Sexualities

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Sexuality and the Transformation of Culture: The Longue Dure

Thomas W. Laqueur
Sexualities 2009; 12; 418
DOI: 10.1177/1363460709105708
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Turning Points in the History of Sexuality

Abstract In the USA today, the election of gay bishops threatens

to bring about a schism in the Episcopalian Church. This article
asks questions about the extraordinary importance attached to
matters sexual, both historically and in the present. Laqueurs
anthropological answer to this broad question is that it is
connected with a long and divergent tradition of thinking about
the origins of culture. Sex and death, he says, organize the work
of making culture. The thematic occasion for the history
presented here is the notion of orgasm, and Laqueur offers four
or five dates which can be regarded as turning points in the long
history of allegories of orgasm.
Keywords gay bishops, historical anthropology, orgasm, origins of
culture, sexuality

Thomas W. Laqueur
University of California, Berkeley, USA

Sexuality and the Transformation of

Culture: The Longue Dure
Most of us in the conference where these papers were originally delivered
and all of the authors of the essays in this forum are more of the constructivist than the discursivist persuasion, to use the classification offered by
Peter Cryle in his introduction. It is true that we all interrogate the
thought process by which words come into being or acquire new meaning
frigidity, spermatorrhoea, sadism, orgasm or the revaluation of terms
associated with sexuality pleasure for example. All of us try to understand the historical importance of the process of linguistic consolidation
by linking it to a variety of concurrent cultural, social, and political
developments. The birth of words marks moments in the history of
the body.
But at the same time, all of us are also invested, more or less inexplicitly, in a longue dure of sexuality; we seem to share a belief in an
enduring ground of corporeal pains and pleasures that words bring more
or less into focus. Neologisms do not so much mark the invention of a
new kind of sexuality as they proclaim a new exigency at some time and
Sexualities http://sex.sagepub.com Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
Vol 12(4): 418436 DOI: 10.1177/1363460709105708

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Laqueur Sexuality and the transformation of culture

place. Bodies underwrite a remarkably stable tissue of metaphor that new

words disrupt but do not destroy. The heat and the cold of the body in
relation to sexual desire and reproductive potency, for example, is rooted
in antiquity and finds parallels in high as well as popular medical traditions
outside the West. Some men and women, before the end of the 19th
century, were unable to have, and others were disinclined or uninterested
in having, penis-in-vagina intercourse. We have plenty of evidence for that.
Cryles attention to words forces us to ask why, at a very precise moment,
the term frigidity long part of the linguistic field associated with this
inability or disinclination came to apply to women, and increasingly to
women only. (Havelock Ellis around 1900, for example, used it for both
but in the same, new, sense that Cryle discusses; see Ellis, 1900 1: 113
and 3: 162.) That is a very different matter from proclaiming the
invention of frigidity.
Each of us explores a history of how our topic somehow entered onto
the stage of history in a new way. Spermatorrhoea does not mark the
invention of urethral or vaginal discharge. Gleet, meaning a slimy
substance or morbid discharge, had been around for centuries and had
come to be a mainstay of quack doctors treating both men and women
by the early 18th century. Sometimes lues was the word used for women.
Elizabeth Stephens traces the problem back to Galen and before. So, we
clearly recognize that thing to which Lallemand brilliantly attached a
neologism and made his fortune. What is new is not a discharge but how
it is enmeshed in new practices of the body in the 19th century. Alison
Moore makes the strongest case for the power of neologism but, again,
the connection between pain and pleasure is not new; their relation to the
primitive and bestial is (see Laqueur, 2007; Largier, 2007). And, Cooks
parallel history of pleasure in the realms of sex and economics, political
theory and aesthetics implicitly makes the case that there is really something there that can be traced across many domains, chronological as well
as substantive. In other words, the history that matters is the story of how
kinds of pleasures function in relation to one another.
By this I do not mean that there is an unchanging real world of the
body whose meaning is independent of language. There are genuinely
new practices invented, although this is rare, and with them come new
words: fisting is the most obvious example referring to what is perhaps
the only genuine novelty in the history of sexuality. In this case the thing
produces the word. There are also real changes in old practices: sexual
intercourse of the penis-in-vagina sort became more frequent on a per
capita basis in the late 18th and early 19th century than before and this
needs to be explained.1 But in general, the intellectually and politically
exigent tension in the history of sexuality is that between a body and a
recognizable complex of desires and practices loosely gathered under
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Sexualities 12(4)

