the other hand, that in the late twentieth century, hormone therapy is used principally to reinforce the “typical” sexual characteristics of gender, and transsexual operations are permitted in individuals who are believed to suffer from “gender dysphoria”, where “true” gender does not correspond to anatomy.
Thus, despite some growing uncertainty about nature’s plan for the human species, experts continued to find evidence that confirms the natural distinctiveness of men and women and the advantages of heterosexual sexuality. Social scientists discovered child sexuality and “adolescence” in the first decades of the century, but their response was to treat the tumultuous uncertainty of youthful sexuality as a problem to be solved, disciplined, and turned to “healthy” ends. Schemata for “normal” childhood development permeated public health and hygiene activities and youth organizations such as scouting and church groups, putting adults on guard against aberrant behavior. Menarche was converted from a private family matter to a public and hygienic rite and was integrated smoothly into consumer culture.
Sexual radicalism nonetheless flourished in this more open atmosphere. Members of the literary avant‐garde like H.G. Wells and the London Bloomsbury group formed serial heterosexual or homosexual attachments outside marriage. In America, Margaret Sanger became an international celebrity by combining feminism with an international crusade in favor of birth control, not least in order to allow women the opportunity to experience sexual relations while avoiding the dangers of childbirth. Finally, following World War I, pioneers like the Englishwoman Marie Stopes and the Dutch sexologist Theodor Van de Velde wrote explicit self‐help manuals on “married love” that broke with convention and offered visions of sexual fulfillment, pleasure, and orgasmic bliss for couples. Their advice surely brought many husbands around to a greater consideration for their wives, but it also fetishized sexual happiness, male initiative, and the all‐important orgasmic consummation, and thus almost certainly helped to popularize a set of erotic standards that were harder to attain than before.
The progressive eroticization of marriage signaled by these developments had two apparently contradictory inspirations: a libertarian desire to provide sexual alternatives to marital, procreative intercourse, and another which aimed to make marriage a more attractive site for the efficient state control of reproduction. There is more overlap in these positions than is generally appreciated. Throughout the West, state interest in the reproductive health of national populations encouraged public figures to consider eugenic measures that limited the birth rate in the lower orders and expanded it in the better‐off classes. Birth control and sterilization thus went hand in hand with cultural and fiscal incentives for satisfactory marriages, greater hygienic accountability, and an active discouragement of non‐procreative sex, especially homosexuality. The most extreme application of these various goals occurred in Nazi Germany, though some Scandinavian countries and American states had practiced the sterilization of “sex criminals” since the 1920s.
It was at this historical juncture that the sexual histories of the West and the East and parts of the southern hemisphere began to reconverge. The modernization process in China, Southeast Asia, and much of the colonized world appropriated some of the conceptual elements of Western efforts to regulate reproduction in the national interest. Intellectuals in Revolutionary China sought support for their campaigns to eliminate arranged marriages, promote maternal health and hygiene, and fight against prostitution and venereal disease. But they did much of this out of eugenic concerns for healthy births and national fitness, not simply from enlightened motives. By 1950s and the onset of the Communist Revolution, direct state intervention in reproduction became a brutal fact. Non‐procreative sexuality was severely sanctioned and a one‐child limit was put on family size in order to make the most efficient use of natural resources. Elsewhere in the developing world reproductive
