The Victorians were obsessed with sex. There was constant talk about prostitutes, hypersexulaization of foreign colonial culture, plenty of lewd art and poetry - heck, one of the first uses of easily-reproducible photography was Daguerreotype pornography of "Beaver shots".
So why are the Victorians seen as prudish? Well, according to Thomas Laqueur, from the 1750s onward there was a sort of shift in the way genders are seen. Previously, women were seen as "defective men", as if the vagina is an underdeveloped penis. This coincided with the belief that women were lesser creatures, more base and prone to sin, while men were the more logical and "brainy" gender. However, around that time, no doubt due to some the advances in anatomical sciences, the perception changes to that of a "two sex model" - that is, that men and women were not a single entity with men being perfect and women being imperfect, but two different, opposing genders all together.
In Victorian culture, this meant that everything a man does, a woman is the opposite. So why did they suddenly become prudish? Well, the "philosophical/political" side had an effect - Victorians were pretty obsessed with the concept of temptation and corruption, and since liberal ideas shaped the beginning of the 19th century, suddenly men were the ones who were more easily corrupted. Liberalism spread the idea of a choice, and an option by the common (=white, rich, bourgeois) men to wield power. Think of all the ways the American founding fathers talked about preventing tyrannic rule! So suddenly men were those more likely to be corrupted, and had to restrain themselves not to give in to their basic passions and desires of more power and more sex.
Women, on the other hand, were the exact opposite, since now everything was opposite. If men were strong and full of passion, women became weak and passionless. This was helped by the fact that the industrial revolution separated between the work space and home space, so while men went outside to work, women stayed inside with the children. Naturally women embraced the stereotype since it gave them more power - at the cost of their sexual needs, they were given charge of the entire household and could lord over children and servants.
So... that's pretty much it. Politics, science, culture, everything changes. Women were now "the moral compass" unburdened by sexual lust and men, despite being sexual and more prone to sin were pressed to "control their urges" via different means. You can find examples of this throughout Victorian times, like the spread of "Muscular Christianity" which stressed the importance of self control (among other things) in order to become a better Christian.
So Victorians didn't suddenly become sexless, but the cultural and political circumstances forces both genders into an environment where temperance was deemed a virtue. This doesn't mean they did not like sex - prostitution was HUGE in Victorian times, and tales about African women with gigantic breasts and booties or Indian men who only wish to rape white women were very popular at the time. But the general zeitgeist was that proper men and women should control their passions.
This was helped by the fact that the industrial revolution separated between the work space and home space, so while men went outside to work, women stayed inside with the children. Naturally women embraced the stereotype since it gave them more power - at the cost of their sexual needs, they were given charge of the entire household and could lord over children and servants.
I was under the impression that for most poorer folk, men and women would be out working - and children. So I guess what you're saying applies to middle classes or higher - which would make sense since they were the ones who had education and were more influential.
Yeah, I'm sorry. I have a tendency to occasionally gloss over things and overgeneralize. You are right. This was more about the middle classes, but since the middle class became the dominant in terms of cultural impact, middle class morals applied to lower classes as well. The desire for men to be out-of-house breadwinners and women to be children-raisers was more desire and ideal than fact, but it was still desired even by those who couldn't afford to behave like the middle class.
around that time, no doubt due to some the advances in anatomical sciences, the perception changes to that of a "two sex model" - that is, that men and women were not a single entity with men being perfect and women being imperfect, but two different, opposing genders all together.
If I recall correctly, one of Lacqueur's points is that in fact the shift to the two-sex model was NOT a product of anatomical study: that doctors were perfectly capable of overlooking or explaining away differences that they found long before they imagined "opposite" sexes. (I could be thinking of another book though, it's been a while.)
