Harvard University Press Blog

Making Sex, From the Greeks to Akin

After Missouri Congressman and Senate candidate Todd Akin shared his view that the female body could mysteriously and miraculously prevent conception in cases of “legitimate rape,” his remarks were swiftly condemned by even his own Republican party. Much of the response, and Akin’s own apology, focused on his use of the word “legitimate” when in fact he’d meant “forcible,” a modifier whose political implications are, to many, no less offensive. Of course, the reaction to Akin’s politics has in some quarters overshadowed consideration of his complete lack of understanding of the female reproductive system. As explained last week in an op-ed by Jennifer Tucker, and further considered on Saturday’s episode of Up With Chris Hayes, the long-dismissed “logic” of Akin’s thoughts on conception stem from the ancient notion that female reproductive organs were merely inward-turned analogues of male. If the male needed to achieve orgasm for conception to occur, then so did the female; the victim of a “legitimate rape” would take no pleasure; hence no orgasm; hence the raped woman’s ability to “shut that whole thing down.”

For more on the trajectory of Akin’s medical fairytale, we turned to Thomas Laqueur’s indispensable Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, from which the following passage is excerpted.

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An interpretive chasm separates two interpretations, fifty years apart, of the same story of death and desire told by an eighteenth-century physician obsessed with the problem of distinguishing real from apparent death.

The story begins when a young aristocrat whose family circumstances forced him into religious orders came one day to a country inn. He found the innkeepers overwhelmed with grief at the death of their only daughter, a girl of great beauty. She was not to be buried until the next day, and the bereaved parents asked the young monk to keep watch over her body through the night. This he did, and more. Reports of her beauty had piqued his curiosity. He pulled back the shroud and, instead of finding the corpse “disfigured by the horrors of death,” found its features still gracefully animated. The young man lost all restraint, forgot his vows, and took “the same liberties with the dead that the sacraments of marriage would have permitted in life.” Ashamed of what he had done, the hapless necrophilic monk departed hastily in the morning without waiting for the scheduled interment.

When time for burial came, indeed just as the coffin bearing the dead girl was being lowered into the ground, someone felt movement coming from the inside. The lid was torn off; the girl began to stir and soon recovered from what proved not to have been real death at all but only a coma. Needless to say, the parents were overjoyed to have their daughter back, although their pleasure was severely diminished by the discovery that she was pregnant and, moreover, could give no satisfactory account of how she had come to be that way. In their embarrassment, the innkeepers consigned the daughter to a convent as soon as her baby was born.

Soon business brought the young aristocrat, oblivious of the consequences of his passion but far richer and no longer in holy orders because he had come into his inheritance, back to the scene of his crime. Once again he found the innkeepers in a state of consternation and quickly understood his part in causing their new misfortune. He hastened to the convent and found the object of his necrophilic desire more beautiful alive than dead. He asked for her hand and with the sacrament of marriage legitimized their child.

The moral that Jacques-Jean Bruhier asks his readers to draw from this story is that only scientific tests can make certain that a person is really dead and that even very intimate contact with a body leaves room for mistakes. But Bruhier’s contemporary, the noted surgeon Antoine Louis, came to a very different conclusion, one more germane to the subject of this book, when he analyzed the case in 1752. Based on the evidence that Bruhier himself offered, Louis argues, no one could have doubted that the girl was not dead: she did not, as the young monk testified, look dead and moreover who knows if she did not give some “demonstrative signs” in proof of her liveliness, signs that any eighteenth-century doctor or even layperson would have expected in the circumstances.

Fifty Shades of Dorian Gray

Word came recently that, in a rush to satisfy the overwhelming desire for Fifty Shades of Grey-style erotica, the UK-based erotic romance eBook publisher Total-E-Bound will be releasing a series of “Clandestine Classics.” The books, they say, will present the likes of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre “as they’ve never been seen before.”

The old fashioned pleasantries and timidity have all been stripped away, quite literally. You didn’t really think that these much loved characters only held hands and pecked cheeks did you? Come with us, as we embark on a breathtaking experience—behind the closed bedroom doors of our favourite, most-beloved British characters. Learn what Sherlock really thought of Watson, what Mr Darcy really wanted to do to Miss Elizabeth Bennet, and unveil the sexy escapades of Mr Rochester and Jane Eyre. We’ll show you the scenes that you always wanted to see but were never allowed. Come on, you know you can’t resist...open the pages and delve inside.

