The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala

Mar 08, 2013 Lynette Twaddle added it

This always seems a bit of an odd book to have read: to be honest title doesn't help, especially when you borrow it from the library. However, once you have mastered your blushes and borrowed/brought your copy be prepared for an interesting read.

While the book p reports from its title to look at sex through time, it begins with recorded time, with the middle ages and other earlier periods opening the main argument of the book, lumped into the same period. Here we see the small mindedness of reli...more

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Apr 30, 2012 rameau rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc-galley, historical, non-fiction, read-in-2012

Let's see if we can divide that blurb into more palatable chunks.

A man admits that, when drunk, he tried to have sex with an eighteen-year-old girl; she is arrested and denies they had intercourse, but finally begs God's forgiveness. Then she is publicly hanged alongside her attacker. These events took place in 1644, in Boston, where today they would be viewed with horror. How--and when--did such a complete transformation of our culture's attitudes toward sex occur?

The Origins of Sex is full of...more

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Feb 05, 2013 Vivek Tejuja rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Sex should not be spoken about in our country or that’s what it seems. In a country like India, where most things are taboo, the one that tops the list is sex and its talk. Sex I think on a very generic level has been taboo in most countries and most places before they woke up and were so-called “liberated” by the idea of talking about it and not being ashamed or shy. At the same time, it is all about the action and ironically so as I was reading “The Origins of Sex” by Faramerz Dabhoiwala I was...more
Sex should not be spoken about in our country or that’s what it seems. In a country like India, where most things are taboo, the one that tops the list is sex and its talk. Sex I think on a very generic level has been taboo in most countries and most places before they woke up and were so-called “liberated” by the idea of talking about it and not being ashamed or shy. At the same time, it is all about the action and ironically so as I was reading “The Origins of Sex” by Faramerz Dabhoiwala I was amazed at what happened in the fifteenth century to those who had sex outside the marriage and also without being married. The revelation at times was so much to handle and yet the book is so relevant for our times (in some parts).

“The Origins of Sex” is not an easy read. At the same time, it is not difficult either. One has to shed all inhibitions while reading, more so because of the anecdotes. The reason I say this is I remember last month when attending the Jaipur Literature Festival, one of the sessions was by Faramerz Dabhoiwala who spoke for an hour about sex and how it was treated in the Western culture till sexual revolution came to being. At one point he spoke of something highly relevant to men those times – a kind of club where they would meet and ejaculate together after being aroused by either maids or prostitutes. By the end of this anecdote, some of the people sitting in the crowd were gob smacked and almost uttered, “Gross” and booed a little as well. This from a crowd where one would assume that everyone was sexually liberated (or so we think).

The book delves deep in the times that led to the revolution and post the revolution as well. It ends briefly at the Victorian Era and though he tries to speak about it a little in the twenty-first century, however I think Faramerz needs to come out with another book of this nature, because it is much needed. The book is divided into six parts and each part is unique and wonderfully researched. My favourite parts are the ones where he talks of sexual celebrities in those times (one of whom is on the cover of the book), the explosion of print, of how men and women were coexisting then and but of course the parts of homosexuality and its importance in a world where sex was condemned, and meant only for procreation, if the parties were married and never for pleasure.

The writing is precise and funny in most parts and as you read along you realize that sexual suppression and its punishment was so severe and totally not needed, so in the sense, some funny parts become ironical and maybe intended to be this way. Faramerz is a brilliant writer and I could not believe that this was his first book, because the writing is experienced and as I said very-well researched which is most needed for a non-fiction work. This book made me see how it all began when it came to sex and how regressive we get day by day in this time and age, despite calling ourselves modern and with forward-thought. My best moments with the book have been reading it either on the train or the bus and getting curious glances from men and women. This just goes to show how we treat sex in our country – no matter what the medium. I would definitely recommend this book to everyone this month. A refreshing read for sure.
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Dec 21, 2012 Elaine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I thought this book was very interesting -- although I didn't necessarily agree with all of Dabhoiwala's claims -- trying to stake out A moment when defining changes in the perception, regulation and portrayal of sex took place seems problematic to me, given the ups and downs and infinite variety of those things throughout history. Nevertheless, the portrayal of so many fascinating phenomena of the 17th and 18th centuries in England -- libertinism, nascent feminism, the cult of celebrity prostit...more