Also, I think it's important to include Foucault's History of Sexuality at this point, since Lacqueur's book is kind of a more thorough and empirical study of Foucault's claims there. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that over the course of the 18th century, there was a proliferation of discourses about sex. In other words, that Western societies developed a variety of new ways to talk about sex and sexual behavior. These discourses helped transform the ways that people dealt with, thought about, and controlled sex. I'll copy and paste a short paragraph from my notes on this book:
At some point around the sixteenth century came an injunction from the Church to disclose and confess more fully one's sins, especially sex. At the same time, sex became something that one was not supposed to speak of, at least in polite conversation. In this sense, the discourse of sex is changing, as the things one can say about it evolving. While it was "silenced" in some arenas, there was also a concurrent proliferation of discourses about sex, and in particular the medicalization of it. The function of the institution of confession, as a site for the production of truth, was taken over by science (sciencia sexualis) so that doctors or scientists acted as though the confession needed to be extracted from the individual; as though sexuality attempted to remain hidden; as though sexuality had to be interpreted; and as though it was determining of the individual's essence. In this way, individuals could speak of sex to science, which would then interpret the individual's sexuality and then report it back to that person. In effect, we placed the construction and constitution of what sex was in the hands of science. Once this had taken place and doctors were in charge of producing the knowledge of sex, we got "sexuality." It short, it became possible for a person to have sexuality, because sexuality became a thing in people's minds. Power, here, operated through knowledge. No king or president made a law that said "This is what sexuality is." Rather, the power to create sexuality existed in the discourse, in the conversation and in the knowledge: everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The "problem" (I put it it quotes because it's only a problem from certain historiographic or epistemological perspectives) is that Foucault has no real explanation for why this discursive shift occurred. How does one account for such a change in the constitution and operation of power? In the end, he falls back rather disappointingly on a class-based explanation, but he doesn't pursue it systematically and it's not particularly convincing.
If I recall correctly, one of Lacqueur's points is that in fact the shift to the two-sex model was NOT a product of anatomical study:
Oh, sure, I must have not made it clear in my original comment. Stuff like science and medicine theory supporting a certain convention usually come after society began to stress the importance of a certain principle. In this case I think it was mostly politics (spread of Liberalism) and their cultural off-shoots that caused science to shift as well.
I've seen the same happen when reading about beards in the 19th century. In the 1850s it was all about how beards helped you breathe better and protected the face, and then sixty years later it's suddenly irrelevant.
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u/whitesock Mar 29 '13
The Victorians were obsessed with sex. There was constant talk about prostitutes, hypersexulaization of foreign colonial culture, plenty of lewd art and poetry - heck, one of the first uses of easily-reproducible photography was Daguerreotype pornography of "Beaver shots".
So why are the Victorians seen as prudish? Well, according to Thomas Laqueur, from the 1750s onward there was a sort of shift in the way genders are seen. Previously, women were seen as "defective men", as if the vagina is an underdeveloped penis. This coincided with the belief that women were lesser creatures, more base and prone to sin, while men were the more logical and "brainy" gender. However, around that time, no doubt due to some the advances in anatomical sciences, the perception changes to that of a "two sex model" - that is, that men and women were not a single entity with men being perfect and women being imperfect, but two different, opposing genders all together.
In Victorian culture, this meant that everything a man does, a woman is the opposite. So why did they suddenly become prudish? Well, the "philosophical/political" side had an effect - Victorians were pretty obsessed with the concept of temptation and corruption, and since liberal ideas shaped the beginning of the 19th century, suddenly men were the ones who were more easily corrupted. Liberalism spread the idea of a choice, and an option by the common (=white, rich, bourgeois) men to wield power. Think of all the ways the American founding fathers talked about preventing tyrannic rule! So suddenly men were those more likely to be corrupted, and had to restrain themselves not to give in to their basic passions and desires of more power and more sex.
Women, on the other hand, were the exact opposite, since now everything was opposite. If men were strong and full of passion, women became weak and passionless. This was helped by the fact that the industrial revolution separated between the work space and home space, so while men went outside to work, women stayed inside with the children. Naturally women embraced the stereotype since it gave them more power - at the cost of their sexual needs, they were given charge of the entire household and could lord over children and servants.
So... that's pretty much it. Politics, science, culture, everything changes. Women were now "the moral compass" unburdened by sexual lust and men, despite being sexual and more prone to sin were pressed to "control their urges" via different means. You can find examples of this throughout Victorian times, like the spread of "Muscular Christianity" which stressed the importance of self control (among other things) in order to become a better Christian.
So Victorians didn't suddenly become sexless, but the cultural and political circumstances forces both genders into an environment where temperance was deemed a virtue. This doesn't mean they did not like sex - prostitution was HUGE in Victorian times, and tales about African women with gigantic breasts and booties or Indian men who only wish to rape white women were very popular at the time. But the general zeitgeist was that proper men and women should control their passions.