A long time ago in Ancient Greece everyone
was extremely gay. Except they weren’t because
no-one had invented sexuality, yet. They had
terms for different aspects of love and sex,
like aphrodisia and synousia, but they didn’t
build identities around those desires and
practices. Their preferences never became
a telling truth about themselves.
This was the case across much of the world
at one point or another, with many same sex
relationships accepted or endorsed, from the
wonderfully named pleasures of the bitten
peach in Fujian, through Assyrian preyers
for the blessing of same sex relationships
and Melonesian homoerotic rituals, to hunter
gatherers in what’s now Zimbabwe with a
slight perchant for homoerotic cave painting.
The concept of sexuality as the idea of identities
intrinsically related to one’s desires didn’t
come into existence until around the 1880s,
but it’s development kinda starts with the
Greeks, who didn’t develop vast edifices
of sexual morality like the Christians, but
sought to regulate sex along several lines:
Self Mastery
A sense of balance between different drives
was important in Greece, and this ethics applied
to sex: you should remeber to never dash yourself
on the rocky shores of wonton lust. But equally,
celibacy was widely considered pointless unless
it was pursued for a particular aim, like
being a great athlete.
Status
The Greeks didn’t stigmatise types of sex,
but they placed great importance on people
keeping to their proper roles. Free men should
always take the dominant sexual position,
whilst women, boys, and slaves were to take
submissive positions. This caused problems
when free men slept with each other, since
it was seen as demeaning for either to take
a submissive role.
However, Greeks opinions were not very consistent.
Many Greeks obsessed about what the best times
to have sex were, mostly for health reasons.
They decided it was unhealthy to ejaculate
in winter but that summer sex was essential
for stopping fevers or something. However,
when someone asked Pythagoras, a famous cult
leader best known for thinking beans are extremely
evil and also triangle fun, what the best
time for a man to have sex was, he replied
“any time he wants to have his strength
sapped from him”.
It’s not right to just say that homosex
was accepted in Greece, it wasn’t even seen
as something to be questioned along lines
of acceptability or unacceptability. However,
elements of homosex were problematised. It
was seen as strange that a boy who took a
submissive role in a love relationship with
a man could grow into a man who might lead
his city. However, such things happened, a
lot. But at the same time, having many suitors
was seen as the sign of a boy having many
outstanding qualities.
After the Greeks the Romans did stuff that
was kinda similar, but more focussed on human
frailty, and early Christianity kept on in
a similar vein to the Greco-Roman tradition
at first, as they wanted to distance themselves
from those radical gnostics who were doing
crazy stuff in the Middle East. The Christians
even got into all the Greco-Roman monogamy
stuff, which wasn’t really the old testament’s
jam.
It all started with the monks. Peeps like
St. Cassian got kinda obsessed with whether
or not their thoughts were pure, and they
got waaay too into trying to find out if something
dangerous or impious was lurking in their
thoughts. The monks were always unsure of
themselves, always interrogating every dream,
memory, and action for impurities. Due to
the uncertainty, the monks turned to higher
authorities, beginning to confess everything
of importance to the big monks. Permanent
self scrutiny became a way of life.
Augustine gets super into the question of
sex in heaven. Whilst most of the early Christians
thought sex only existed as a part of mans
debased nature after the Fall, Austine was
pretty sure there was sex in heaven, and it
was only mans controle of his own desires
that were effected by the fall. For him sexual
desires must be controlled, and he really
influenced the Church to be more concerned
with the desires of it’s subjects.
Some other stuff happened, and then in 1517
a dude nailed a piece of paper to a door and
everyone completely freaked out. The pope
was pretty worried that everyone was gonna
be protestant so all the big Christians got
together in Trent for a Council, and they
sorted it out. They moved confession from
being focussed on acts to being focussed on
desires. This new practice began to spread
from the Big Catholics down to the Little
Catholics and gradually into everyday life
until people not only confessed to their priests,
but also to their friends, their family, their
neighbours, and even themselves. As this new
practice of confession spread people began
to conceive of their desires as a deep part
of their identity, something of utmost importance
to who they were.