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Aug 01, 2012 Avril rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sexuality

This was an absolutely fascinating read by a historian who definitely knows his period. The sheer volume of sources, primary and secondary alike, is almost overwhelming - there are pages upon pages of notes, many referring to manuscripts and other archive material. But the book isn't just well-researched, it's also extremely well-written. I read it relatively quickly, entertained and amused as well as enlightened.

Some of the elements of this first 'sexual revolution' were familiar to me: the mov...more This was an absolutely fascinating read by a historian who definitely knows his period. The sheer volume of sources, primary and secondary alike, is almost overwhelming - there are pages upon pages of notes, many referring to manuscripts and other archive material. But the book isn't just well-researched, it's also extremely well-written. I read it relatively quickly, entertained and amused as well as enlightened.

Some of the elements of this first 'sexual revolution' were familiar to me: the move from an overwhelming concern with issues of public order to a notion of sexual privacy; the change from women being considered the lustier sex to women being thought of as almost asexual. The material about the social context in which 'rescuing' fallen women became a possibility illuminated for me the novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell which make that a plot point.

What was completely new to me was the section on 'The Media and the Message', which talked about the ways in which new media like pamphlets and prints enabled the spread of sexual material to a new 'general public'. It was the 'Internet promotes pornography' of its day! The men who then carried tiny pictures of famous prostitutes in their watches would now, I imagine, simply look for images of naked women on-line. As Dabhoiwala argues, the foundations of the modern obsession with pornography were laid in the 18th century.

Dabhoiwala also points out what various feminists have argued for decades; Western sexual revolution(s) - the one that we believe began in the 1960s and the much earlier one that he describes - have usually been wonderful for straight men, but have been much less liberating for women and homosexuals. As 'natural' sex became more acceptable, 'unnatural' sex like homosexuality became more strictly policed, and the continuing sexual double standard meant that men were able to enjoy extra-marital sex without it affecting their lives in the way that it impacted on women. I definitely do not want to go back to a pre-Enlightenment policing of sexuality, but sexual revolutions haven't been unmixed blessings.

Reading this history in the context of the sexuality debate of the Uniting Church in Australia, which I've been observing and participating in for decades, I understand a little more why there is such a sharp division between the Anglo-Celtic members and the Pacific Island and indigenous members of the Church on issues to do with sexuality. If it is the case that Anglo-Celts are coming from a culture that started to prioritize privacy and individual sexual freedom several centuries ago, while Pacific Islanders and indigenous people are coming from cultures that prioritize public order and discipline of sexual matters, we're approaching issues of sexuality from absolutely and completely different perspectives. No wonder we're struggling to discuss homosexuality! I'm not sure that knowing this will help me participate better in the debate, but it certainly helps explain why the debate keeps stalling.

One final note: Dabhoiwala quotes an entry from John Wesley's journal on reading an account of James Cook's voyages: "Meeting with a celebrated book, a volume of Captain Cook's voyages, I sat down to read it with huge expectations. But how was I disappointed. I observed, 1. Things absolutely incredible. A nation ... without any sense of shame! Men and women coupling together in the face of the sun, and in the sight of scores of people! ... Hume or Voltaire might believe this: but I cannot.' Sexuality debates in the Uniting Church frequently include someone mentioning the sexual ethics taught to their culture by Methodist missionaries as one reason that they cannot accept same-sex relationships. I wish John Wesley had been just a little less judgemental of what he read in Cook. My life today might be much easier!

