Date: Thu, 29 May 1997 22:33:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: Pornography & Modernity; An addendum



Charlotte Keyes says:

>It is also likely that the new level of male anxiety [during the
>mid-eighteenth century], displayed in the modern taboo against all
>homosexual acts between males, was directly tied to the new ideals of love
>and marriage. Males were accustomed to establishing their dominance over
>women and children through various forms of separation and distance; tha
new >ideals of love, companionship and affectionate childbearing made this
>distance more difficult to maintain...Adolescent boys had previously been
>allowed to be sexually passive with adult males.  They were now socialized
>to avoid this.  Consequently, as men they knew that no matter how close and
>affectionate their associations with women, there remained one unbreachable
>difference [between the sexes]: men did not know what it was like to desire
>males sexually.  Only women and sodomites knew that.  Therefore, what the
>nineteenth century called *homosexuality* and *heterosexuality* are not
>distinctions to be found in universal human nature.  They were, instead,
>products of a gender system that had appeared in the early eighteenth
>century and that accompanied the new forms of marital friendship and
>paternal affection...


It is disputed whether these new forms of love affected the lives of the
poor before the middle of the nineteenth century.  But it is certain that
the taboo on homosexual behavior was fully enacted for example on the London
poor from whom the effeminate transvestite "molly" was most likely to be
recruited (R Trumbach, "Erotic Fantasy and Male Libertinism in Enlightenment
England," in Lynn Hunt [ed], *The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and
the origins of modernity, 1500-1800* [New York, 1996: Zone Books/MIT Press],
pp. 253 - 282].

For most of the eighteenth century it is not clear, however, that the modern
homosexual taboo applied to women in the way that it did to men.  In London,
it was not until the last quarter of the century that there were women who
were stigmatized as sapphists or tommies as men were called sodomites or
mollies.  

Women's sexual relations with men, and whether they were faithful wives and
not "whores", were of greater consequence of their gender standing than
their avoidance of sexual relations with women.  The psychology of women was
not yet treated, in this respect, as equivalent to that of men.  The
achievement of what twentieth century psychoanalysts have loved to call
"full adult heterosexuality" was, in the later eighteenth century, still
preserved for men.  Only men were, by those lights, fully human.

Louis Godena       





     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---