Surely the likes of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina have prepared us for these modern meme-ings of classic lit. But, we must insist, there’s at least one beloved work of 19th century British literature that needs no 21st century co-author tarting things up in order to give today’s readers those scenes we’ve “always wanted to see but were never allowed”: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Before Wilde’s novel saw first publication in Lippincott’s in 1890, the magazine’s publisher censored several of the passages that most fully explored the nature of homoerotic and homosocial desire. Even still, the work was met with such hostility that Wilde himself made further cuts prior to the novel’s 1891 publication in book form. Wilde’s original uncensored text went unpublished until just last year, when we released Nicholas Frankel’s lavishly illustrated and wonderfully annotated edition of the novel. And now Wilde’s original text is available as The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, a paperback edition that includes general and textual introductions from Frankel.

As Frankel explains, this original version of the story is “a more daring and scandalous novel, more explicit in its sexual content” than previously available editions. So, should you come across a copy of The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray you may mistake it for a mash-up, a “clandestine classic,” but rest assured: this is the novel as Wilde envisioned it.

Contraception and the Catholic Church

As of August 1, most new and renewing health insurance plans must begin offering a spectrum of women’s preventive health services, including birth control, at no upfront cost. This provision of the Affordable Care Act has been among its most controversial, with many Catholic and other religious organizations suing the government to block a rule that they see as compelling them to act in opposition to their beliefs, which they represent as steadfast through time.

This improbable reemergence of contraception as a public issue in the public square turned our attention to John T. Noonan’s Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. The book was originally published in 1965 and then enlarged back in 1986, but despite its age there seems to exist no comparable treatment of the entire history of the church and contraception, from the Roman Empire to Vatican II. One could argue that no such work could even be attempted today, as anyone with the access Noonan then enjoyed would today almost surely be censured for their effort.

On publication, Time called the book a “magisterially documented history of church teaching on birth control [which] suggests that there are good reasons why the traditional stand can change,” and Harper’s described it as a work of “inherent genius” that was as “truly exciting as a book can be.” In a post earlier this year, the U.S. Intellectual History blog detailed the roiling debate into which Noonan’s book entered in the mid-1960s.

What follows below is adapted from Noonan’s original Introduction to the book.

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“Contraception” is a term which could be applied to any behavior that prevents conception. Sexual continence is contraceptive in effect; sexual intercourse when an ovum will not be fertilized avoids procreation as much as intercourse where a physical barrier is used to prevent the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum. How has some behavior now generally approved by Catholic moralists been discriminated from other acts of contraception which have been condemned?

My focus is on the ideas and values clustered into a doctrine on contraception. Seen from one aspect, the doctrine is a reply to the question, “On what terms may the generation of human life be controlled?” Considered from another aspect, it is an answer to the question, “Under what conditions may human beings have sexual intercourse?” From another, it responds to the inquiry, “What revelation of God or what laws of nature are relevant to sexual conduct?”

There is an advantage to looking at a single set of concepts over two thousand years. As an attempt to set out what the purposes of sexual behavior should be, the tradition I explore uniquely combines appeals to divine instruction, natural laws, and psychological and social consequences. Is there any comparable effort, assiduously sustained within the same general framework for over nineteen hundred years, to express in rational terms a standard of sexual behavior?

The meaning of theory, however, is properly understood only when one determines what conditions it responds to. Consequently, I have described the contraceptive means known to different eras, and what can be inferred as to their diffusion and employment. The theory, then, will not be viewed as an abstract logic developed without reference to existing habits. I shall set out both the practice to which doctrine responded and the steps taken to alter the practice. The effort at enforcement tested the seriousness with which the theory was intended. Unlike a history of secular law, however, where the meaning of a rule may be measured by its effective sanctions, the history of a moral doctrine must be, chiefly, an account of what was taught. The application of a moral rule is effected primarily not by agencies of compulsion but by an individual's accepting it in his heart. If a moral teaching is violated, it may still have been “effective” if it played a part in the moral consciousness of the violator. The diffusion of a moral doctrine, and the external embodiment and enforcement of it, may be gauged; the principal effect of the doctrine, its effect on conscience, must largely be inferred from the terms in which it is proposed.

