Why you can't tell right from wrong in the bedroom
anymore
Miss Manners has great authority when it comes to informing you how behave
in social situations, but when you shut the bedroom door and dim the lights
you're on your own. How many people should gather in the bedroom and what
sex they should be, what they should wear and whether anyone should really
do certain things and what it all means -- well, that's up for grabs. It
wasn't always this way. When people first began to write about human
sexuality, the proper way of doing things seemed quite clear. That was a
little more than a hundred years ago.
It's hard to believe, but the subject of sexuality didn't exist until the
nineteenth century. True, people began to write love letters and other
erotic fictions shortly after they invented writing, but that's not serious
stuff. The serious stuff didn't begin to appear until the late nineteenth
century and when it did arrive it was bad news. One of the best-remembered
volumes from that period is Baron Richard von Krafft-Ebing's
Psychopathia Sexualis . Because of its wide-ranging depictions of what
Krafft-Ebing and other well-behaved Europeans regarded as pathological
sexual behavior, the book became a furtive best seller. Indeed, it became so
popular that the embarrassed author felt he had to remind the public that
his work was intended for scientific use, and to make his point he put the
sexually explicit parts in Latin to keep them from uneducated eyes. The book
was still circulating in the early decades of the twentieth century and
served as an inducement to many adolescent scholars to improve their Latin.
Only God knows how many readers found their own sexual natures stigmatized
as abnormal or criminal in its pages. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg said that
Krafft-Ebing's work was the first "forbidden book" he had read and -- good
old Ginsberg -- said he "discovered with joy case histories like mine." Most
readers were not made joyful by such discoveries.
In retrospect it's easy to pigeonhole Krafft-Ebing as one of the last great
taxonomic nuts of the nineteenth century. During that period just about any
upper-class household had a glass fronted cabinet which held a collection of
something -- sea shells, maybe, or stones, pressed flowers, butterflies. The
Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, a contemporary of Krafft-Ebing, invented a
system for classifying the elements, a system which soon became the periodic
table. It was hoped that later investigators would be able to explain the
how and why of these chemical categories, much as Charles Darwin had
explained the vast variety of plants and animals which the brilliant Swedish
botanist Carolus Linnaeus had classified in the eighteenth century. The man
who came along to explain the bewildering variety of human sexual behavior
was Sigmund Freud, a Viennese doctor with a taste for the classics.
Vienna in Freud's time was the most sexually sophisticated city in Europe,
but Freud was a doctor and he knew a perversion when he saw it. His writings
aren't as scary or censorious as Krafft-Ebing's, but they certainly
distinguish between sexual styles, between the healthy and the pathological,
between good manners and bad. Freud's theories explain how the successful
individual evolves from a small libidinous bundle into a fully mature,
genitally focused heterosexual. It's a perilous journey and not everybody
succeeds in getting to the end, for there are many places where the
unfortunate get stuck, or "fixated," and many branching pathways from which
there is no certain return. Those who get stuck along the way or who turn
down the wrong path, those people become the fetishists, masochists,
sadists, homosexuals and other perverts who populate Krafft-Ebing's dismal
world. In your bedroom you don't do what those people do, not if you're a
healthy, mature, genitally focused adult.
In Europe, Freud's astonishing ideas about human sexual development were met
with uneasy and hostile laughter, but they eventually found a place along
side other theories. In the United States, on the other hand, they came to
dominate thinking on the subject. A creative misreading of Freud's works
turned them into liberating documents which announced that sexual repression
caused illness and that sexual activity of the right sort was good for you.
There hadn't been such good news about sex in a long time, and by the middle
of the century most people in this country had a superficial acquaintance
with what they called Freudianism. They knew that the right sort of sex was
therapeutic and prevented neurosis, and they had a comforting sense of
knowing which was the right sort.
As it turned out, the only thing liberated by Sigmund Freud's work on
sexuality was Sigmund Freud's imagination. He seems not to have been deeply
interested in sex, the actual doing, and his bizarre notions about women and
about human nature served only to enforce the status quo. But if you let
people get a sense of their own self-worth, you never know what will happen.
The 1969 Stonewall riots, led by transvestites and drag queens who got tired
of being pushed around, were a rebellion not only against gay bashers and
the police but ultimately against a theory of sexuality which pathologized
and stigmatized them. And the rebellion succeeded. Four years after those
riots, the American Psychiatric Association announced that it no longer
considered homosexuality a mental illness. Throughout the last decades of
the twentieth century Freud and his ideas lost stature. Indeed, Alan Stone,
a former president of the American Psychiatric Association, recently gave a
keynote address to the American Academy of Psychoanalysis in which he said
that the scientific center of Freudianism had crumbled, and that
"psychoanalysis both in theory and in practice is an art form that belongs
to the humanities and not to the natural sciences. " Bye-bye, Sigmund.
But if Freud's authority is gone and if homosexuality isn't pathology, what
is? If it's OK for men to suck and fuck each other what is it not OK to do?
If men can take it up the a__, why can't women? Valerie Steele's
infuriatingly wishy-washy book Fetish: Fashion, Sex and Power shows
the utter confusion that can overtake an author who tries to write about
fetishism, which at one time was a pathology but now is just another style.
The boundary between the normal and the perverse is blurring and, indeed,
the boundary between the sexes is blurring -- or is being "erased" as the
post-modern culture critic Marjorie Garber likes to say. Garber, who wrote a
two-inch thick volume about cross-dressing and cultural anxiety in
Vested Interests, wrote another big book on bisexuality, Vice Versa,
which explores with elephantine humor our fading notions of sexual identity.
Currently there is no grand theory of sexuality to warm our hearts, but it's
a free country and you may as well come up with your own theory. Here's how: First take someone to bed. Or if you can't find anyone to take to bed, read
a few good poems about taking someone to bed. If you know Latin, skip the
Krafft-Ebing and try some poems by Catulus like the one that begins "Vivamus,
mea Lesbia, atquae amemus." Love is in the subjunctive.
(If you're interested in love as well as sexuality, and just about everyone
is, check out our review ofA
General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard
Lannon. A fascinating book which makes complex advances in brain science
easily accessible to ordinary readers — written with literary grace and
flair. Less romantic, but equally entertaining is A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History
of the Penis by David M. Friedman. Check out our review.)
—Gene Mirabelli
Valentine's Day