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Writer's pictureStephen Morgan

The Forgotten History of Sex

Rather than write our own blog post today, we have decided to share a rather informative piece from The New Yorker by Rebecca Mead. We also suggest reading the book referenced in the article, Firece Desires, by Rebecca Davis. The more we know, the more we underdstand and value each other. Love for all, we say.



An excerpt from The New Yorker:


"“Fierce Desires” is billed as the first major history of sex and sexuality in America since John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman published “Intimate Matters,” in 1988. (A third edition was published in 2012.) In their study, D’Emilio, a pioneering historian of gay life, and Freedman, a much lauded feminist historian, wove together a wealth of research about the expression and policing of sexuality in American lives through three centuries, from the family-centered reproductive imperatives of the colonial period to the more romantic model that prevailed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in which sexual relationships were taken as a source of personal identity and happiness. The authors made it clear that, for instance, the Puritans were not so pure. In one case of bestiality prosecuted in Plymouth, the perpetrator was required to identify in a lineup the specific sheep that he’d violated, before both the man and the animals were executed for the crime. In the nineteenth century, Western cowboy culture bred same-sex intimacy, along with bawdy doggerel about saddling up and riding. D’Emilio and Freedman sought to complicate the straitlaced fantasies about the past which religious and political conservatives were promoting in the nineteen-eighties, but reproductive heterosexuality was at the center of their narrative—understandably enough, since reproductive heterosexuality is the structure within which most Americans have lived."





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