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Apr 13, 2012 Nick Stibbs rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book, which has an academic flavour, takes a journey through the 17th, 18th and 19th century, exploring how Enlightenment thinkers tussled with Puritan reformers, to etch out the sexual mores of post-Reformation England. Whilst we might think the battle was won by those on the more libertarian end of the spectrum, we can observe echoes of anti-prostitution campaigns in such contemporary movements such as Stop the Traffik, which share much of the fervour initiated by liberal Christian reform...more

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Jan 15, 2013 Annie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical, non-fiction

By turns intriguing and disturbing. How did society's (read English society) attitude towards sex change so much in 200 years? When did public and private switch? How did women change from being perceived as sexual predators to sexual prey?
I found the section dealing with seduction the most difficult to read. Extracts from Samuel Pepy's diary detailing his pursuit of a business partner's wife is difficult to read through a 21st century woman's eyes. This is not seduction. She is not a willing pa...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Kinga rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is an excellent ice-breaker on the public transport. Trust me on this one. No one will talk to you about the book you’re reading on the bus unless it says ‘sex’ on the cover. It just really does bring the teenage boy out of everyone.

The book itself is not as dirty as an average schoolboy’s mind but there are a few really juicy anecdotes to spice up its academic tone. Dabhoiwala presents us with a thesis that the first sexual revolution happened a couple of hundred years before the 1960...more This book is an excellent ice-breaker on the public transport. Trust me on this one. No one will talk to you about the book you’re reading on the bus unless it says ‘sex’ on the cover. It just really does bring the teenage boy out of everyone.

The book itself is not as dirty as an average schoolboy’s mind but there are a few really juicy anecdotes to spice up its academic tone. Dabhoiwala presents us with a thesis that the first sexual revolution happened a couple of hundred years before the 1960s. Admittedly, it was a revolution that dragged, went back and forth, and included mostly white heterosexual men from the middle class and up. Yet, it is certain that something shifted between 1600-1800. It probably had to do with more religious freedom which usually goes hand in hand with other freedoms. Up until 17th century sex between two consenting adults was not a private affair. It was everybody’s business to make sure any fornicating (I love the word ‘fornicate’!) was suitably punished, even by death.

Then fairly suddenly a new idea appeared, that maybe the Bible doesn’t always get it right and from this originated the fresh conviction that fornicating, while perhaps morally wrong, should not exactly be against the law. And if anyone wants to fornicate and burn in hell for this, that’s their problem. The society will restrict itself to scorning the adulterers and not having them flagellated, because that’s just, well, medieval.

Another new concept was the supposed moral superiority of women. Up until then women were more or less seen as Sin incarnated. They were too weak and not smart enough to resist any temptation therefore gave themselves easily to any desire and have been the cause of the downfall of a man since Eve gave him that apple. Female sexual powers were to be reckoned with and it was even believed that female orgasm was necessary for conception. That’s an interesting and empowering idea, ladies, but luckily it has been abandoned as that would surely be the saddest form of contraception (except for abstinence I suppose).

It all changed around the 18th century when men suddenly came to the humbling conclusion that women are actually pure and innocent naturally while men are the lusty ones. And then enters the Rake! A rake is a man who seeks out innocent maiden and ruins them. That’s his job. A rake is the worst thing that can happen to a young lady. Now, if you think that being believed to be morally superior is somehow good for you, then think again. Especially if you are also at a disadvantage physically, economically and socially, which women were. With this brand new attitude men earned themselves a free get out of jail card and shifted all the responsibility onto women. "We men, are lusty, we can’t help it. It’s our nature and that’s that, now you, young maidens, are chaste and pure by nature, so it shouldn’t be that hard for you to resist the temptation, unless, of course, there is something seriously wrong with you."