sexuality on the one hand and the changing, but not unlimited,
meanings given them in the past. Perhaps in this regard I am the most
extreme among my colleagues. I have in my work generally, and in this
essay in particular, emphasized that there are turning points in the history
of things of which words speak. But at the same time, I insist that the
sexual body is recognizable as a ground for the making of culture over
very long periods of time.
The politics and hermeneutics of sexuality tend always to extremes: is it
plausible that masturbation really is morally worse than suicide as Kant
claimed or more dangerous than smallpox as Samuel August Tissot, one of
the most famous physicians of the Enlightenment, insisted? (It still surprises
me to find evidence for how long and how seriously doctors took this
claim: 108 men were admitted between 1855 and 1875 to St Elizabeth
Hospital, the federal insane asylum, suffering from masturbation induced
madness; we do not know how many of that number survived, but of the
38 who were admitted during the Civil War, average age 25, 18 died, or
47 percent, a considerably higher mortality rate than from Variolo major.)
And I still find it remarkable that in addition to being charged with treason
Marie Antoinette in 1793 stood accused of teaching her son the Dauphin
to masturbate. These are not, at first sight, commensurable offenses
(Lowry, unpublished).2
But that is my point. Both the rhetoric of, and the responses to, matters
sexual seem often to be excessive, disproportional, well beyond what their
actual consequences might seem to be. (I take my examples from the
modern period but late antiquity would do nicely.) The battles over birth
control in the 19th century have a peculiarly vicious quality, as if civilization itself depended on their outcome.3 No one in the 1960s would have
predicted that abortion would become a if not the decisive domestic
political issue in late 20th-century USA or that significant numbers of
ordinary people and members of the governing class would support a
constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. A procedure to change
foundational law that in the past had been reserved for freeing slaves or
giving women the vote is now mobilized to address an issue of what would
seem a very different order.
This should not surprise us. Upon the whole, thought William Paley,
the immensely influential late 18th-century British bishop, moralist and
champion of natural theology: if we pursue the crime of seduction
through the complicated misery which it occasions, it would not be
something more than mere invective to assert, that not one half of the
crimes for which men suffer death by the laws of England are so flagitious
[so shameful, so outrageous] as this (Paley, 2002 3: 176). Seduction is
worse than half the capital offenses in the Bloody Code of British Law.
Examples could be multiplied from other countries and times. But the
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Laqueur Sexuality and the transformation of culture

point is clear: the move from the particular to the cosmic is precipitous
when it comes to matters sexual in the public realm.
The same might be said about sex in private as well. This is not my
topic although the border between public and private is obviously very
much in play in the questions that engage me here. In fact, one of the
central features of sexuality is that it is almost never just private. And sex
is not alone as an arena in which something seemingly small takes on
cosmic proportions. Synecdoche can work its horrible magic in many
contexts: armed Soviet and American tanks faced each other barrel to
barrel across the Berlin border in September 1961 and set the world on
the path to nuclear apocalypse over the question of whether East German
soldiers were within their rights in demanding that an American
civilian show his ID card when he wanted to cross from one sector to
the other. The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and the
origins of the Great War provide another classic example. But, on the
whole, matters sexual seem peculiarly prone to the inflation of meaning
and consequence.
A general answer to why this might be the case will, I want to suggest,
offer an entry into the long history of the mutually transformative power
of sexuality and culture that is the subject of this essay. Consider the
current controversy in the Anglican Church over the ordination of gay
bishops or indeed gay priests. It is rhetorically extreme: Bishop Emmanuel
Chukwumuof Enugu, of Nigeria, for example, telling the Rev. Richard
Kirker, coordinator of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, at the
1998 Lambeth Conference that Leviticus had declared the death penalty
for homosexuality and then proceeding on the spot to exorcize Kirkers
homosexual demons (see Shaw, 2006). Its consequences are potentially
dire: a denomination, 77 million people strong, stands on the abyss of
schism over what seems like a relatively peripheral issue.
Of course, the more secular minded among you will say most religious
controversies seem wildly out of proportion. But the ordination of homosexual priests and bishops seems especially so. Its resolution does not seem
tied to crucial questions about Gods relation to his creation or His plan
for salvation. It does not seem to be the crux, as is sometimes the case, of
a major theological controversy. And, even for so-called fundamentalists,
the stakes seem small. The Bible has very few pronouncements on the
subject; the New Testament in particular has even fewer, if any; and Jesus
himself is not reported to have said anything about it.4 Finally, it seems
sociologically harmless. The numbers involved are tiny. Two cases: that of
the Rev. Canon Dr Jeffrey John, a homosexual though celibate, who
was forced by a beleaguered and, arguably cowardly Archbishop of
Canterbury to withdraw his acceptance of the bishopric of Reading in
2003; and that of the Rev. Gene Robinson, who lived in an open union
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Sexualities 12(4)

