The Tragedy of Heterosexuality

by Jane Ward

A distinctive and common feature of early twentieth-century marriage self-help texts is their concern with the problem of mutual physical repulsion by wives and husbands. Sexologists and physicians by their own accounts were very busy teaching women and men how to make their bodies, and heterosexual sex itself, less repellent. Stopes was worried about the “mental revolt and loathing” that wives may feel in reaction to their husbands’ sexual violence;18 Ellis warned of the “stage of apparent repulsion and passivity” that seemed to be a normal part of women’s experience of sex with their husbands (a stage he believed would eventually give way to “active participation”);19 William Robinson, another early twentieth-century sexologist and author whom I discuss in more detail shortly, hoped that his marriage-advice manuals would address the “disgust,” “deep hatred,” and “desire for injury and revenge” that heterosexual couples felt for each other.20 If heterosexual, reproductive, married intercourse was a core organizing principle of American life in the twentieth century, how could it also be so disgusting and rage inducing? On women’s end, the most obvious answer comes from sexologists’ own accounts: marriage was a site of repeated rape and dehumanization of women by their husbands, a situation that women struggled to endure and survive. But even beyond the well-documented patriarchal violence of marriage were other contributing factors. Intercourse between white American men ...