This review is now getting a bit longish and I haven’t even got through half of my notes because I ended up rambling. So to be concise: There were lots of other things that changed and lots of news ideas were discussed. Some brave thinkers proposed the legalization of polygamy (which culminated with Joseph Smith who went as far as to start a new religion just so he can have more than one wife. Very funny, as these days most men have to be coerced to taking even one wife,) other men proposed complete abolition of marriage as some sort of anachronistic nonsense, and Jeremy Bentham heterosexual himself wrote an essay urging to give full rights to homosexuals, but no one wanted to print it.

The attitude toward prostitutes changed accordingly, as well – they were no longer evil, they were to be pitied, as obviously being naturally chaste must’ve been at some point spoiled by a lusty man or two (males were excused though, because it’s better they do it with prostitutes than other men, God forbid, and they surely would because they couldn’t control themselves). It created a new fashionable branch of philanthropy: helping fallen women. The rich in their amazing generosity built Magdalen Houses where all fallen women could be brainwashed and come out pure and clean. The prostitutes who escaped the clutches of Magdalen Houses could become real celebrities and have proto-tabloids follow them around and publish sensational stories about how they fell off a horse et cetera. If they were smart they could make quite a lot of money before dying of syphilis by taking on rich lovers, blackmailing them and then selling the stories to the press. The fact that now everyone could print anything definitely helped changing attitudes to sex. Nothing relaxes morals better than the knowledge that other people are doing it as well.

To summarise I will quote a certain self-published author I have read: “Everything changed and many things stayed the same”. To say that there was a sexual revolution in the 18th might be a bit of an overstatement, but something has changed and many of the attitudes to sex which were born then remain in the way we think about sex and gender still. “The Origins of Sex” is a compelling read rich with anecdotes and illustrations and it was often hard to put down. A few times when I was reading it late in the evening my boyfriend would call out from the bedroom frustrated:

“Oh, I can’t believe you’d rather be READING about it!”
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Apr 29, 2012 Sam rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, kindle, non-fiction, owned, review-copies, society

Subtitled A History of The First Sexual Revolution, The Origins of Sex promises to explain how the Western world, and England in particular, went from policing sexual behaviour to a more liberal viewpoint in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on court records, novels, newspapers, art and debate, Dahoiwala argues that the Enlightenment changed sexual behaviour in ways that still impact us today.

Thoughts:
I was excited about starting this book as I'm usually a big fan of social histo...more Subtitled A History of The First Sexual Revolution, The Origins of Sex promises to explain how the Western world, and England in particular, went from policing sexual behaviour to a more liberal viewpoint in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing on court records, novels, newspapers, art and debate, Dahoiwala argues that the Enlightenment changed sexual behaviour in ways that still impact us today.

Thoughts:
I was excited about starting this book as I'm usually a big fan of social history. I was instantly hooked by the descriptions of attitudes towards sex in the 1600s, of men and women hanged and beaten for engaging in adultery or pre-marital sex. The idea of sex as part of public life, policed by the community rather than something private seems so foreign to us now.

Dabhoiwala then goes on to explain how attitudes changed. There are four main arguments made throughout the course of the book; that the breakdown of religious authority led to people being allowed to have contrasting views, that the Enlightenment made society more liberal, that women started to have a public voice for the first time and that mass media publicised sex and made celebrities out of famous mistresses. All these factors meant that sex came to be seen as something private, not something to be policed by the legal system or by members of the community.

I found the arguments convincing and the subject matter fascinating but unfortunately reading this book was a struggle. The same arguments were repeated over and over again, just with the use of different examples. I know Dabhoiwala had completed an impressive amount of research, but I don't think the reader needs to hear about all of it in order to appreciate the arguments. The tone of the writing is also very academic and dry and I don't think I would have finished the book if I hadn't agreed to provide a review for it. It's just a shame as the subject is so interesting but yet the writing makes it less so, by the time I was half way through I was wanting to move on to something else.
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May 27, 2012 Henk-Jan van der Klis rated it 3 of 5 stars

