ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, radical thinkers explored the new worlds of anatomy – and non-Western cultures – to challenge conventional ideas about sexuality. For a brief moment, scientists explored the possibility that male and female sexuality might be parallel, that women’s genitals were like men’s turned inside-out. The philosopher Diderot challenged the Church’s denigration of sexual desire by claiming that Nature commanded humans to have pleasure and to procreate. But an underground tradition was far more subversive – arguing that sexual pleasure was an end in itself, and that exploring the body was a way of gaining knowledge of the material world that might contradict received authorities.