with his male partner, and was confirmed by the Episcopal Church in the
USA as Bishop of New Hampshire.
For a time it looked as though the question of gay bishops and priests
would fade into a general haze of benign neglect, tolerance or support of
human rights. The 1978 Lambeth Conference in its resolution on human
relationships and sexuality affirmed that, while heterosexuality was the
Biblical norm, the Church recognized the need for deep dispassionate
study of the question of homosexuality, which would take seriously both
the teaching of Scripture and the results of scientific and medical research
(Lambeth Conference, 1978, Resolution 10). Pretty anodyne stuff and
not a basis for schism, one might have thought. Only in 1991 did the
official stance seem to toughen. It become clear that while same-sex
monogamous relationships were acceptable if distinctly second best, these
were not permitted the clergy. Or at least, so a majority thought. The
distinction between clergy and laity is generally one that is not much
defended within Protestantism and it was by no means clear that, as one
Anglican observer noted, it this seeming ban on gay priests would
become a line that must not be crossed (quoted in Shaw, 2006: 101).
So, why did what might have seemed like a second order controversy
set the church on the path, not of more dialogue but of schism? Why, as
I put the question earlier, did this particular question of sexuality assume
such hyperbolic proportions? The Evangelical side would answer that, in
fact, adherence to the word of God is the real issue but when pressed as
to why they have been willing to accommodate themselves to many other
things that the Bible seems to prohibit the conversation quickly stops. But
this sort of answer is less interesting than the admission on both sides that
sex is a synecdoche for something beyond the body and the Bible.
The power of the homosexuality question derives from its being
political in at least three ways. First, it offers the occasion to fight other,
present or past, battles on a new front. The Church of England has
been invaded by a Taliban tendency with its own agenda and a strong
determination to win, says one observer. Rowan Williams, the current
Archbishop of Canterbury speaks about the powerful politicization
around the issue that makes it harder to have a discussion than it might
otherwise be (Bates, 2004: 2212). Evangelicals say that they have long
felt themselves on the losing side of debates with more liberal Christians
and now is the time and this is the issue on the basis of which to
take back the Church. Strict construction of Leviticus 18:22, however
problematic in itself and however irrelevant the pages of laws of holiness
of which it is a part might seem today, is revenge for more than a century
of the so called higher criticism.
There are other old scores to be settled as well. Western prelates are
willing to accept local option: they acknowledge, for example, that a
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Laqueur Sexuality and the transformation of culture

question such as whether polygamists can be baptized should be left to

each provincial Church, in other words, that this is an African matter to
decide. African bishops now have the opportunity to claim for their views
the sort of universalistic weight that the voices of the West have so long
taken for granted: the ordination of homosexuals is unacceptable
anywhere and everywhere. Thus, in a general sense, the controversy
becomes another round in the four-centuries-long battle over pluralism
how much difference of opinion can or should a polity or a community bear? and in the shorter but still deeply rooted history of
decolonization and anti-imperialism.
There is a second, more theoretically grounded, set of reasons why
the fundamental issue in the ordination of homosexual bishops debate that
I have taken as my example is at its core political. The category of sexuality itself, and of bodies and desires more generally, constitutes the basis,
Michel Foucault famously argued, for the shift from so-called sovereign
to bio-power. Sexuality, he says, is not something in the body that needs
control from some outside or inside power in either the State or the ego
and super-ego as the Freudian story of civilization and its discontents
would have it. Instead, new disciplines medicine, demography, and the
social sciences more generally at a specific historical moment, the mid
to late 19th century, come to define and give meaning to categories whose
referents in an important sense did not exist before: homosexuality, population, masturbation. It is through these disciplinary modalities becoming
invested in the body that power is exercised on the liberal subject; biopower is at the heart of what Foucault came to call governmentality, the
decentralized exercise of power in the largely self-monitored subject of the
liberal state.
Homosexuality and the sort of debate I have outlined are thus essentially political because their terms are those of bio-power and its enemies.
On the one hand stand the moderns who speak of taking into account the
results of scientific and medical research; on the other are the people of
the old regime who insist on the sovereign power of God. In either case,
politics is primary and sexuality is its vehicle, its language, its medium.
There is, finally, a third way in which we might think of the relation
between politics and sexuality: one that does not make a claim about
depth and surface or about the nature of sexuality itself but works instead
by collapsing one category into the other. We can see this happening on
two seemingly different but, I think, closely related trajectories. On the
one hand the neo-liberal claim that market forces work everywhere and
not just in an isolated economic sphere tends to put every part of the self
on the same ontological plane. Human capital theory as developed by
Gary Becker and other Chicago school theorists in the 1960s suggests
that whatever we do study, listen to music, relax, make love is not
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Sexualities 12(4)

something divorced from ourselves as producers but, in fact, adds to or

subtracts from our own and hence also national capital.5 The
privatepublic distinction collapses. Ironically, both left Nietzschean and
Marxist critiques of the 1960s get us to the same place. If the personal
is the political, as the saying went or goes then sexual acts are no
longer in the separate realm of the private but constitute public acts, ways
of making a person a social being. Thus feminists like Betty Dodson who
argued that masturbation constitutes the core of womens sexual being,
that it allows them to become who they are, come pretty close to Chicago
school economists who would push the market into every space, public
or private, without distinction.6
The bitter quarrel about the ordination of gay bishops in the Anglican
Church may really be about larger political questions; sexuality may be
politics by another name. And I have no particular quarrel with any of the
three ways I have just outlined for responding to a question about sex
with an answer about politics. But I do want to point out that none of
them explains why sexuality constitutes the particular domain of conflict
nor why, as I claimed earlier, it carries an especially, and from a certain
perspective, excessive, cultural charge.
One way to answer that question would be to reverse terms: rather than
sexuality being politics by other means we might entertain the proposition that politics is sexuality in another register. Radical Freudian
theories about fascism and the responses of the 1968 generation in
Germany to these views are my case in point here although their
theoretical warrant goes back to other meta-psychological writings of
Freud himself. (I am thinking here of Totem and Taboo where Freud offers
an account of how the murder and ingestion of the father is the founding
moment of the band of brothers that, many metamorphoses later,
becomes political society.) In no western country were questions of sexuality more politically central during the second half of the 20th century
than in what became, in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany. Immediately after the collapse of National Socialism it was, in the slang of the
time, Thema 1, (Topic No. 1); the Nouvel Observateur claimed in 1970
that the Germans were sex obsessed Sex ber alles noting that the
heavy breathing of orgasm had mercifully replaced the stomping of boots.
Nowhere outside Germany was sexual liberation linked with greater fierceness to politics more generally during the 1960s and 1970s and nowhere
with the possible exception of the USA was the backlash more painful
in the decades after.7
Read Wilhelm Reich and act accordingly, read the graffiti on Frankfurt wall in 1968 and millions did just that. Breathlessly, we are told,
they made their way through The Function of the Orgasm and the Mass
Psychology of Fascism. Nowhere else were these views so central. A special
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Laqueur Sexuality and the transformation of culture