In The Origins of Sex, dr. Faramerz Dabhoiwala (fellow & tutor in history, Exeter College Oxford) provides a thorough study on the origins of sexuality in our modern Western culture. For millennia, sex had been strictly regulated by the Church, the state, and society. Until the 17th century harsh punishments were given to men and women that had sex outside of marriage. But by the 19th century everything had changed. And for us, 21st century westerners sexuality is so woven into our culture,...more In The Origins of Sex, dr. Faramerz Dabhoiwala (fellow & tutor in history, Exeter College Oxford) provides a thorough study on the origins of sexuality in our modern Western culture. For millennia, sex had been strictly regulated by the Church, the state, and society. Until the 17th century harsh punishments were given to men and women that had sex outside of marriage. But by the 19th century everything had changed. And for us, 21st century westerners sexuality is so woven into our culture, literature, television programmes, ads en ethics, that most of us even think about alternatives.
Dabhoiwala has done a lot of research from laws, court cases, novels, pornography, history, paintings and diaries and letters, that illustrate the changing opinions on sexuality.

The most basic modern novelty was a perennial indeterminacy about the limits of sexual freedom. In place of a relatively coherent, authoritative world view that had endured for centuries, the Enlightenment left a much greater confusion and plurality of moral perspectives, with irresolvable tensions between them. At a basic level, attitudes after 1800 evolved in two contrasting ways. On the one hand we can trace continued, or even tightened, social control over various forms of sexual behaviour. Though the machinery of public punishment had been largely abandoned, its ideals were not. Against this backdrop of apparent national decline and social upheaval, the importance of religious faith and of social conservatism came to be widely reaffirmed: only by going back to basics would the nation find its way again. For women of all classes, sexual ignorance and passivity came increasingly to be valued as essential components of respectable femininity and heterosexual love. This was not just a male ideal: most women themselves deeply internalized it, and policed it in others. Just as important, especially in the English context, was the further development of social double standards. Regulating, controlling, and forcibly improving the sexual mores of the working classes became in the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, an immense fixation for many middle- and upper-class politicians, commentators, and social reformers.

The ultimate legacy of the Enlightenment has thus been far from straightforward, and its consequences are still unfolding. Yet in retrospect it is easy to see that it marked the point at which the sexual culture of the west diverged onto a completely new trajectory. If anything, the characteristics of that culture - its individualism, its explicitness, its permissiveness, the equal status claimed by women and by homosexuals - have become more distinctive in recent decades, even as the world has grown smaller. They have also been widely influential: just as western feminism has had an impact across the globe, so too have western concepts of sexual freedom.(less)

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Apr 07, 2013 Warwick rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: history, sex, feminism, social-history, literary-history

There's a pernicious assumption visible in a lot of modern treatments of sex and gender relations, which boils down to the following idea: that men want sex, and will pursue it aggressively, while women want love and have to fend off men's sexual advances until they get it – at which point sex may be offered as a sort of reward. This nonsense underlies everything from chick flicks to Apatowesque bromantic comedies, from advertising to political debates, from song lyrics to prizewinning novels, a...more There's a pernicious assumption visible in a lot of modern treatments of sex and gender relations, which boils down to the following idea: that men want sex, and will pursue it aggressively, while women want love and have to fend off men's sexual advances until they get it – at which point sex may be offered as a sort of reward. This nonsense underlies everything from chick flicks to Apatowesque bromantic comedies, from advertising to political debates, from song lyrics to prizewinning novels, and it has been deeply internalised by a lot of people.

Some writers have sought justification for it in evolutionary psychology (unconvincingly); Gordon Rattray Taylor tried to explain it by means of an extended effort at religious psychoanalysis with his Sex In History back in the fifties. I enjoyed that book, but its scholarly credentials seem a bit doubtful. Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origins of Sex is the book I've been looking for: measured, entertaining, convincing, and completely absorbing.