The believers to whom a moral doctrine is addressed will range from the devout to the conformists to the rebellious. Partly as a function of faith, partly as a function of other psychological attributes such as attitude to authority, partly as a function of social environment, the acceptance of the doctrine will vary. At no time, I suppose, has a specific moral teaching put forward by the theologians been received in an identical way by all the faithful. The seriousness with which a doctrine is taken by different persons and groups is a matter of estimate. The range of reaction in the audience may be presumed to have affected the enunciation of the doctrine itself. When the theologians speak to a community of various degrees of faith, various degrees of moral sensitivity, various degrees of education, they may use language unsuitable for more intimate dialogue, and, in the words of the Talmud, they may ''build a fence around the Law,” setting up outer ramparts to keep an inner treasure secure.

The assent of human beings, which gives effect to a doctrine, is not to a single set of propositions, but to the Christian faith. Within this faith there are beliefs on the Bible, grace, original sin, the sacraments, sexuality, marriage, the value of human lives, the purpose of human existence. These beliefs or doctrines structure the propositions on contraception. However tight the relation, however close the dependence on the Christian framework, the teaching on contraception has had its own set of problems, concepts, articulations: its own history.

James Franco's Beach Reads

At his Huffington Post blog, that great Renaissance man James Franco has been serving up recommendations for summer reading. Last week he offered what he describes as “two very fun reads”: Fredrick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, and Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal. Franco, who studied with Warner at Yale, characterizes The Trouble With Normal as “a smart and fun look at gay marriage and anti-normative lifestyles”:

(Warner) makes the liberating argument that the heteronormative lifestyles might learn more from queer lifestyles than the opposite, that instead of having the gay and queer communities try to conform to the hetero mainstream, maybe the mainstream might learn something from those wacky people living “alternative” lifestyles. As gay marriage is very much on people's minds, this is a book that can blow your mind about how we are taught to see ourselves in this country—straight, gay and otherwise—and how we can all learn to be still more open to variety.

The Trouble With Normal, a paperback edition of which we published in 2000, is something of a touchstone for a new work dealing with similar questions of identity, sexuality, and culture. In the much-anticipated How To Be Gay, pioneering queer theorist David Halperin joins Warner in arguing that the aspiration to “normalcy,” while understandable as a pragmatic approach to attaining civil rights and societal acceptance, leads to the embrace of an official, public gay identity that can countenance little deviation from mainstream norms, especially with respect to sex. Halperin cites Warner for “urging us not to turn our backs on the sophisticated and adventurous queer culture we have created around sex, not to sell out those members of our communities who do not (or who cannot) bury their sexuality discreetly within the sphere of private life, and not to purchase respectability at the expense of sex.”

For Halperin, the trouble with normal is its denial of a “unique subjectivity” expressed by male homosexuality. He argued as much in a recent op-ed occasioned by gay pride month and the attendant “state-of-the-gay” reports. Every year, writes Halperin, the “straight media,” offers triumphal declarations of progress along a projected narrative of complete gay assimilation into the mainstream. As the story goes, while older gay men may still claim a recognizably gay culture, today’s young gay men are said to have fully embraced the hetero-normal. The problem with this report of generational mobility, says Halperin, is that it’s been with us since at least the 1970s, and yet “gay culture” remains. So what work is being done by the continual report of its demise?

Indexing the Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History at Princeton University, has been named a winner of the 2012 Bancroft Prize for Age of Fracture, his exposition of the late-20th century dissolution of the ideas that had previously served to shape Americans’ understanding of the world. The Bancroft is one of the most distinguished academic awards in the field of history, and, says the book’s editor, Joyce Seltzer, for Rodgers it was well-deserved:

The very first time I read Dan’s manuscript, I knew it was very special. He managed to brilliantly characterize the last three decades of intellectual discourse in the U.S. so as to enable me to see it in a new and revealing light. By mapping out major ideas about the market, race, gender, political obligations, and social welfare, and demonstrating the shift from collective to fragmented perspectives and outlooks, Dan makes the radical changes taking place in our way of thinking provocatively clear. I began to see the transformation he explored everywhere—in the arts, sciences, and in our social and political relations and expectations. Age of Fracture is a wake-up call to all of us that we must pull together again for the greater welfare and future of our community and nation.

