Discuss the change from the "one sex" model to the "two sex" model and the affect this had on sexuality throughout the 18th and 19th century?

In Galen’s model each element of the reproductive system is common to women and men, a mirror image of each other. The vagina an interior penis, labia as foreskin, uterus as scrotum, ovaries as testicles. For Galen, sexual pleasure, and orgasm for both female and male were essential and necessary to generate enough heat to reproduce. The male heats up to a point at which blood is transformed into semen while women also required orgasmic sexual pleasure to simultaneously generate her own ejaculated seed. The view that women’s orgasm was essential to reproduction was dominant throughout Europe until the late eighteenth century at which point the emergence of the Victorian era and its obsession with the passionless bourgeois wife and mother was observed. The majority of manuals throughout this period and earlier often dealt with infertility focussing upon how to excite, and enhance women’s sexual pleasure…

“Handle her secret parts and dugs, that she may take fire and be inflamed in venery, for so at length the wombe will strive and waxe fervent with desire of casting forth its own seed, and receiving the man’s seed to be mixed together therein.”

The one sex model is loyal to the male, clearly favouring man over woman. The male body is taken as the most perfect in form and beauty, while the female is portrayed as a cooler and thus less perfect version of the male. The masculine was the yardstick against which all else was measured. The important point to remember about medical texts and literature throughout this period were that they were generally written, taught and spread by men, for men. In these writings women are figured as wives, objects and possessions that required training, regulating and constant supervision.

What was at stake in terms of sexuality was the relationship between each other within the great chain of being. In Ancient Greece and Rome sexual pleasure between males was not illegitimate in itself, but only became so in terms of their relative position within the social order of the day. Sexual pleasure between Greek male citizens and boys was socially approved, “provided the adult male took what was perceived as the penetrator’s role, and provided they continued to have sexual relations with woman.” However if the boy became a free citizen (an equal) their sexual practice became problematic. It was not biology or sex that mediated activities of the flesh, but the location within the chain of being.

The one-sex model seems so far fetched that it requires a leap in imagination to comprehend how anyone could have held such views. This is particularly so when one considers the length of time it prevailed (1400 years) and that anatomists reaffirmed it time and time again, despite their skills in human dissection. The more they examined the body of women the more they became convinced it was a version of man’s.  It’s not as if the body was not well examined, so why the distinction of male and female bodies in the eighteenth century? Organs that previously shared the same name, occupying the same bodies were assigned their own names - such as ‘vagina’. Body structures such as the skeleton and nervous system which were previously common to both women and men were now differentiated according to sex. This is proven in anatomical drawings of the human skeleton, which prior to the eighteenth century had been persistently represented as the male skeleton. “It was not until the 1750s in England, France and Germany that genuine sex differences were discovered in every bone, muscle, nerve and cell of the human body and a specifically female skeleton emerged.”

So the question of why the two sex model emerged cannot be explained simply by advances in medical knowledge nor scientific progress. Rather, it must be understood within the historical context of a turbulent political transformation to establish a new modern social order. The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century brought forward new concepts concerning human beings and their relationships to nature and each other. The great chain of being was dismissed and a familiar rise of new political systems of governance, particularly liberalism was accepted. This paralleled with the emergence of modern concepts such as liberty, equality, fraternity, and individualism. At the root of the Enlightenment vision was the belief that all of mankind are born equal, that the liberty of each individual was sacred. “In the 1789 declaration of the rights of man and citizen there was no explicit reference to an individual’s sex or race.” Finally an individuals right and liberties were equal to any other, with this in mind an argument was needed to establish social difference as a basis for enslavement. In other words, for social inequality to exist, it must develop directly from natural inequality. If natural inequality was mirrored as social inequality it did not contradict the terms of Enlightenment freedom. It was left to science to demonstrate whether natural inequalities existed amongst human beings. Consequently, race and sex became the two fundamental emerging inequalities.

Modern science, particularly since the 18th century has relentlessly pursued the origins of sexual difference. The secret of our sexual differences have been found in reproductive systems, skulls, skeletons, brains, hormones, chromosomes and genes, etc. It was conclusively proven that “sexual differences were not restricted merely to the organs of reproduction but penetrated the entire organism.” It was believed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that cultural differences stemmed from biologically based sexual differences. Social inequality was thus viewed as mirroring ’natural’ inequality.