First of all, he makes the important point that our idea of what men and women want is a uniquely modern phenomenon. Throughout the Middle Ages, ‘the basic idea [was] that sex was fun, and that men and women desired it, indeed required it’, and furthermore ‘it had always been presumed that women were the more lustful sex’. He locates the important change – in this attitude and in several others – as taking place over the two centuries from 1600 to 1800, and that is where the book's focus lies.

Let's be clear, there was nothing utopian about the pre-modern view of sex. It was a misogynistic set-up, and it was used to justify a widespread culture of forced seduction and rape. In fact, what Dabhoiwala brings out very effectively is the tragedy of the fact that the changes towards a more modern view came about because of growing concern over women's rights. Activists thought that a developing stress on ‘the “naturalness” of female chastity’ would better protect women and lead to a more equal society; actually, it just became another way ‘in which the intellectual foundations of patriarchy were gradually reshaped’.

Dabhoiwala traces this process through diaries, letters, trials – and also the growth of the novel, a medium which emerged during this period, and which is deeply shaped by these ideas. The trope of men assailing female chastity is of course central to Richardson, and we get a good look here at just how fascinated literary society in general was with this basic concept. There is also a good exploration of the rise of celebrity prostitutes, some of whom raised vast fortunes through a little judicious blackmail.

Sex was seen as so polluting for women that a single incident could turn them from a respectable lady to a whore literally overnight. When the idea was mooted by legal activists of forcing a man to marry any girl he seduced, Sir Sydney Montagu MP was less than impressed: ‘he that doth get a wench with child and marries her afterward it is as if a man should shit in his hat and then clap it upon his head’. This book is crammed with similarly mouth-dropping anecdotes. I loved hearing about the dubious academic methods of William Acton, the great Victorian authority on prostitution, who concluded ‘merely from their appearance’ that ‘a third at least’ of all the girls he saw at a London dancehall must be whores.

My only quibble really is with the title – this is basically a study in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century social history rather than a comprehensive history of sex. But what there is I found deeply engaging, and this book really helped crystallise a lot of ideas for me about monogamy, sexual relations, and early feminism that I'd been thinking about for years. It's also extremely relevant. These attitudes are the ones that shaped the modern world…and sadly, the way women in this period are either ‘desexualised’ or turned into celebrity prostitutes is likely to be something you'll recognise pretty quickly after you put the book down.
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Mar 28, 2013 Steve Scott rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: social-and-cultural-issues, history, human-sexuality

This was a well researched book that digs into the history of the first sexual revolution.

Dabhoiwala makes a good argument that the Enlightenment and the decline of religious power, along with the spread of print media in its various forms, brought huge changes in how society looked at sex. He outlines the 16th and 17th century traditions of state and church imposed sexual discipline. These mandated punishments for fornication, adultery, prostitution, and sodomy. Within a hundred years the stan...more

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Dec 26, 2012 Naftoli rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, sex