Accurately and coherently characterizing an era is a challenging endeavor, especially when one’s period of inquiry is so recent. In his Prologue, Rodgers quotes Stuart Hall on the naming of ages: “What is important are the significant breaks—where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes.” Though the task is to focus on major ideological threads, rather than to catalogue an age’s every idea, one of the striking things about Age of Fracture is just how much ground Rodgers is able to cover in a book that comes in well under 400 pages.

Age of Fracture is certainly no pastiche, though, and it’s also not the sort of free associative cultural criticism that we’d associate with, say, Greil Marcus. Nevertheless, Rodgers makes his way from Jimmy Carter to Judith Butler, the Civil War to the Culture Wars, Game Theory to the Gay Rights Movement, Nietzsche to Noonan, Earl Warren to Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe to Howard Stern. He covers so much ground, in fact, that we thought we’d just be blunt about it and offer up the Index. Give it a skim or a scour below.

Sexual Fluidity and the City

In a recent New York Times Magazine profile, the actress Cynthia Nixon (of Sex and the City fame) discussed her sexuality, and explained her reaction to some of the attention drawn by her having begun a serious relationship with a woman after ending a fifteen-year relationship with a man. From the piece:

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”

Those remarks set off such a firestorm, in part from LGBTQ rights advocates, that Nixon later issued a clarification:

My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:

While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have “chosen” is to be in a gay relationship.

 As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community—as well as the majority of heterosexuals—cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.

Our community is not a monolith, thank goodness, any more than America itself is. I look forward to and will continue to work toward the day when America recognizes all of us as full and equal citizens.

A few years back we published a book—some might say the book—on this very issue. In that book, entitled Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire, author Lisa Diamond argues against the traditional view of sexual orientation as fixed, presenting instead an understanding of sexual flexibility very much like that described by Nixon. Diamond studied a group of 100 young women as they developed from adolescence to adulthood, collecting valuable data on their sexuality as it developed, rather than later in life as most studies have done. She found that attraction for women is often far more fluid than our society usually acknowledges, and the book, which is full of the voices of those young women, presents the most complete picture we have of the flexibility of sexual attraction. 

Aware of the controversy and political manipulation that her findings could incite, Diamond opted to begin the book by addressing some of the most common misconceptions regarding what she terms “sexual fluidity.” An excerpt:

The Dorian Gray That Wilde Would Want Us To Read

The controversy spurred by the initial publication in 1890 of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is fairly well known. The novel ushered in great and disruptive changes in the way that people understood their Victorian world. What’s less known, though, is that the text that caused such outcry was a censored version of Wilde’s work. Portions of Wilde’s typescript were excised by its first publisher, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and then Wilde himself made further edits before its publication in book form. Our beautifully illustrated new annotated edition of Dorian Gray represents the first publication of Wilde’s original text.

Scholars have known of the existence of the original uncensored Dorian Gray since at least 1976, but academic attitudes towards textual authority worked to prevent its publication until now. However, as Nicholas Frankel, the editor of our edition, explained in a recent blog post, this is almost certainly the version of the novel that Wilde would want us to read today. Its restoration of Wilde’s previously censored work makes plain much of the homosexuality that in previously published editions has been coded.

In a recent episode of the HUP podcast, Frankel elaborated on the response to the initial publication of Dorian Gray and on the history of this edition of the text. You can listen via the player below or by heading here.

 

HUP Podcast - Nicholas Frankel

As Frankel details in the book’s introduction, in the Victorian era sexual preference was less clearly seen as identity, and he points out that the word homosexual did not even enter the English language until 1892. At the time of the writing of Dorian Gray, same-sex encounters were considered “unclean” vices rather than identity-defining acts. Given that Wilde’s life and work are, as Frankel states, “widely credited with instating homosexuality as a distinct sexual and social identity,” it’s only fitting that we should finally have access to the original work at the center of this shift.

Through its extensive annotations and lush illustrations, Frankel’s book doesn’t just present an analysis of Victorian society. Rather, his remarks on the various incarnations of Dorian Gray through the years serve to annotate a broader evolution in societal attitudes towards sexuality. The image at right, for example, is a publicity poster for the 1945 MGM movie adaptation of Dorian Gray. Its caption reads “Why did women talk about Dorian Gray in whispers?” The film, like the poster, emphasized heterosexuality and expanded the role of the novel’s female characters.

As Frankel's notes and Introduction make clear, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel that has been made to serve various purposes since the very moment of its publication. This new edition of the text finally lets Wilde’s own original intentions be known.