sort of sexual tension was the driving force of 1968, wrote the New
Left cultural critic and historian Klaus Theweleit. (He was the author of
one of the most important post-1968 accounts of politics and sexuality
two volumes published in the late 1970s on the sexual fantasies of the
Freicorp in which he tries to remain faithful to the idea that fascism was
at its core a battle against pleasure while at the same time acknowledging
that its success lay also in its refusal to relinquish desire (Theweleit, 1987,
1989). Of course the 68ers were wrong and perhaps nave in their belief
that Auschwitz was typical of a society that represses sexuality, or that
brutality and lust for destruction became substitutes for sexual pleasures
but that does not detract from the usefulness of this example for us.
Reichs central insight that cruelty was the result of chronic sexual
dissatisfaction and, conversely, that genitally satisfiable people were
prone to be nice and kind found expression in all sorts of reform movements, some silly, many long overdue. The 68 generation, for example,
fought to create schools that valued the views of children and allowed
the freer expression of child sexuality whose very existence an earlier
generation had denied. If their parents had not been taught, with
disastrous political consequences, to obey blindly, their own offspring
would not be so burdened. A radical volte-face was not the solution to the
long reign of the Christian Democrats and the historical blindness and
moral obscurantism of the generation of the Fathers. Well publicized
excesses allowing six-year-olds to paint the naked bodies of their peers,
to play with their own genitals and those of their friends in public, and to
fondle their teachers made the reformers vulnerable to false charges of
pedophilia and worse. More generally, a program of sexual liberation was
not a practical route to political reform; and it also badly misread the
relationship of National Socialism, and fascism generally, to sexuality. But
the analysis does have the virtue of explaining why and how sexuality
and not just any constellation of desires and pleasures and arrangements
is mobilized to transform culture.
It also raises the question why anyone would think that this should
be possible: or, to put it crudely, why is sexuality of such consequence?
There is no foundational answer. Its turtles all the way down, as Clifford
Geertz put it in the words of an Indonesian folk tale about the limits
of explanation.8
But there is an explanation one level up from the turtles and I propose
getting there by the same routes that I followed. The first is through
pedagogy: a course I taught to undergraduates called Policing Sexuality.
It surveyed the extraordinary efforts that various societies have gone to
so as to make sexuality polite that is, to make it refined, clean, polished,
cultured to get back to the common sense of policing and politeness as
having to do with upholding the rules that guarantee public security. Our
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Sexualities 12(4)

seminar discussed the monumental battles in the 19th century and early
20th century about prostitution, birth control, abortion, age of sexual
consent, child marriage, and parental rights over the sexual availability of
their children itself a vast topic that played an important part in the
creation of anti-old-regime, imperialist and anti-imperialist discourse.
During the 18th century enormous effort, for example, went into attacking arranged marriages and such purported practices as droit de seigneur
the more powerful perhaps because the more imaginary and,
conversely, how huge a stake the novel had in love as the free choice of
adults.9 These issues also permeated imperial politics. Mrinalini Sihnas
recent book tells the story of how the American journalist Katherine
Mayos 1927 Mother India argued that child marriage was the paradigmatic example of the moral degeneracy of Hinduism and the hopelessness of Indian independence. These charges were met in the same year by
the so-called Sarda Act, backed by Indian feminists, nationalists, and
Gandhi himself, to ban child marriage and thereby redeem Indias honor
and gain the moral standing required for nationhood. Access to women
had become, in widely different contexts, the synecdoche for political
legitimacy or illegitimacy (Sinha, 2006).
My course began with the remarkable introduction to Claude LviStrauss foundational work, Elementary Structures of Kinship, in which he
argues that the incest taboo is neither in nature that is to say a matter
of biological necessity nor in culture but constitutes instead the border
between the two, rather like, I imagine, the transition from a liquid to a
gas or some other radical shift of state in chemistry and physics (LviStrauss, 1969). This idea, it turns out, had a long prehistory that I will
come to in a moment but for the time being I want only to say that
Lvi-Strauss offers here an understanding of why a category of rules
although not specific ones could be understood as constituting the deep
atomic structure of kinship and hence of culture. (Echoes of this insight
could still be heard when perfectly reasonable left-leaning anthropologists
like Franoise Hritier at the College de France joined the successful
opposition to that part of the new proposed Pacte Civile that would have
allowed gay couples to adopt: heterosexuality is the foundation of kinship
which is the foundation of French and all other civilization. It is, so to
speak, the guarantor of the symbolic order. That gay people might have
children is incompatible with this order Fassin, 2001.) One obviously
need not take this view nor believe that the incest taboo is restricted to
humans chimps apparently prohibit it to follow Levi-Strauss in seeing
the foundational nature of a rule about sexuality.
My second route to an answer to the foundational question I posed
goes through the claims that could be made about death. The great
18th-century speculative anthropologist and philosopher of history
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Laqueur Sexuality and the transformation of culture