This book caught my eye when Nick Stibbs read and commented on it. I bought it and about 30 pages into it, asked myself, “Hey why are you reading yet another book on human sexuality? Is it really going to offer up a new idea? Come on now!’ I spent most of my time in graduate school researching and reading on this topic and recently books of this nature have helped me get to sleep at night! However, Mr. Dabhoiwala surprised me! About midway through the book he began to present new analyses regard...more This book caught my eye when Nick Stibbs read and commented on it. I bought it and about 30 pages into it, asked myself, “Hey why are you reading yet another book on human sexuality? Is it really going to offer up a new idea? Come on now!’ I spent most of my time in graduate school researching and reading on this topic and recently books of this nature have helped me get to sleep at night! However, Mr. Dabhoiwala surprised me! About midway through the book he began to present new analyses regarding the slow, steady paradigm shifts that brought us to the present day.
Like all academic books on sexuality, this book is not really about sex. It’s about the uses and abuses of power, class conflict, double-standards, the tension between the private and public domains, theocratic authority, and many other factors of interest to social scientists, religious studies scholars, political scientists, cultural studies, European history, and the like.
It is remarkable that this is Mr. Dabhoiwala’s first book. He shows a particular grace and sophistication that one does not always find even in academic writing. He refrains from using adjectives to convey his personal feelings (which is the way expository writing should be written!) in an attempt to let the reader come to her own conclusions. From where I sit, I think Dabhoiwala’s greatest contribution in this work is to chart the shifts in English thought that lead us to our current views/confusion on sexuality, the public & the private, and hot button issues such as prostitution, rehabilitation, marriage, and the government’s role in policing interpersonal behaviors.
He spends much of the time discussing the developments of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries then presents “The Victorian compromise,” something I had never heard of. The Victorian compromise struck a very uncomfortable balance between private and public behaviors but viewed differently than one would think as nowadays we harbor very different notions of the private/public than the English did during the reign of Queen Victoria.
Finally, he introduces the new wave of thought – actually a chaotic stream of ideas that were never congealed or clearly sorted – by the Enlightenment and makes the assertion that the unfinished work of the Enlightenment continues its unfinished business and unfolds before us even onto the present day. This argument is not comforting but certainly sheds light on controversial issues of today such as birth control, abortion, criminalization of prostitution, and even ingrained ideas that men are sexual wanderers whilst women are, by nature, passive and sexually monogamous.
I’d like to share a few sentences from page 362:
How far, then, have we really come? We like to think of social change in terms of linear progress: that, too, is a legacy of the Enlightenment. Yet this predisposes us to historical short-sightedness – we easily forget how contingent our present state is, that the past is littered with alternative paths not taken, that even within the last few generations the boundaries of the right to sexual privacy have been continually challenged and redrawn. Both in law and in social practice, the widespread acceptance of sexual freedom for women and unmarried persons is a comparatively novel development. Even today, across the English-speaking world, the provision of contraception and of abortion remains highly contested, as does the issue of prostitution. (end of quote)
Further, though Islam is never discussed in this book, the author’s presentation of western individualism and personal freedoms – the entire trajectory of western culture – it occurred to me, has no counterpart in the Islamic world. The author attributes secularization, i.e., the loss of religious authority after the Protestant Reformation to an ever-widening interpretation of morality and thus a bridge to personal freedoms, this also has no counterpart in the Muslim world. It is a small wonder that women have comparatively no freedoms in Muslim-majority countries as compared to European-based cultures. The idea that parents in the U.S., Europe, or Israel would force a clitorectomy on a young girl, deny a woman a driver’s license, force unwilling women to wear a hijab, etc. is absolutely unthinkable. Yet it makes complete sense when one realizes that Muslim-majority countries have not relinquished religious authority and that a handful of men in those countries get to interpret the holy book for the entire population. Some sort of “Reformation” is necessary in those countries to facilitate a collective move toward individualism. But I digress.
Obviously I give this book 5 stars and eagerly recommend it.
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May 04, 2012 Christina (A Reader of Fictions) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: netgalley

No matter how fascinating the topic, I always approach nonfiction skeptically. While some is well-written and engaging, it sometimes seems the authors are intentionally trying to put their readers, mostly luckless students, directly to sleep. Much as I love sleep, I can generally manage it just fine on my own, so I have no interest in such tomes. Thankfully, the writing of The Origins of Sex, while highly scholarly, is also pretty readable so far as serious scholarship goes.

What strikes me perha...more No matter how fascinating the topic, I always approach nonfiction skeptically. While some is well-written and engaging, it sometimes seems the authors are intentionally trying to put their readers, mostly luckless students, directly to sleep. Much as I love sleep, I can generally manage it just fine on my own, so I have no interest in such tomes. Thankfully, the writing of The Origins of Sex, while highly scholarly, is also pretty readable so far as serious scholarship goes.

