Straight by Hanne Blank Read Free Book Online Page B

distinctive ways. Where the aristocracy (or indeed a traditional rural working household) would base its ideas of family and lineage on the management of hereditary rank and property, the middle classes, as historian Lawrence Stone has explained, organized themselves around four central and distinctively modern features: intense emotional bonds, a brash new emphasis on personal autonomy, an unprecedented interest in privacy, and an intensified interest in sex.[ 4 ]
    This last point may seem surprising, but it shouldn’t. The stereotypical Victorian prude, and the Victorian lady of scrupulous sexual ignorance and passivity, did exist—their modern-day analogues do too—but there was far more to Victorian sexuality than this. Victorians, including women, talked more and in greater detail about sexual issues than any previous generation we know of.
    It was an era of wide-ranging and often extreme opinions on all aspects of sex. Some Victorians were indeed sex-phobic, misogynist, and prudish, even priggish. Physicians like William Acton famously made statements like “the majority of women are (happily for them) not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind,” and British gynecologist Isaac Baker Brown did advocate, and perform, surgical removal of the clitoris as a cure for female masturbation.[ 5 ] But even among his colleagues, Acton was known as an illogical extremist, and Baker Brown was eventually drummed out of the profession.
    Other Victorians’ views of sex were quite progressive. Political publisher Richard Carlile professed a belief that women “had an almost constant desire for copulation,” and only social constraints kept them from acting on it. Wishful thinking, perhaps, given the lack of both social approval and reliable contraception, but others were similarly bold about giving sexuality pride of place in human affairs. “Sexual matters,” wrote the popular physician and advisor HenryGuernsey, “are so thoroughly interwoven with the highest destinies of the human race, physically, mentally, and spiritually, there is scarcely any function of higher import.”[ 6 ]
    Most nineteenth-century middle-class individuals struggled to find a sexual middle ground—not as negative and harsh as the views of Acton or Baker Brown, but probably not as openly enthusiastic as those of Carlile or Guernsey either—where they could feel comfortable, respectable, and safe. This was no small task. The bourgeois family, with its hothouse emotions and its pigeon-hole privacies, was supposed to be a fortress and a shield, providing a buffer zone of respectability that protected its members from aristocratic decadence on the one side and the horrors of the teeming city on the other. The purpose of this family was the generation and formation of people—specifically men—who would form an unassailable backbone for the state.
    The deliberate formation of a solid, respectable, and powerful middle-class culture was more than a reaction against the aristocracy or, in the New World, an effort to embody the “more perfect union” envisioned by America’s founding fathers. It was also an effort to create a strong national core that could survive increasing exposure to the world. By the mid-nineteenth century, the United States, Great Britain, and nearly all of the European states had extended their reach, as well as their armies and economies, to the far corners of the globe. Whether in British India, the Belgian Congo, German East Africa, French Cambodia, or any of the legion other European or American appropriations, successful empires required adept management of far-flung possessions inconveniently populated by vast numbers of people who didn’t look, think, or act like their colonial overlords. “Natives” were often thought of as primitive or childlike, in dire need of the civilizing influence of the superior European. (Fear of a brown planet is,