Giambattista Vico argued that burial of the dead was one of the three
universal institutions of humanity that produced and continued to
sustain civil society. The other two universal institutions are matrimony
and religion but they, it quickly becomes clear, circle back to the dead.
The living stand between the dead ancestors and their own progeny; it is
the primal lex the law of genealogy (and this gets us back to sex) that
creates the family or the clan as an institution which in turn connects the
unborn and the dead and projects it into historical time (Vico, 1968:
326). It is the family or the clan that are responsible for the proper care
of the dead and are, in turn, the foundation for religion. While all of this
has many classical and early modern antecedents, my point is not to trace
one strand of intellectual history but to suggest that a long and divergent
tradition of thinking about the origins of culture is at work in the creation
of rules to manage sexuality. The point is not whether death or sex are
primary but rather that, as the founders of 19th-century anthropology and
cultural history Fustel de Coulanges is a good example understood,
they together organize the work of making culture. Worship of the dead
is the primal form of religion; one of its first rules was that it could be
offered only to those deceased persons who belonged to it by blood
(Fustel de Coulanges, 2006: 1539). The claims of Levi-Strauss and of
Vico are thus intimately connected.
Let me make this case by tracing briefly the ways in which Malthus
Essay on Population figures into various histories of the origins of culture.10
His fundamental observation the single truth that he thought would
completely discredit the philosopher William Godwins optimistic speculations about the perfectibility of human nature is that the sexual
appetite is as urgent as hunger, that it cannot be civilized into quiescence,
and that it is extremely painful to leave it ungratified. (Malthus makes the
case the other way around as well that no pleasure is greater and that,
on his deathbed, even a scholar will remember moments engaged in
virtuous love far more fondly than the happiest hours of study, but that
is slightly off the point.) Malthus, as we all know, thought that in fact the
sexual urge would not be denied and that, as a consequence, population
would periodically and regularly outstrip food supply. One result of sex
therefore was misery: famine, war and death. The other option was vice
birth control, prostitution, infanticide. Eventually he offered a third:
moral restraint not having sex which came down to another, if less
deadly form of misery.
The poet and critic Robert Southeys response to Malthus dire view of
human sexual hunger was to argue that the existence of a seeming innate
incest taboo the purported fact that humans, unlike animals, do not in
fact desire sex with every member of the opposite sex proves that we are
in fact capable of moderation. Malthus responded in succeeding editions
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Sexualities 12(4)

of the Essay with considerable and depressing ethnographical evidence for

how much of the history of soi-disant civilization was really a history of
the morally vicious efforts humans have undertaken to divorce sexual
intercourse from reproduction or to limit access based on power, status,
and age precisely because sexual restraint was so much not part of our
nature. By the 1860s J.R. McLennan, the man who first used the word
exogamy, developed a theory to show how the incest taboo, far from
being evidence of humans moral superiority to the beasts, as Southey had
argued, was rather a cultural-evolutionary adaptation to a cascade of vice
and of efforts. Female infanticide limited population but led to a shortage
of women which led to stealing women from other tribes, which turned
out to be difficult and led to promiscuous intercourse or to polyandry as
ways of solving the woman shortage problem. This led to matrilineal
kinship structures, insider and outsider groups within a tribe that
produced the sense of the other within the group with which one could
mate without attacking other tribes. Voil the incest taboo as a way to
keep from killing ones kinsmen.
The Darwinian version of civilization is different: the population born
of sexual hunger encourages cultural creativity agriculture, better
hunting techniques in order to feed offspring; and larger populations
meet the needs of natural selection to have biological variety as its
workshop. Reproductive control for Darwin mattered less than the
impetus that sexuality gave to civilization. But for my purposes we need
not choose whether increase in food or population limitation is the most
exigent. I do not need either of these stories or Vicos or Fustel de
Coulanges or Levi Strauss or Freuds or Foucaults especially the
Foucault of volumes 2 and 3 of the History of Sexuality to be true,
whatever that might mean. All I need is that an enormously wide range
of thinkers have, on the basis of rich evidence, understood the regulation
of sexuality and the management of death to be foundational for
understanding the origins of culture and of major cultural institutions.
Making the link is one of the oldest habits of thought in our repertoire,
an almost synaptic tendency to read into sexuality although not every
question of sexuality at every instance other matters of great import.
This I think is why to return to my original example the ordination
of two gay bishops is so deeply contested.
It is also why, in my own work, I try to write the history of sexuality as
a history of cultural transformation in which the pleasures of the body are
mobilized for the work of culture. There was, I argue, orgasm before
orgasm, which makes its lexical birth in the late 19th century all the more
of an event, a turning point in a story I want to now outline briefly. The
Roman classical theorists called it or what we easily and unambiguously
recognize as it the summa voluptas, the greatest delight. I do not need
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to reaffirm to readers of this journal that, upon the slightest reflection, an