In much of Europe during the medieval and
early modern periods close friendships where
a lot closer than they tend to be today. People
had way more time to hang out (maybe even
150 days of holiday a year), and people tended
to stay in the same place, so spent years
getting to know their peasant buddies. Equally,
extremely close platonic bonds weren’t assumed
to be sexual, and thus people didn’t end
up classifying their extremely close platonic
bonds as sexual, thus allowing extremely close
platonic bonds to develop more freely.
People saw practices like homosex in varied
ways. Mostly, female homosex was permitted
but sodomy wasn’t allowed, probably, there’s
a dicotomy, of scholarly opinions on whether
they aloud gay homogamy. Whilst female homosex
was often permitted, usually the female adoption
of a dominant male role in female sex, or
of adopting the identity of a man, was punished.
However, for the most part, homosex was not
noticed, since close emotional bonds between
people of the same gender were assumed to
be platonic, thus, anyone who wanted to engage
in a spot of homosex could often do so without
being questioned, they could even have a close
relationship lasting for decades. Homosex
was an act, there was no association of such
transgressive acts with a certain character
type or identity.
Bramtone, a weird mix of a moralist and ponographic
writer of the time, summed up some of the
sentiments of the era, saying “there is
a great difference betwixt throwing water
in a vessel and merely watering about it and
round the rim”. Many saw female homosex
as practice or a warm up for hetrosex, and
others saw it as inevitable for women who
couldn’t find themselves a man to marry.
In some cases punishment "for leude behavior
each with the other upon a bed” was as light
as being required to apologize, and in other
cases the punishment was hanging. It was a
bit of a mixed bag.
From the 17th century onwards everyone started
getting really obsessed with sex. Not doing
it, though some probably were, but talking
about it, and investigating it, and trying
to make sure no one else was doing it, or
at least making sure they were doing it in
the appropriate ways. There started to be
an inclination to try to control the amount
and quality of populations, with black slaves
and white indentured servants being kept in
separate quarters in Maryland slave plantations,
largely because of fears of white women developing
insatiable lust for black men.
The regulation of sex became hugely important
to institutions. In schools, dormitories were
organised to ensure students didn’t have
sexual encounters with each other, as were
toilet breaks and school yards. The greatest
stroke of genius came in the design of toilet
cubicles. There were instances of cubicles
designed with doors which were raised off
the ground so that a teacher could see the
pupils feet and low enough that they could
see the pupils head. The side panels of the
toilet cubicles were high enough to prevent
the students from seeing each other. All this
was done so as to ensure that the pupils weren’t
having sex with each other in the cubicles.
From this time institutions also began to
operate in a different way, they became relient
on management techniques to get people to
do stuff. That is, instead of getting people
to do stuff by threatening them, they used
methods like incentives, minor punishments,
and architectural and social structures so
that people would be influenced into doing
the stuff that was wanted of them. Whilst
peasants were largely left to their own devices
to do their farming and the lord’s lackeys
only got involved if they weren’t producing
enough crops for him, factories started to
try and work out the most efficient ways for
their workers to work, and then got people
to manage the workers to ensure they were
working in those most efficient ways.
The implementation of such management techniques
was only possible in more atomised societies
where people acted more as individuals than
groups. If you have a tangle of many kinds
of close relationships in which you act differently,
your motives become more opaque as you have
many different emotional bonds causing you
to act differently, thus making you much harder
to predict and thus manage. Management techniques
started to proliferate in the wake of the
social ravages of the witch hunts, which had
destroyed many of the forms of social relations
of the peasantry. The implementation of management
techniques to promote efficiency and prevent
people boobeling around with their buddies
lead to further atomisations, which in turn
allowed for the development of even more controlling
management techniques, and on and on and on.
This facilitated the development of factories
and thus the industrial revolution, moving
the nexus of relationships from the extended
kinship groups of the peasantry to the nuclear
families of the upper and working classes.
Meanwhile, there were major transformations
afoot in the way the colonies were ruled,
and how Europeans living in the colonies saw
themselves and their sexual desires. Since
the 16th century European men taking posts
in the colonies were generally encouraged
by the state to take native concubines since
it was seen as a way to prevent veneral desises
from brothels and sodomy. Such practices continued
until the early 20th century in areas like
British ruled Africa and French Indo-China,
where it was impractical or expensive to maintain
large populations of white women of marriageable
age. However, in many colonies concubinage
lead to other concerns.
