ABSTRACT
In 1500 in western societies sexual desire was as likely to be organized by differences in age as by differences in gender, and the bodies of men, women, and hermaphrodites were likely to be seen as profoundly similar. This sexual system was of long standing. In western societies it was directly linked with the world that had existed in the ancient Mediterranean. This western system was also in many ways similar to the sexual systems that could be found elsewhere in the world, for instance, in East and South Asia. The way in which the western system operated was influenced by the Christian religion, but it is likely that Christianity had for the most part accepted a system that had long existed independently of it. In western societies a masculinist system that made honourable for adult men sexual acts in which they sexually penetrated others but were not themselves penetrated, coexisted with a Christian moral and legal system that made sinful and illegal all sexual acts that occurred outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Sources suggest that many adult men might desire and penetrate both women and adolescent males. It is likely that women also desired both males and females. This desire for both genders is harder to demonstrate among women because sexual behaviour between women appeared less often in the legal sources than did behaviour between males. But sexual behaviour between males and between females was in both cases organized predominantly by differences in age, men with boys and women with girls. The study of this same-sex behaviour is the easiest way to see the difference between the traditional sexual system and the modern sexual system that came into existence in the first generation after 1700.
