Reviews

Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz (Knopf, 2002).

This book is strictly for aficionados of sex-and-censorship history.

If you are interested in the origins of our present-day struggles over sexual information and ideas, Horowitz’s detailed rendering the 19th century landscape is packed with incidents and insights. She traces how freethinkers in the early part of the century campaigned to advance sexual knowledge; how the emergence of "the sporting press," precursor of today’s tabloid culture, triggered middle-class panic and anti-vice crusades; and how by the end of the century, the party of censorship and repression, personified by the redoubtable Anthony Comstock, succeeded in suppressing birth control information and radical political tracts along with erotic literature and art.

Horowitz identifies four strands or voices in "the sexual conversation" of 19th century America.

First was "vernacular sexual culture," from the French postcards and other commercial erotica that had been circulating for decades to the emerging genre of lurid police-detective literature that became popular with a growing population of urban youth. As vernacular sexual culture gained strength, Horowitz says, Christian evangelicals "fought for the souls of sinners," and by mid-century, the "Second Great Awakening" of religious enthusiasm in U.S. history "unleashed campaigns against alcohol, prostitution, slavery, stimulating food and drink, desecration of the Sabbath, and obscene images and words."1

The second primary voice consisted of 19th century utopian freethinking. Reformers like Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright advocated expanded sexual knowledge and consequent sexual fulfillment, whether or not within the conventional confines of marriage. These visionaries, to the extent they gained followers and founded utopian communities that drew people out of traditional family and gender roles, posed a threat to the capitalist, male-dominated social structure.

Horowitz’s third voice emerged from health reform and physiology. Early health educators combined sexual information (which was only sometimes accurate) with bizarre theories about the dreadful effects of masturbation (and hence, the compelling need to stamp out arousing literature and art). Within the physiological framework, Horowitz writes, some physicians and reformers countered tracts warning against youthful sexual culture with "a strong strain of medical common sense and religious free thought" that insisted on "the naturalness of the body’s sexual appetites and desires."2 This included, subversively to some minds, information about female sexual satisfaction – a goal or entitlement that, some authors seemed to suggest, might profitably be pursued outside the confines of marriage.

Finally, there developed a school of thought that put sex at the center of human personality – one of our most fundamental interests and drives. This holistic approach, "combining visionary and radical politics with notions of sexual liberty and freedom of expression,"3 was promoted by such author-activists as Ezra Heywood, the free-love crusader, and Victoria Woodhull, the notorious stockbroker, suffragist, publisher, and self-promoter who ran for president in 1872.

Horowitz’s distinctions among these four strands of 19th century sexual thought are somewhat artificial, and one category tends to blend into the other. Overall, though, they created a rich pattern of cultural ferment that challenges our stereotypical notion of the Victorian Era as a time when discussion and enjoyment of sex was uniformly repressed.

But reactions to all this ferment throughout the 19th century led to strengthened and expanded obscenity laws – and increasing pressures from religious evangelicals and political conservatives to enforce them. Free-love advocacy was an obvious threat to established family, community, and gender roles. Even medical and health information - especially if it concerned birth control - was viewed as a threat to female domesticity. The result was that, by century’s end, previously available knowledge about sexuality - including in particular, female sexuality - was suppressed through obscenity law, and freethinkers like Ezra Heywood, whose writings were far from sexually explicit, went to jail. Censorship of art and literature with sexual content took hold, and did not really begin to recede until the late 1950s.

In the midst of our now-unbuttoned sexual culture, this history may sound quaint. But the political battles between "the party of reticence," as another historian has dubbed it,4 and the philosophy of sexual liberty, or at least comprehensive sexuality education, goes on. Witness "abstinence-only-unless-married" indoctrination as mandated by the federal government today as a condition of sex-ed funding. School systems using the federal aid must suppress information on contraceptives and safer sex, a reckless public health policy whose supposed justification is that young people should not receive "mixed messages" about sexual behavior.5

Or take the Federal Communication Commission’s recent enforcement of its "decency" rules to ban the radio broadcast of Sarah Jones’s feminist protest rap, "Your Revolution," while tolerating equally suggestive, but more conventional, male rappers’ lyrics. This sort of discrimination against a young African American woman’s perspective on sexual politics is a familiar consequence of official government censorship in the realm of sexual speech.6

Concerns about sexual explicitness and sexual morality still drive censorship politics in the U.S. From the 2000 "Children’s Internet Protection Act" (CIPA), mandating Internet filters in schools and libraries7 to widespread censorship of nudes in public art venues,8 the 19th century legacy lives on. Rereading Sex is a welcome addition to our understanding of its origins.

- Marjorie Heins
December 17, 2002

Notes

1. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America, 6.

2. Id., 7.

3. Id., 8-9.

4. Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence (1996). On Gurstein and other scholars who advocate for prudery and reticence, see also Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (2001).

5. See Janice Irvine, Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States (2002); Not in Front of the Children, supra, 137-56.

6. On May 17, 2001, the FCC issued a "Notice of Apparent Liability" for "indecency" to radio station KBOO in Portland, Oregon, for broadcasting Jones's rap, "Your Revolution." KBOO protested, but the FCC delayed deciding whether the "Notice of Apparent Liability" should become final. The result, effectively, was a ban on broadcasting the song. Jones, represented by People For the American Way, filed a legal challenge. Ultimately, the FCC reversed itself, thus "mooting" the case. See "FCC Declares Sarah Jones's 'Your Revolution' Not Indecent After All."

7. CIPA was struck down in May 2002 by a 3-judge federal district court; on June 23, 2003, the Supreme Court reversed this ruling and upheld CIPA. See Ignoring the Irrationality of Internet Filters, the Supreme Court Upholds CIPA.

8. See, for example, the cases collected in The File Room archive.