The Dutch East-Indies saw a large population
of inlandsche kinderen, mixed race and impoverished
white people who were neither native nor Europeans,
since they lacked the appropriate means, cultural,
or racial background to be considered European.
Not being Europeans, they were largely seen
as unfit to rule, and it became uncertain
what to do with them. On top of this they
were seen as a sign and threat of racial degeneracy.
During the 17 hundreds the inlandsche kinderen
were included in colonial rule, and there
was an attempt to bring them into the fold
of Dutch culture through establishing Dutch
schools for them to attend, and attempting
to make Dutch their favoured language. However,
paranoia that colonial life would lead to
the racial decay of Europeans spread, causing
the belief that Europeans who spent too long
in the colonies, and especially Europeans
who were born in the colonies, were becoming
less than fully European. With this the colonial
Europeans sought to establish their Europeanness
by living an idealised form of European bourgeois
lifestyle that was yet to proliferate even
within Europe. Thus, as such developments
of bourgeois lifestyle fed back between Europe
and the colonies, the developing norms of
the European bourgeoisie became fueled by
a colonial paranoia of racial degeneracy.
By 1838 inlandsche kinderen were officially
barred from all government posts which involved
interacting with the Javanese, and although
such laws were later repealed, the inlandsche
kinderen were still barred from most governmental
posts by the establishment of the requirement
of an education from the Netherlands. There
was a move from making the racial distinction
between Europeans and inlandsche kinderen
based on bloodlines to being based on cultural
distinctions. The inlandsche children were
seen as less restrained, less self possessed,
brought up in a culture that would lead them
into doing sex and crime from an early age.
With this there was a fixation by the colonial
bourgeoisie on proving that unlike the inlandsche
kinderen, they had the correct traits to rule.
Thus they devoted a crazy amount of attention
to self development.
Much of this attention was given to the rearing
of children. It was felt that Javanese servants
lavished too much attention on European children
causing the children to become weak willed
and decadent,
This was due to such practices as carrying
children’s satchels to school and following
children to feed them as they played if they
left food over from a meal. Equally, it was
thought that like blood, one could inherit
the personality traits of someone through
their milk. Thus there was much anxiety that
Javanese and European working class nursing
maids would pass on their personality traits
to the children they nursed, weakening the
self possessedness of the next generation
of bourgeoise children.
A big concern was child masterbation, with
a particullar colonial fixation on nursemaids
masterbating children. They also worried about
Javanese servants teaching bourgoiseis kids
all kinds of crazy sex stuff. Children began
to be seen as something of their own race,
with a lack of self restraint and cultivation
more equivalent to the European poor and colonial
subjects than to part of the ruling elite.
Education became essential as a means of molding
the next generation into upstanding people
fit to rule. Kindergartens developed in the
Netherlands were exported to the colonies,
developed further and exported back. They
moved children from the relitivly unregulated
care of a nursemaid into an environment governed
by strict scientific principles where they
could develop self mastery rather than be
masterbated and learn crazy sex stuff. Through
this the domain of family life became a topic
for scientific investigation and intervention.
Women were seen in the position of preventing
the moral decay and racial degeneracy of colonial
life. They were tasked with upholding morality
in the home, with many housetending manuels
advising them to make sure their children
and servants didn’t get too close. Since
the European woman was the key to moral forthwritness
it was thought that a women who could make
such a bad decision as to sleep with a colonial
subject couldn’t have even been European
in the first place, and thus Europeanness
was only considered to pass through the male
line.
The cultivation of the bourgeoisie European
self was an important factor in the European’s
justification of colonialism to themselves,
casting non-Europeans as weak willed and unfit
to rule themselves. Equally, the morallising
project of saving non-Europeans from their
deviant sexualities played into this. Portrayals
went so far as to depict non-Europeans lieing
around the sides of roads casually ejaculating.
European sexuality spread through colonial
subjects for many reasons. Missionaries played
a large part in spreading European sexuality
as they converted people to Christianity.
Equally, the adoption of European sexuality
was a status symbol for many native elites,
something Fanon thinks of along the lines
of “marrying white culture”. Additionally,
for those looking to preserve their positions
of power or get ahead in the new colonial
systems the adoption of European sexuality
was useful to help them fit in a little with
the new colonial rulers.