orgasm is never just an orgasm. I do not need to repeat the obvious: the
Latin term does not mean exactly the same as our, late 19th-century, term
and its cognates. Exactly what orgasm is how, if at all, it is distinguished
from sexual excitement more generally; whether there is such a thing as
the human orgasm as opposed to male and female orgasm; what it signifies for us as a species, or for individuals or couples as we make meaning
out of our sexed bodies was and is much debated.
But I can offer evidence, in very broad strokes, for two claims: for
millennia, orgasm was an allegory of the cosmos and creation; beginning
in the early 18th and definitively by the late 19th century, orgasm became
something that a body might, contingently, have or have not. Even in this
autarchic register it was seen to have a social function in binding together
autonomous selves. As divorce became increasingly possible in the late
19th century the pressure put on mutual sexual pleasure in marital advice
books mounted (see Collins, 2006). But orgasm became unmoored from
a larger story and contributed to the moral revolution that, with the
advent of effective birth control, radically severed sex from reproduction.
These changing ways of making meaning in the body, I want to argue,
did some of the hard labor of changing culture and making it comprehensible. Stories written on the body, like the allegories painted in the
plaster of Renaissance council chamber, do real work.
Let me offer four dates or clusters of dates as anchors for my story.11
To begin with, the last two-thirds of the 2nd century CE, the lifetime of
Galen of Pergamon, the most influential medical writer of antiquity,
offered an account for why a great pleasure is coupled with the exercise
of the generative parts and a raging desire precedes their use that would
be influential for millennia. Second, I offer 1559, the year Columbus
Realdo not Christopher claims to have discovered the clitoris as the site
of female sexual pleasure. I chose this year not because I believe that what
Columbus said he discovered had not been long known both by the
learned and by others but for two other reasons. First, Columbus claim
represents a decisive shift from orgasm understood as the pleasure that
overwhelms the whole body to a pleasure fixed primarily on an organ. And
second because, the elaboration of anatomical knowledge about the
clitoris and the penis did so little to change the meaning of orgasm itself
or its relationship to the male as distinct from the female body.
My next date is 1716, the year in which modern masturbation that
is, auto-eroticism as potentially pathogenic and, more importantly, as a
highly charged engine for the generation of guilt, anxiety, and an inner
sexual life more generally came into being. I will say more about this
subject in a moment but for my purposes now all I want to point out is
that the definition of the practice in question is a milestone in our story
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Sexualities 12(4)

of orgasm and culture: the falsely eponymous sin of Onan was said by its
brilliantly successful inventor, a quack doctor named John Marten, to be
the unnatural practice by which persons of either sex . . . endeavor to
imitate and procure for themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered
to attend the Carnal Commerce of the two sexes (quoted in Laqueur,
2003: 1415). The crucial point here is that what would come to be called
orgasm that sensation is definitively loosed from generation and
comes to be thinkable as a feeling that is connected to an inner self and
only contingently to greater things. At roughly the same time, other
people come to theorize generation making life de novo as a microcosmic version of Gods creation of species as being really reproduction
more or less mechanically duplicating species thereby robbing orgasm
of its place in the scheme of things. No scientific discoveries account for
either of these developments.
I have two candidates for my fourth and last date: 1899 when the word
orgasm first came to be applied specifically to the distinct pleasure in
humans that was the culmination of sexual excitement as opposed to be
a word that meant, more or less, sexual excitement, rut, heat, or corporeal
arousal whether it reached a culmination or not. Climax moved from
being a rhetorical high point to being a synonym for orgasm in 1918. (I
would accept 1882, 17 years earlier, when ejaculation and excitement
were lexically joined, although not yet for humans, but as the frenzied
moment when a school of fish ejaculated sperm and egg into the water.)12
My other, culturally more resonant, date would be 1905 when Sigmund
Freud, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, made the extraordinary claim that
for a girl to become a woman, contra naturam he knew that there was
no neurological foundation for this a fresh wave of repression would
have to overtake a piece of masculine machinery. The clitoris would need
to become the organ through which excitement is transmitted to the
adjacent female sexual parts, that is, the vagina. I need not dwell on his
unhappy metaphor of pine shaving setting a harder wood on fire. The
crucial point is that from that date forward female orgasm and later on
and in different ways too male orgasm would be central to psychogenesis. All the many versions of the story of orgasm would become
allegories of the individual in society. This shift, however much Freuds
views have for over a century been attacked with ever more sophisticated
studies of the physiology of orgasm, had nothing to do with science and
Freud knew it. By the 1870s, without of course the brain scans and
hormonal tests, much of the modern picture was already in place.
Let me go back to the beginning of orgasm as an allegory of the
cosmos. I will now tell why a great pleasure is coupled with the exercise
of the generative parts and a raging desire precedes their use, Galen
writes. In part it was a matter of physiology: the male penis and the neck
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Laqueur Sexuality and the transformation of culture