What strikes me perhaps most of all, having read this book, is how little progress we have actually made as a culture with regards to sex. Sure, we went through a sexual revolution and all of that, and we definitely see ourselves as being way more open to sex than our antecedents, but this just isn't the case. I mean, the idea, which is most definitely still pervasive, that women don't have as much of a sexual drive as men do, for example, stems from the mid eighteenth century. Prior to that point, women were believed to be lusty tempters, like Eve. Really the only real difference lies in the treatment/place of women in society, but that's not too different in all countries, and it doesn't apply much to the sexual realm for many.

It should be noted that Dabhoiwala is speaking specifically to the development of opinions of sex in Europe. The discussion is, in fact, limited almost exclusively to Britain. However, the thought there obviously impacts the United Stated quite a bit. I'm not sure how helpful this would be to completely different cultures, except perhaps to get people thinking about their own cultures treatment of sex throughout the ages.

Scholarship may not be your thing (honestly, it's usually not mine either), but there are some seriously shocking facts in here, as well as some facts I'm just going to store away. The focus is definitely on the treatment of women with regards to sex, so I definitely recommend this to feminists. Now, just so you can see how entertaining history can be, I'm going to share a couple of fun facts with you about special 'masculine sex clubs':

"One of its most vigorous proponents, the politician Sir Francis Dashwood, founded several libertine societies. At the centre of his estate he built a temple to Venus, landscaped to resemble a gigantic vagina."

"Even more remarkable was a much humbler club called 'the Beggar's Benison,' which from the 1730s onwards spread from the east coast of Scotland to Edinburgh, Glasgow, and as far afield as St. Petersburg in Russia. Its members met regularly to drink, talk about sex, exchange bawdy jokes and songs, and read pornography. They paid young women to strip and display themselves naked. Their central purpose was to compare penises and masturbate in front of one another, singly and together, in elaborate rights of phallic celebration."

"In the United Kingdom it is now legal for a man to brand his wife on the buttocks with a red hot iron during sex."

Men are WEIRD. What blows my mind most is that there were so many societies doing this. And they had accoutrements. It's like they thought they were a special phallus religion. Gross. As for the last, what I want to know is can the woman brand him? If not, that is RUDE. These are just a couple of historical goodies you can learn in The Origins of Sex.

I found this to be an entirely enlightening read, and recommend it highly to anyone interested in scholarship on the history of opinions on sex. It will definitely make you question some of our modern thoughts, as you realize that they're not really modern at all. (less)

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Jan 03, 2013 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Brian by: the economist

Shelves: from-the-economist

(4.0) The 'sexual revolution' from 17th century up to Victorian England

Reviews and description seemed to suggest a more broad treatment of sexuality in society, but turns out it's almost exclusively about England. That's fine, but should've been able to see that earlier. The book tackles a few perspectives on sexuality and trace them through the transition from the 17th century through mid-19th century (at times touching on 20th).

We see how marriage begins as completely controlled by the church,...more

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Jun 30, 2012 Deb rated it 4 of 5 stars

You need to take the subtitle seriously-this is a very interesting analysis of changes in sexual behavior and attitudes between the mid 1600's and 1800. Most interesting to me was the stuff on the media and celebrity--it would appear that history is repeating itself (just more rapidly).

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Sep 14, 2012 Jane rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history-sociology

Interesting topic but I didn't like the style used to present the facts, probably because it was written in a way that was too academic. Parts of the book were also too long winded for a relatively narrow scope the author has chosen to focus on.

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Jul 19, 2012 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Kind of disappointing in that it was totally confined to 17th and 18th century England. The epilogue at the end was very good but the time of the English Revolution and Charles II is just really not that interesting as far as a Sexual Revolution is concerned. I think there was a whole bunch of stuff going on in France, Europe, and the US at the time.

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Oct 22, 2012 Ken rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting, but the subject is too sprawling for a 400 pg book

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May 10, 2013 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

For my LJ review check out the following:

Sex in Culture, Law & History

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Aug 05, 2012 Luis rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great book, really enjoyable and with lots of interesting ideas and opinions about the development of sex's thought before, during and after the enlightenment.

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May 22, 2013 Chantal marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

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