In settler-colonial America land could only
be passed down through nuclear families rather
than indigenous kinship groups. Thus, in order
to have and pass down the lands in many cases
required for survival, many indigenous people
had to form nuclear families, thus becoming
distant from their traditional kinship groups
and tribal structures.
With such a distancing, it became more difficult
to mount larger scale resistance to colonialism.
Without the close group bonds which might
encourage each other to action, or the sense
of community which might give the sense that
there was a viable alternative worth fighting
for, it would have been hard to have the hope
and support necessary to mount such difficult
battles, which had generally ended badly in
the past. This destruction of social bonds
lead to huge deathtolls on the Indian reservations
as people just lost the will to live.
This was a pattern across much of the colonised
world, which combined with other devisions
like that between those keeping to traditional
social structures and new Christians adopting
nuclear families. The appeal of Christianity
and it’s regulated modes of sexuality increased
as traditional social bonds erroded. The atomisation
of kinship and tribal bonds lead to the destruction
of the systems of mutual support leading people
to be more dependent on precarious labour
rather than having their friends and family
help to tied them over whilst things weren’t
going so well. Such developments enabled the
development of a pool of labourers with little
option but to take any manual job offered
by the colonial regime. This broke up kinship
groups further as people moved away for work
and it facilitate the construction of colonial
infrastructure which in turn made the outer
reaches of the colonies more manageable and
more tightly controlled by the colonial authorities.
However, it didn’t always work this way.
In India many peasants moved to the industrialising
cities for work as they wanted to get money
to save their families farms. They were much
more prominent in campaigns for workers rights
than the urban poor, as they were less beaten
down by the urban conditions, and their pressing
concerns were with the larger wages needed
to save their family farms rather than just
the need to survive.
Another big colonial export was anti-sodomy
laws and general anti-sodomy sentiments to
many societies which had been aproving of,
or at least relatively indifferent to, homosex.
This was mostly done because the missionaries
and colonial authorities really didn’t like
sodomy, but inducing witch hunts within colonised
populations helped devide such populations
further.
Back in Europe, with all the concerns about
the proper structure and practices of a healthy
and moral bourgeoisie family, medicine got
obsessed with the ill health effects of child
masterbation, hygiene raigimes for breastfeeding,
and the correct way to raise children to not
grow up into decadents. From the investigation
and uncovering of the truths of family life,
people began to investigate other aspects
of the burgeoning notion of sexuality. People
began to think of sex as something about which
their was a truth to be uncovered, and thus
sexology sprung up to invent a science of
sex. It obsessed over taxonomizing desires
and various forms of sexual identity, thinking
of all manner of crazy categories, like presbiophiles
and zooerasts, each with their own moral transgressions,
childhood history, and identifying characteristics.
The sexologists also devoted much effort to
deciding which processes were normal and which
pathological.
Through the obsession with confession, which
had taken off even in protistant Europe, people
came to hold their desires as part of their
identity, and thus, when these desires, along
with other traits, were taxonomised as sexual
identities, they came to hold those sexual
identities as part of their identity, especially
once these sexual identities became widely
discussed. Sexual identity became a truth
of oneself.
Previously, debauchery, adultery, rape, and
sodomy were considered as deferent levels
along the same line of moral transgression,
but they became seen as completely different
deviances. The perpetrators of these acts
became seen as having a flawed nature rather
than being occasional sinners.
Such taxonomisations didn’t only limit the
possibilities for those seen as transgressive,
they also limmeted what constitutes as a normal
hetrosexual life, and thus shaped hetrosexual
life around what constituted a healthy and
morally upstanding nuclear family, a family
who would form the central body in regulating
any sexual deviance. Now, anyone who might
think of themselves as having deviant sexual
desires would have to contend with thoughts
of themselves as having a pathological identity,
and not only face social stigmatization for
acts they might be engaged in, but also for
who they were as a person, the deep seated
truth of themselves as a deviant.
Whoo. End of video. You might have noticed
that I only got to 1900, so there’s gonna
be a sequel. If you’d like to see that I
guess you could subscribe and press the ding
dong bell. That would be nice. Yay. Thanky.
I’m going to put a few references and further
readings in a pinned comment if you’re interested
in anything in more detail. Bye.
