1: Cultural Diversity in the Era of Settlement
Establishing Christianity in the wilderness: Libertinism, paganism, and sexual relations with the Indians had no place within the Puritan scheme
- English colonists faced 1) varied sexual practices of the Native peoples of North America (an alternative reality to European traditions) 2) Demographic, regional, and settlement conditions in the New World 3) European, specfically English, influence which shaped sexual systems on the 17th century
Climate and settlement patterns facilitated the reestablishment of a family-centered sexual life in New England, but it delayed it in the Chesapeake colonies of Maryland and Virginia.
England → America
The men and women who migrated from Europe to the English colonies brought with them beliefs of sexuality shaped by the Protestant Reformation
- Rejected the Catholic condemnation of carnal desires
- Marriage was acceptable primarily as a way to channel lust and prevent sexual sin gave way to the belief in marital love and the need produce children → to justify sexual intercourse (marriage justifies sex)
- Distinguished proper self expression which led to reproduction and sexual transgression - sexual acts that occur outside of marriage and for purposes other than reproduction
The Protestant attitude toward sexuality rested upon a larger system of beliefs about the family. → Reformation ideas emphasized the importance of the individual
→ Protestantism encouraged a heightened sense of the family as a discrete unit.
*the nuclear family emerges
The nuclear family that emerged in this period (1600s) stood as an independent entity, “a little commonwealth” ruled by its own patriarch and mirroring the political unit of the state (4)
- Courtship and marriage within the middle and upper class continued to hinge largely on property alliances
- For other social groups (i'm assuming she is referencing poor and working class), “love” became one element in the choice of a mate
- Husbands and wives learned to love each other
Marriage and sexuality assumed new meanings in early modern Protestant cultures (PLEASURE + OBLIGATION)
- Sex became a duty that a husband and wife owed to one another + stood a as a means of enhancing a marriage
- Protestant churches encouraged moderation and condemned sex outside of marriage
- Church and society dealt more harshly with women who engaged in pre- or extramarital
sexuality than with male transgressors FEMALE CHASTITY ASSURED MEN OF THE LEGITIMACY OF THEIR CHILDREN
Modern medical views of sexuality emphasized the importance of reproduction and stressed the importance of pleasure during intercourse
- Ex. female orgasm was necessary for physical health and conception
- The regulation of sexual behavior reinforced the primacy of marital reproductive sex and the need for the legitimacy of children
Heavy penalties awaited the woman who gave birth to a child out of wedlock, the economic burden of child support fell upon her community
Married women birthed until menopause to ensure living heirs
Contraception was unlikely outside of the aristocracy
- Folk remedies, herbal remedies, infanticide used by sex workers, unmarried female servants
- Married middle class couple did not begin to control fertility until after the 17th century
17th century English migrants brought sexual beliefs and practices motivated by a desire to improve their economic position or establish a purer church
Cultural Conflict: Native Americans and Europeans
Christian tradition judged the sexual lives of the native peoples as savage in contrast to their own civilized customs
- French and Spanish missionaries attempted to eradicate
- “Devilish practices”: polygamy, cross-dressing
Elaborating and distorting the differences between native sexual customs and their own provided a basis for the European sense of cultural superiority and right of conquest
- It also justified efforts to convert the native population to Christianity
- Protestantism of East Coast settlers
- Catholicism of the Spanish and French in Florida, Louisiana, and northern Mexico
Most native peoples did not associate nudity or sexuality with sin - or the european performative gender binary
- Personal choice in sexual matters
- Bodily autonomy
- Relative absence of sexual conflict due to different cultural attitudes toward property and sexuality
- The sale of sex did not exists until the arrival of European settlers
- Rape rarely occurred and was forbidden by natives
- Spanish settlers justified rape of Indian women as a right of conquest and sexual service from female captives of war
- The Cherokee Nation enacted rape punishment laws in the 19th century
*commodifying and exploiting sex*
Tribe community vs. patriarch nucleus
Regional Diversity NE versus Chesapeake
- Proportion of men to women was higher than in england