“Both men and women were created as ‘naturally’ and biologically sexed, with an increasing onus to find the other and now ‘opposite’ sex attractive. What occurred was not a liberation. For woman it heralded a period of intense patriarchal oppression, but for men as well, it reflected an increasingly restrictive form of masculinity, which was policed by a highly effective public and print culture.”

Scientific opinion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries cannot be separated from the political forces of capitalism, patriarchy and expanding colonial domination. Race and sex signified the exclusion or inclusion within the civilised rational domain of modern public citizenship. European women were all seen to be governed by natural forces to a greater degree than rational civilised bourgeois man and therefore denied the liberty, equality and freedom that all of mankind was once promised by liberal

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Philosophers (equal in nature therefore equal in society was no more). Biological

differences were discovered and science and politics become one. Science utilised its prestige and authority to support the economic enterprise.

 

It is against this cultural and political horizon that an understanding of modern sexuality was discovered. The Victorian era of the nineteenth century became dominated by the belief that an individual's sex and sexuality form the most basic core of their identity, potentiality, social/political standing and freedom. It is ironic that the 19th century commonly portrays Victorian sexual society as puritanistic, moralistic and highly repressive, when in reality sexuality became a focus of public and private attention. The Victorian bourgeois may have covered their piano legs out of modesty, but as an emerging social and political force they chose sexuality as the basis for defining their identity from the aristocracy, peasants and working classes. As Michel Foucault points out...

“Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, there emerged a political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about sex. ... This need to take sex ‘into account’, to pronounce a discourse on sex that would not derive from morality alone but from rationality as well, was sufficiently new that at first it wondered at itself and sought apologies for its own existence. How could a discourse based on reason speak like that?”

But they spoke with increasing intensity and authority, bringing into society and science a multitude of distinctive sexual species. The pervert, child masturbator, homosexual, prostitute and many more all emerged as distinctly classified sexual species possessing their own internal secret which had been revealed by the penetrating gaze of science. Among the bourgeoisie, the passionless reproducing wife confined to domesticity and her simple husband, became the central reference point for discussions concerning sexuality. The prostitute, homosexual and solitary masturbator emerge as individuals posing the greatest threat to heterosexual reproduction, bourgeois morality and social order. The masturbator and prostitute emerge as creatures spreading disease and weakening the modern social body, both disrupting the boundaries surrounding the emergent bourgeois family.

 The discovery of the two sex model proved that “sexual attitudes and practices were (and are) fundamental aspects of society. Reproductive activities shaped demographic patterns, while attitudes towards sexual practices helped shape the construction of gender roles.” Nature played a pivotal role in the rise of liberal political thought. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the study of the intrinsic natures and origins of sex and race became an overwhelming focus of attention for modern science and political theorists. Political struggles over power and position within the post-revolutionary public sphere were fought out in the scientific arena in terms of sex, race and class. Nature, and claims on behalf of the natural emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, playing a crucial role in informing our common understanding of sexual difference. In short, we have become our sex. Foucault writing and reflecting on modern sexuality states that sex has "become the truth of our being".

Bibliography

A. Fletcher Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (1995)

M. Foucault "Nietzshe, Genealigy, History", in Bouchard Donald, Language Counter-Memory, Practice:Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault (1977)

M. Foucault The History of Sexuality, Vol.1 (1976)

T. Hitchcock English Sexualities, 1700-1800  (1997)

T. Hitchcock Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England (offprint)

T. Laqueur Making Sex:Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990)

T. Laqueur The Making of the Modern Body:Sexuality and society in the Nineteenth Century (1987)

L. Schiebinger "Skeletons in the Closet:The first illustrations of the female skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy" in Thomas Laqueur, The Making of the Modern Body:Sexuality and society in the Nineteenth Century (1987)

L. Schiebinger Nature’s Body:Sexual Politics and the making of Modern Science (1993)

R. Shoemaker Gender in English Society, 1650-1850 : The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (1998)

R. Trumbach Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Cantury London (offprint)

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