of the uterus (the vagina) and the others parts of the pudendum are richly
endowed with nerves because they need sensation; serous residues, an
exquisitely sensitive skin, a systematic heating of the body all get it ready
for generation. Given all the adaptation of the body, it is no longer to be
wondered at that pleasure inherent in the parts there and the desire that
precedes it are more vehement (Galen, 1968 2: 640). Orgasm, the end
of this increasingly intense heating, signals the un-socialized bodys
capacity male and female to generate the seed that will become a
new life.
But it is also a matter of cosmic significance that was fertile ground for
interpretation. So, for example, the phenomenology of orgasm becomes
in the writings of the heterodox theologian Tertullian an allegory for the
material origin of the soul and its entry into the body at conception; the
passions and pleasures of the body speak of very great things indeed:
In a single impact of both parties, the whole human frame is shaken and foams
with semen, in which the damp humor of the body is joined to the hot
substance of the soul . . . I cannot help asking, whether we do not, in that very
heat of extreme gratification when the generative fluid is ejected, feel that
somewhat of our soul has gone out from us? And do we not experience a faintness and prostration along with a dimness of sight? This then, must be the soul
producing seed, which arises from the out drip of the soul, just as that fluid is
the body producing seed which proceeds from the drainage of the flesh.
(Laqueur, 1991: 47)

Augustine would have none of this: the intimate experiences of sex

were the result not of the ineluctable heating of the body but of the
estrangement of the soul from God. In paradise one could have sexual
intercourse and ejaculation just as we do now but without the violence,
urgency, and the sharp consuming pleasure of orgasm. Orgasm was an
event of cosmic significance; the arena for debating questions of the
greatest cultural significance.
Let me jump ahead by more than a millennium to Columbus who
immodestly announced to the learned world in 1559 that since no one
had discerned these projections and their working [he is speaking of the
clitoris], he had the right of naming: it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus. If one rubs it with hand or penis it becomes erect and
eventually semen will fly swifter than air flies this way and that on account
of the pleasure (Columbus, 1559: 4478). Female semen that is, emitted
from the other female penis the vagina flies this way and that as a result
of what we would call clitoral orgasm. We are still in the world of orgasm
as a sign of generation but it is now located much more precisely. No longer
just the result of the whole bodys furnace-like heating up, it becomes the
far more localized result of stimulation at a place. The grounds for allegory
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Sexualities 12(4)

are narrowed. But at the same time the discovery of the female penis as
a homologue of the males but without an orifice for emitting seed did
nothing to dislodge the older system of signification in which the vagina
was a penis turned outside that, like the male penis, emitted the fluids of
intercourse that Galen had interpreted as seed.
In fact, nothing of a scientific nature made orgasm become, as it did,
increasingly detached from generation. (Nor for that matter did anything
empirical require that the sexes ought to be construed as biologically
opposite and, it was to be hoped, complementary rather than hierarchically ranked on a single axis.) How this happens is a much longer
story but suffice it to say that two centuries worth of discoveries only made
the connection between female orgasm in the old sense rut, estrous,
excitement more obscure rather than less. Menstruation, which had
never before been regarded as a human female form of heat quite to the
contrary became by 1850 understood as just that. This in turn produced
survey after survey in which women reported that they had indeed
become pregnant just after their periods. Not until the late 1920s did it
become clear that the female of the human species did not have an estrous
and ovulated, in general, independently from coition.
If nothing scientific happened to end the reign of orgasm as an
allegory of the cosmos, something cultural did. (I think that even if some
discovery had demanded a re-evaluation of the function of orgasm this
need not have changed either the course of allegorical realignment that I
have been describing or the sort of cultural work that sexual pleasure did.)
On a very general philosophical level of course, allegorical interpretations
of the natural world were under assault everywhere. There are other less
grandiose reasons. But I want to point to something quite specific as an
example for how sexuality and cultural transformation work.
The discovery and spectacularly successful ascent of masturbation and
particularly masturbatory orgasm as a morally and a medically exigent
matter took orgasm generally out of the realm of the cosmic and put it
solidly into the realm of the social or the anti-social which comes to
the same thing (see Laqueur, 2003). Masturbation became the dark
underside of the Enlightenments generally benign view of sexual
pleasure; it was the philosophes and not the Church who put masturbation
on the moral map and in so doing they took a giant step in making orgasm
a stage upon which the relationship of the self to society was made
manifest. Masturbatory orgasm was solitary, it was secret, and most
importantly it was the result of succumbing to sexual arousal that had its
origins not in the social world but in the imagination. Masturbation and
masturbatory orgasm were unnatural not because or not primarily
because they did not lead to reproduction but because they were artifactual, the result of the self-stimulation of the mind and then of the body.
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If this is the case I hope it becomes clearer how it is that the invention
of modern masturbation is an important element in the creation of
modern subjectivity; it was an agent of cultural transformation. The
question was whether and how selves with secrets, with powerful and, in
many contexts, much valued worlds within, with desires that need not
necessarily be harnessed to the great task of maintaining the human species
could be made compatible with the demands of the social order. I do not
mean by this that everyone involved in the process understood that this
is what they were involved in. Some did. The German pedagogues on
masturbation who, in 1786, took up an entire issue of the Berliner
Monatschrift to discuss how to prevent masturbation knew exactly what
they were up to. (Kant had published What is Enlightenment in these
pages two years earlier.) The quack doctor John Marten who wrote
Onania had no such ambitions; the cunning of history substituted for
intention. But the ethical and more broadly cultural stakes in what he
started were great.
Freud took much of this on board and embedded it in a larger story,
that of psychogenesis. The particular female story that I mentioned earlier
has been more productive of counter-narratives during the past 40 years
than that of the male because the demands that civilization made on the
female body seemed so much more draconian: a psychic shift in the site
of pleasure in the face of the facts of the body. Resistance to this story
made the female orgasm the subject of much of the feminist corporeal
politics of the 1960s. Anne Koedts Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm is one
of the early clarion calls, a call for human rights through reclaiming the
bodys pleasures. If sexual techniques now regarded as standard are not
satisfying, they should be rejected. The standard is simply misguided and
inappropriate. New techniques, she argues, must be used or devised
which transform this particular aspect of our sexual exploitation (Koedt,
1970: n.p). Everything beyond the masturbatory orgasm, writes Betty
Dodson 15 years later, is simply how we choose to socialize our sex life
(Dodson, 1974: 18). Similar sorts of claims can be made for various,
somewhat later, mens sexual liberation movements. This is a long way
from orgasm mirroring in its pleasures and fatigue the story of the soul.
I could elaborate, and as some of you know, have elaborated on these
stories. But I will conclude by going back to the beginning. I began by
asking why it is that the struggles over the regulation of sexuality seem so
disproportionately shrill and their consequences so much greater than
they would seem to warrant: a threatened schism of a major protestant
denomination over the would-be ordination of two bishops seems an
excessive response. One answer that I have not suggested but will propose
because it is so wrong-headed as to be instructive, is suggested by Jesse
Big Daddy Unruh, the powerful speaker of the California legislature in
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the 1960s, in another context, to explain why academic politics was so