- Abundance of land but shortage of laborers
Ideology, demography, and the economy combine to shape sexual practices
NE tended to arrive in families from fairly homogenous backgrounds - middling class of farmers and artisans settling in towns 3:2 M|W
- Family formation was easier
- Enforcement of marital ideals and sexual regulation was easier
- Systematic enforcement (execution of Mary Latham)
Chesapeake: Maryland and Virginia had more varied origins, ranging from gentry to servants - arriving as individuals settling in scattered farms and plantations 4:1 M|W
- Shortage of women delayed family formation
- Childbearing years curtailed by late marriage from indentured servitude contracts
- More difficult to control youthful sexual activity
- Sexuality slightly less regulated - geographic distant meant personal distance and women could have more opportunities to meet single men and remarry
Labor systems shape the sexual system
- Young female servants sexually assaulted and raped - unwanted pregnancies
- Whippings, fines, and added a year of service to her contract
Post 1670 - African slavery upends indentured servitude
- Slavery contributed to the diversity of sexual systems - elaborate efforts to differentiate whites from blacks in sexual terms and to contain interracial sex (legal efforts)
- More African men → spread apart —> limited family development
- Acceptance of polygamy, premarital sex, women nursed for 3 years, states of depression
- Some southern men had black wives or mistresses
- 1662 Virginia law - severe penalties for fornication between blacks and whites
- Interracial marriage appeard to have been tolerated in the early years of slavery ⅕ of children were mixed by the 18th century
What are the economic incentives in sexuality?
Jia Tolentino - to be liked + seen = economic incentive to be seen you have to act = performativity
What are the economic incentives in sexuality at the impetus of economic exclusion?
Corporate Responsibility- business is support to fix climate change and the consumer is use to having too much - excessive, overabundance, like oozing fat slugs
How can we digest our sexual nature when we enslave people and animals
Whales → kerosene Horses → car India famine → green revolution
Warfare on our bodies – chemicals in our clothing
Loss of reproduction function → as a source of discussion for this new phenomenon of the individual pursuit of sexuality as a form of happiness, pleasure, and fulfillment - a protest to monetizing reproduction → avg. person contributes to the force, wealth, and economy
Did you know? Working less can save the planet. → currently reimagining labor with ai???
The mis-investment of focus → high labor, stress, mind-numbing content → separation from community
Hard take - the state of focus is adaptability
Exploitation: Tweak the same product over and over
Exploration: Looking widely through research and development
Experiences shape the brain -
- Redundancy
- Bad habits
- Toxic exposure
How the media feeds on your amygdala
Managing the internal world: emotions are contagious
Lack of mobility – computer jobs - questioning the outlets we have for passion and energy and living in the space of deprivation
Reproduction (commercial + economic)
Emotional: intimacy, physical, and pleasure
Racial thought influences gender identity, fear of feminization
Sexual metaphors in politics: class, race, sex
How laws construct sexuality in religion, medical changes, scientific, and technological fields
Early 2000s
Argument that corporations should have a larger role in social responsibility - do they therefore regulate personality, impacts on consumerism - regulators of time … but how is sexuality?
A reading of the introduction to Intimate Matters: a study of American sexual history
Recounting American sexual history over the last 3.5 centuries.
1) Colonial Era family centered, reproductive sexual system
- The dominant language of sexuality was reproductive and the appropriate locus for sexual activity was in courtship or marriage
- Role of aristocracy - wives of founding father
2) 19th Century romantic, intimate, and conflicted sexuality in marriage
- An emergent middle class emphasized sexuality as a means to personal intimacy, reducing the rate of reproduction.
- Working/labors impact on sexuality
3) Modern Period commercialized sexuality, where sexual relations are expected to provide personal identity and individual happiness, apart from reproduction
- Commercial growth brings sex into the marketplace for working class women and men of all classes
- The individual had replaced the family as the primary economic unit weakening the tie between sexuality and reproduction
- Adopting personal happiness as a primary goal of sexual relations
Argument sexuality has been continually reshaped by the changing nature of the economy, the family, and politics.
