ABSTRACT
There are many questions we could ask about sexuality: about duty and obligation, morality and immorality, goodness and evil, health and sickness, truth and falsity. Subtle, and not so subtle, debates around some or all of these dichotomies have dominated the Western discourse on sexuality for over two thousand years. Whatever the range of answers that may be reached, they all have the distinction of carrying a heavy weight of prescription, of telling people, often very coercively, how they must behave in order to attain the good (or moral or hygienic) life. The unifying thread of this essay, however, is that the idea of sexuality has been loaded down with too many assumptions, that it has lumbered under a weight of expectations it cannot, and should not have to, bear. ‘Sex acts’, Gayle Rubin has rightly said, ‘are burdened with an excess of significance’ [2]. We should lighten the load. One of the major difficulties in doing this has been the privileged role claimed by the experts on sex over the past hundred years in telling us what is good or bad, appropriate or inappropriate behaviour. In his Presidential address to the 1929 Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, Magnus Hirschfeld declared that: ‘A sexual ethics based on science is the only sound system of ethics’ [3]. The impulse behind this statement was noble indeed. Hirschfeld like other luminaries of this first phase of the sexological revolution, looked forward to a new enlightment in which prejudice, religious moralism, and authoritarian sexual codes would dissolve before the light of reason as provided by the new science of sex. Sexual knowledge and sexual politics marched hand in hand as the sexologists, like Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis and Auguste
Forel (joint Presidents of the World League in 1929) also became the patrons of sex reform, while sexual reformers of various hues, from feminist birth controllers to campaigners for homosexual rights, looked to the scientists for guidelines to further their activities. ‘Through science to Justice’, Hirschfeld famously proclaimed as the watchword of his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. It was the motto of the whole sex reform movement. The problem then, as now, was that the insights of this new science were not straightforward or unequivocal: to put it bluntly, sexologists disagreed with one another. Homosexual activists might look to Hirschfeld’s theories which said that they belonged to a biologically given ‘third’ or ‘intermediate’ sex to justify their claims to social justice, but the Nazis who burned Hirschfeld’s library and legacy after 1933 could equally well use more or less the same arguments to disqualify homosexuals altogether, as biological anomalies, from the new moral order-and find scientists to support them. Sexologists might point out the fact that sexuality was a rich and varied continent, but they also lent their weight to normalizing institutions, to attempts at ‘cures’, and to eugenic solutions to the ‘problems’ of over population and the proliferation of the ‘feebleminded’. Havelock Ellis was not alone in being a sexual reformer, and also a supporter of the eugenic breeding of ‘the best’ (inevitably defined by class and racial criteria). The proliferating literature on married love might encourage the belief that women, too, were sexual beings deserving of satisfaction and pleasure. But these marriage experts also managed to pathologize the single woman and to sustain a burgeoning literature on the inadequacies of ‘frigid’ women.