vicious. Because the stakes were so small, he said. In fact the stakes for
a community whose existence is predicated on who is admitted and who
is not, whose most hallowed privileges academic freedom for example
depend on a notion of professional autonomy, whose hierarchy depends
on peer review are not at all small when it comes to hiring and tenure
decisions. These are constitutive of the community.
The same must be said about questions of sexuality. I have suggested
in this essay that they are allegories for deeply held cultural claims and in
some cases constitute the foundational narratives of social and political life
as well as individual lives. I have mobilized the history of anthropology
and social theory to suggest that what has long been said of so called
savage people and of the mythic human past might be said of advanced
industrial societies. Its all about sex and death.

Notes
1. I make an attempt to answer this question in Laqueur, 1993.
2. This material and much more on death from masturbation gleaned from
hospital records can be found in Lowry, 2006. I am grateful to Dr Lowry
for sharing with me his raw data. For documentation of the rest of the
claims in this paragraph see Laqueur, 2003.
3. See Gordon, 1976 and Reed, 1983 for evidence of the tone of these disputes.
4. Of course, Protestantism has a long history of schism based on one,
heretofore obscure verse of scripture, suddenly taking on a new, literal
meaning and consequently life and death importance: the break in 1704 of
the Old German Baptist Brethren, the Dunkers, from the Lutheran Reformed
Church took place because a group of people came to believe that the Biblical
injunction to baptize in the name of the father and the son, and the holy
spirit demanded three separate immersions. Why Biblical verses come into
and out of focus is an important question beyond the scope of this article.
5. The founding text of this view is Becker, 1993.
6. See Dodson, 1974. The use of the word liberating in her title makes the
point before opening the books covers.
7. This account of the sexual politics of post-war Germany is based on
Herzog, 2005. See also my review essay in Laqueur, 2005.
8. Geertzs use of the story is in Geertz, 1973, but lots of people, including
Hawking, 1988, use it for the same purpose.
9. On the question of feudal sexual rights see Boureau, 1998.
10. I am here mobilizing the account offered in Gallagher, 2006: 15684.
11. Documentation for this discussion although not the argument is cited in
Laqueur, 1991, unless otherwise noted.
12. See the entries orgasm and climax in the Oxford English Dictionary. It
gives as a meaning of orgasm in 1872 the following: a sexual orgasm
induced by emotional influences, especially if it is ungratified, may be
followed by a severe attack of this peculiar form of headache.

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Biographical Note
Thomas Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC
Berkeley. He studies the cultural history of Europe during the past three
centuries and has written on the history of sexuality, of death and
commemoration, of religion, and of human rights and humanitarianism. The
essay in this volume is part of new project to think about the new exigency of
sexuality in contemporary politics and religion. He is finishing a book called The
Work of the Dead after which he hopes to write a book about dogs in western
art. Laqueur is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, The
Threepenny Review, Slate, the Nation, and other journals. Address: Department
of History, University of California, Berkeley, 3229 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley,
CA 947202550, USA. [email: tlaqueur@berkeley.edu]

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