Three critical patterns recur in the history of sexual politics in America.
1. Political movements that attempt to change sexual ideas and practices seem to flourish when an older system is in disarray and a new one forming.
2. Sexual politics reveals a consistent relationship to inequalities of gender.
3. The politics of sexuality responds to both real and symbolic issues
Three frameworks chosen by the authors to incorporate behavior and ideology:
Sexual meanings
The language of sexuality: were the terms and metaphors religious, medical, romantic, or commercial - can this be expanded in 2023
Sexual regulation
Which secular or sacred, personal or public source reference sexuality?
Sexual politics
Which social institution was the sexual experience typically located - marriage, the market, the media?
1760s- 1890s
An era of extensive economic and geographic mobility, the role of both the church and the state in sexual regulation diminished.
The medical profession played an important role in fostering the objective of sexual self-control. This process left family and women to create self regulating sexual beings.
1890s -
Women, doctors, and sexual reformers argued that the state ought to play a larger role in regulating personal morality.
- The 1900s has witnessed an intense conflict over the ways in which the state power can appropriately be used to do so (overt and subtle ways)
- The media is saturated with sexual images, the promise of free choice, but channels individuals toward particular visions of sexual happiness often closely linked to the purchase of consumer products
Women’s role in sexual regulations has varied throughout our history, from responsibility shared with men in pre industrial communities, to a specialized female moral authority in the 19th century middle class, to a weakened role in formal sexual regulation in the 20th century
Introduction
P. xii →
“The mundane is the private side of history”
Sexual relationships are a significant source of inequality
Isn’t it the case that most colonial societies have an active sexual “underground” / marginalized / or exclusive sphere?
- Can I define this for the time periods referenced in this book?
→ what are the economic effects of of socially unacceptable or social invisible sexual relationships
- White slave master and black female slave / black male slave /
- Adults and children
- White business man and trans women
- Extramarrital affairs, etc.
Missing the 20th century and 21st century
There is a symbolic role of sexuality in the historical creation of gender
Sexuality has many relationships to nonsexual aspects of culture - especially its grounding in economic change and its role in maintaining systems of social inequality
Suggested limits of the field of studying Sexuality: we are told more about women than men, more about whites than other racial groups, and more about native born middle class than immigrants and working class.
Sexual ideology (“what ought to be”) and sexual behavior (“what was”) | dichotomy approach
Dominant meaning of sexuality has changed during our history
- Primary association with reproduction within families
- Primary association with emotional intimacy and physical pleasures for individuals
Sexual depravity serves to strengthen class and race hierarchies
Who determines what is normal and what is deviant and how is that enforced?
By what means have social rules about sexual behavior been enforced? Church discipline, courts, external peer pressure, internalized control? My list: social injustice, crime, violence, genocide…
Agents of sexual regulation in the 17th century - The Church
Agents of sexual regulation in the 19th century - The Medical Profession
Agents of sexual regulation in the 19th century - The State
Agents of sexual regulation in the 20th/21st century - Corporations + Media + Culture + Academic Institutions
→ which individuals have stake in the state - lawmakers, political figures, legislative and judicial figures, large corporations
In early America, a unitary system of sexual regulation involved family, church, and state resting upon a consensus about the primacy of familial reproductive sexuality.
Those who challenged the reproductive norm could expect severe, often public, punishment and the pressure to repent - had to repent and confess, to be welcomed back in good standing with church and state
POC and immigrant communities have created unique internal systems of morality, maintaining preindustrial patterns of community control over sexual behavior
However diverse systems of moral and sexual regulation may seem - white, middle class, and protestant authorities tend to maintain formal authority over sexual morality through the control of religion, medicine, or law.
Sexual politics relates closely to the changing nature of sexual regulation - competition between interest groups that attempt to reshape dominant sexual meanings.
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
John D. Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman
Second Edition 1997
Sunday, September 24th, 2023