pregnancies when an undesired female fetus was discovered, sometimes in the name of individual rights, sometimes in direct opposition to them.
In Catholic countries with a Latin heritage or new nations on the rim of the Mediterranean, twentieth‐century government intervention in the private sphere of family and sexuality has often taken the form of the enforcement of sexual honor. Honor cultures have traditionally prized the virginity of daughters and the marital chastity of wives. Women, in these cultures, live under an umbrella of protection assured by fathers, husbands, and brothers, for whom women are a source of dowry revenue or lucrative kinship alliance, which had to be defended like any form of property. Where honor cultures have been historically strong, there has been a very close correlation between gender structures and what is permitted in the domain of sexuality. In the modern era, the states of Mediterranean Europe and North Africa, Spanish South America, and especially Brazil have forcefully intervened to bolster sexual honor. In Brazil, sexual crimes against virgins were harshly punished, as were adulterers, especially wives. Crimes of passion, on the other hand, where personal or family honor were at stake, were often excused in law or jury decisions. In some Arab lands, law and custom support to this day the killing by brothers of a sister who has dishonored the family through premarital intercourse.
The last forty years of the twentieth century were witness to a series of changes in sexual beliefs and practices that have transformed modern societies in dramatic and permanent ways. It is important to note that the new attitudes and new reproductive technologies that have marked this “sexual revolution” are simply more radical or more effective versions of earlier developments. The birth‐control pill, introduced in 1960, made contraception foolproof for many women; it permitted a truly secure and decisive psychological separation of reproduction from sexual pleasure, freeing women to pursue jobs and careers while encouraging sexual experimentation. But forms of somewhat efficacious birth control have been in use since the rise of human civilizations, and sexual relations for the sake of pleasure have a long and celebrated past. Now, however, contraception and sexual pleasure were far more widely available. Even the female orgasm was freed from its inferior status. In their 1966 book, The Human Sexual Response, William Masters and Virginia Johnson demonstrated women’s powerful, multiorgasmic capacity in convincing physiological detail.
We may take all this for granted nowadays, but for those who came of age sexually on the cusp of that change – the late 1960s and 1970s – it was a brave new world. However, the drive for personal sexual emancipation that occurred in that era was inseparable, ideologically and practically, from liberationist movements for blacks, women, and the poor, and from nationalist struggles throughout the world against the vestiges of colonialism. For white, middle‐class college students in Europe and America, sympathy with these movements and the adoption of a defiantly “countercultural” sexual lifestyle was a logical application of the contemporary belief that “the personal is the political.” Utopian communities featuring sexual experimentation sprang up throughout the 1970s, pornography and public nudity flourished as never before, and live‐in couples increasingly put marriage and family on the back burner.
The last of the liberationist movements to burst on the scene was the revolt of sexual minorities. Gay and lesbian liberation exploded with dramatic force in the summer of 1969 at the Stonewall bar in New York City, when a routine police raid on a neighborhood bar provoked violent resistance from the gay clientele. Word spread quickly in gay communities throughout urban America and Europe, setting in motion gay liberation movements that were unafraid to threaten or use radical means for achieving the decriminalization of homosexuality and other meaningful legal reforms. Urbanites in cities with long‐established gay communities, and the educated readers of Alfred Kinsey’s influential publications on human sexuality in the late 1940s and early 1950s knew about the existence of homosexual minorities, but until the 1970s punitive legislation, police surveillance, and widespread discrimination kept most gay men and lesbians on the defensive. The youthful explosiveness of the “coming out” process created generational splits in the gay community that have been slow to heal.
The shock that all this sexual rebelliousness administered to traditional, marital, heterosexual, and missionary‐position sexuality was damaging. But if the stranglehold of sexual orthodoxy was broken forever, the world of sexual liberation remained a very gendered place. Female militants from the political action of the 1960s and 1970s bitterly recall the macho sexual posturing of male radicals. Many of the women who have been frontline feminists have written that the sexual revolution was “for men,” in the sense that it did less to emancipate women from sexual servitude than to complete their “sensualization” and “objectification” for the delectation of men. In practice, many women found that though sexual and reproductive autonomy were significant advantages, they did not erase the gender discrimination that persisted in the workplace, in the division of labor in the domestic sphere, or in the political world. Many feminists also found to their chagrin that prostitution, and pornography that degrades women, have prospered in the new era of relative decriminalization, not disappeared.
The deadly appearance of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s initially cut a terrible swath through gay communities throughout the world, raising the specter of a “gay” disease spread by homosexual sexual relations. Conservative and religious defenders of traditional moral norms seemed initially desperate to characterize the scourge as God’s punishment for deviations from heterosexuality, but this proved to be an entirely rearguard defense. Later events proved that any sexual contact, or infected needles could spread the disease just as well. By the turn of the century, HIV/AIDS was making the greatest headway in sub‐Saharan Africa among heterosexual populations. In the wake of the epidemic, sexual behavior has been slow to change. In the gay communities in the West that have been devastated by HIV/AIDS, some gay men have embraced monogamy or safe sex, but many others have maintained the sexual practices and dating patterns of the 1970s as a way of affirming what they have come to think of as constitutive of their identity as gay men.
The epidemic illustrates the extraordinary capacity that sexual deviance has always possessed as a symbol in moral panics and purity crusades against minorities or exotic sexual practices. In modern times, as Angus McLaren has pointed out, social upheavals or rapid changes of any kind are often read as sexual rebellions or as crises in sexuality (McLaren, 1999: 45). This was so with the fears of masturbation when adolescence emerged as a distinct new phase of childhood, with the challenges of both first‐ and second‐wave feminism, with the linking of communist subversion with [homo]sexual deviance in the 1950s, or the obsession with the innocence of children in our increasingly sexually explicit society that has led to the persecution of day‐care workers and Sunday school teachers.
As a set of attitudes and practices, desires and inhibitions, we have been able to trace sexuality though the ages and across cultures. Sexual variations are as manifold as the variations in human societies, which reminds us of the truth that the past is indeed a foreign country. However, we have also seen that within any society at some point in time there is a remarkable correlation between gender systems and the sexual cultures that shape the behavior and expectations of individuals who live within them. Sexual attitudes and practices frequently test the limits of the gender system, but are constrained by the cultural and legal barriers that have historically protected gender hierarchies, gendered work, and gendered spaces from the threat of rapid change. Sexual discourses have always possessed the power to persuade us of the possibilities of pleasure or the dangers of transgression, but historically they have followed a master script dictated by the gender arrangements of society. It may be that emerging transgender and gender‐fluid identities may eventually destabilize dominant gender hierarchies, but that moment has not yet arrived. LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer/questioning) people are still “minorities.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
1 Allen, Peter Lewis (2000) The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2 Bennet, Paula and Rosario, Vernon, eds. (1995) Solitary Pleasures. London: Routledge.
3 Bleys,
