A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna (review)

Surely one of the more interesting questions for thinking about modern societies must concern the implications for social life of the recognition of human sexualities. Recall the uproar when Freud, at the turn of the last century, suggested that children were in reality little sexual polymorphs. And there have been many continued uproars since, and to this day, regarding the sexuality of women, not to mention the other genders – queer, trans, and cross.

Historian Paul Rutherford (the author of well-received studies of Canadian television as well as the lures of advertising) in A World Made Sexy: Freud to Madonna here adds his voice to an already distinguished, or at times eccentric, collection of people who have contributed some understanding of the implications of being sexed – which is not exactly the same as being ‘sexy.’ For Rutherford, that is another project entirely, which he terms ‘the Eros Project.’ The Eros Project is part conspiracy, part teleology of the second wave of modernity, and part transnational business using the communication of images to organize desire. Most important, perhaps, the Eros Project served, like much of pop culture, ‘to re-enchant a lifeworld rendered prosaic and dull by the rise of logic and industry.’

A World Made Sexy is organized around a series of case studies. These range from sex museums from Amsterdam to Shanghai, to the theorists of sexual liberation (Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Salvador Dali, Hugh Hefner), with additional case studies of the Maidenform bra, the Barbie doll, and Madonna’s songs and videos. Relevant books are looked at once again, such as McLuhan’s The Mechanical Bride (1951), Baudrillard’s The System of Objects (1968), and the forgotten work of the neo-Freudian Ernest Dichter, a German Jewish refugee from the Nazis, who became, once safely in the United States, the founder of motivational research.

Rutherford’s privileged interlocutor, however, is the Michel Foucault of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (English translation, 1978) and his other writings and interviews of the time. Here, Foucault rejected the idea of sexual repression supposedly coeval with the rise of bourgeois society and spoke instead of an ‘incitement to discourse’ on sexuality by the modern will to knowledge – (‘la volonté de savoir’ being the book’s original French title). ‘The essential thing,’ Foucault had written, ‘is . . . the existence in our era of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together.’ In a word, the Eros Project.

Rutherford’s is an attempt to extend and, to some degree, criticize Foucault, although the criticism is gentle. How much it is an extension of Foucault except by emphasizing more the economics of both the sex biz and particularly the uses of sexuality by advertising is another question. Rutherford does note oddly that his Eros Project is only one of a number of stories that could be told about sex in the twentieth century, although he is vague about what these might be, other than referring to ‘the sexual revolution’ or ‘the aids tragedy.’ Although A World Made Sexy makes a brave effort to fill in the post-1900 data that Foucault was never especially interested in doing, Rutherford does agree that by the 1960s the processing of sex had become exactly what Foucault had said it was all along: a discourse. No more, no less.

One final remark. This is a book that could have greatly benefited from photograph illustrations, and it is a sad comment on the economics of Canadian academic publishing that there are none.