The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution by Faramerz Dabhoiwala (review)

Faramerz Dabhoiwala argues in this deeply informed and wide-ranging survey that the “first” sexual revolution took place in eighteenth-century Britain and was, aside from its scope and intensity, a remarkable prefiguring of the sexual revolutions of the mid-twentieth-century Western world. In the wake of the late seventeenth-century expansion of political liberty and religious toleration, sexual liberty was advocated, and practiced, by a greater number of men and a few women. At the same time, the legal and community policing of public sexual deviance was in retreat. New attitudes emerged about male and female sex, adultery, prostitution, and sexual publicity that established them firmly within the main currents of Enlightenment rationalism and that were skeptical of the authority of older beliefs based on custom and religion. Much about this transformation is already well known. Dabhoiwala’s contribution to the history of sexuality in this era, however, is to set these developments in the widest possible literary, cultural, and social context in order to explain how and why these changes took place.

One should be clear about what this ambitious survey does not consider. First, with a few exceptions, the analysis is London-centric. Dabhoiwala assumes that rural Britons did not experience these momentous changes unless they traveled regularly to London or immigrated there. Second, Dabhoiwala is less interested in sexual practices than in attitudes about them, so far as these can be read in print, seen on the stage, or viewed in illustrations, so we learn little about the nature and pleasures of sexual coupling, the employment of contraceptive techniques, the frequency of oral sex, sodomy, incest, or masturbation. What we have instead is the way these things reached the level of discourse, where they were discussed and debated or deployed in rhetorical, political, aesthetic, or personal causes. In the end, most readers will be persuaded by the author’s clear and astute reasoning and by the sheer force of documentary evidence, much of it from primary sources, that this is a sufficient task for one book.

Dabhoiwala sets the scene for the sexual revolution by following the decline in newly populous London of community policing. Constables and night watchmen from neighborhoods gradually surrendered their duties to professional police. This followed the virtual abolition of church policing of sexual deviance and coincided with the decline of Societies for the Reform of Manners, whose members had stepped into the breach to reestablish sexual discipline during the Restoration. Despite occasional moments of prosecutorial zeal on the part of the state, by the mid-eighteenth century fornication and adultery were no longer punished, shaming ceremonies for sexual transgressors in London had vanished, and the general warrants that had permitted the wholesale roundup of prostitutes were no longer invoked by the magistrates. Urban life nourished diverse sexual cultures in which anonymity was akin to privacy and the legal authorities concerned themselves with only the most notorious sexual offenses.

The relaxation of sexual discipline took place against the backdrop of new Enlightenment queries about sex, marriage, adultery, and prostitution. The search for the “natural” foundations of sex revealed the sensual and pleasurable basis for sexual coupling that drove many other social transactions, and thinkers like Bernard Mandeville argued forcibly that private vices invariably accrued to the public good. Dabhoiwala is particularly good in showing how secular arguments percolated down into the spaces vacated by the language of sin and punishment and how even religious authorities were obliged to yield ground to their increasing popularity.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, sexual liberty was more highly regarded but also more dangerous, because upper-class men were the ones who made most use of it, to the detriment of their wives and unwary women of all classes. Criticism of untrammeled sexual predation was articulated in the sentimental novels of Richardson and by a new generation of female literary voices who were condemned in religious sermons...