An attempt at an explanation for the current sexual crisis
In America during the Gilded Age, the Second Industrial Revolution pulled men from family farms and small towns into factories, offices, and cities. During a sudden period of transition, unanchored men spent their days in a world with access to anonymous sex, a metropolis crowded with strangers. Harvey Girls aside, women mostly stayed home, in the women’s sphere, anchored to family.
The result was a sudden crisis of infertility, a medical problem caused by a social split. Dad went into the city and sample the anonymous goods, then brought sexually transmitted diseases home to his sequestered wife, who would carefully avoid mentioning the symptoms of those diseases to her doctor, because, my goodness, what kind of filthy woman gets sexually transmitted diseases?
Pain without description, symptoms patients wouldn’t discuss, unexplained infertility: doctors noticed. In 1904, the physician Prince Morrow published Social Diseases and Marriage, saying what he had been seeing. “The situations created by the introduction of venereal diseases in marriage are many and complicated,” he wrote.
“The problems presented are delicate, perplexing, and difficult of solution. In dealing with these situations there is required not only a thorough knowledge of these diseases in all their relations, but also a knowledge of human nature, a professional sagacity and a
savoir-faire, which are not taught in the curriculum of our medical schools.” Morrow recommended the delicate introduction of “social hygiene” as a topic of discussion with respectable patients. In the antebellum America of
“island communities,” local and isolated, it hadn’t been necessary.
The way you work shows up in bed. Sex happens where you live; the shape of your entire life is interwoven: work, family, politics, travel, culture, paradise by the dashboard light. Sex shapes identity, and identity shapes sex, and cultural norms and social signaling show up in most of the act that involves panting and sighing. Sexual personae are societal Legos, the place where things fit together:
“Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.”
https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/social-history-is-in-your-pants?s=r
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