Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the Sixteenth Century to the Present (review)

This is an English translation—and an elegant one indeed—of the French original published in 2005. Muchembled wrote it after spending a sabbatical year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, from which lofty perch he peered dismally at the American consumer scene and longed for the refinement of Europe. (At collegial lunches, there would be "39 pairs of eyes," 39 glasses of water, and his sole glass of wine.)

The problem with this book is not that it is based on little in the way of evidence or wide reading in the sources but that every twist and turn in the argument is utterly predictable. Imagine a distillation of everything that Max Weber, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Sigmund Freud had ever written about the relationship between religion, capitalism, and sexual repression. Repression makes us work hard, and libertinism causes us to take our eye off the ball. You will find these pronouncements pressed down, shaken together, and yet running over in these pages.

The book is written at such a high level of abstraction that one misses the pleasure even of relishing the evidence that might have been chosen for such a juicy theme—the anecdotes from the great libertines; the novelists and diarists; the salty collections of letters of Lady This or That, Samuel Pepys, the Marquis de Sade, and the rest of the captivating sexual canon of the past. None of it is in this book. Instead, Muchembled's scholarship extends across the secondary literature, which he raids for anecdotes. The pages are a harvest of the fruit of obscure doctoral dissertations plus the apothegms of the aforementioned Greats. Thus, the first question in assessing a book of this nature is, Does the author know the evidence? The answer seems to be, no, not really, unless you consider books on The Making of Victorian Sexuality multiplied by ten to be an adequate evidence base.

The unfolding of the argument, which contrasts France and Britain and latterly the United States, is long familiar: Throughout the five centuries covered by the author, not much happens. Essentially, capitalism rushes on stage and converts the free and easy peasants into obedient robots. The sixteenth century begins the story with a blast of sexual repressiveness: "Pleasure could be conceived of only in pain, sorrow or rebellion." Nascent capitalism demanded more personal discipline: "The prohibitions linked pleasure closely to sin." This is not an unfamiliar argument. The years 1700 to 1960 embodied a great cycle of eighteenth-century moral laxity followed by nineteenth-century Victorianism. Since 1960, "the old rigorist model has persisted in the US, but in Europe hedonism rules" (5). Female orgasm and homosexuality erupted into the public realm, and everyone began consuming wildly as a way of circumnavigating their repression. The players ended in an empty preoccupation with the Self.

Familiar and predictable though the argument may be, the second question is, Is the argument right? Is Muchembled correct that past Western culture has offered a largely unrelieved tableau of sexual repression? The problem with depending on the secondary literature is that Muchembled has only the evidence offered on a platter, by authors who have the same kind of vaguely marxo-femino-leftish perspective as he does. Yet, the primary sources of the years 1850 to 1920 or so offer a corrective to this official history-department common-room version. Muchembled characterizes the long haul from 1600 to 1960 as a kind of uniform steel plate of repressiveness, lifted only by the libertinism of the eighteenth century and closed again by the prudery of the Victorians with their draping of table legs and corseting of women. An alternative view (articulated by me in a book similar to Muchembled's) is that the great breakout from an admittedly repressive earlier epoch began in the middle of the nineteenth century rather than the middle...