ABSTRACT
Darwin inspired some to see sexual desire as creative, while others feared that it would be polluting. Some moralists feared that Europeans could degenerate as well as evolve, that the boundaries of the European race would dissolve and decay at the very moment the great European empires were conquering and expanding. They wanted to cleanse society of illicit sexual desire – even excessive desire in marriage – and mounted an influential social purity campaign fighting against masturbation and prostitution. Sexologists developed new understandings of sex. But radical thinkers used Darwin’s idea of sexual selection to argue that desire was the source of all poetry and art. Sexual desire would also energize revolutionaries to transform society, they declared.
