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>> 77 4 Policing Impassioned Men How did the nation’s early leaders go about policing sex? Their strategies were gender based. They perceived the American male primarily as a creature of passion who, under some circumstances, would do nearly anything to satisfy sexual desire. The American male would not and did not naturally fit into the newly emerging middle class and its clean sex ethic. Rather, his natural tendency was to contribute to the social chaos and sexual anarchy associated with the urban masses. Who would police him and how? The new nation’s first generation of leaders perceived the American female quite differently . She too was a creature of passion, and she too contributed to social chaos and sexual anarchy. However, while leaders saw men as both part of the problem and part of the solution to social order, they saw women mainly as part of the problem. They were convinced that women must be policed first by fathers and husbands and then, as a backup, by government officials. Ultimately, men had to police women’s sexual behavior, but women did not (and could not) police male sexuality. Creatures of Passion If males were fundamentally creatures of passion, they were poor governors of other men. Indeed, they used other men for their own gratification and interests rather than give priority to monitoring them and managing their sexual behavior. For early leaders, the good news was that if a few men could successfully exhibit civic virtue by monitoring and restraining their own passion, then they conceivably could urge, prompt, and even force most American men to behave within the boundaries of acceptable sexual guidelines . Early leaders put their faith in the few trustworthy men they found among themselves, and they relied on those few trustworthy men to be role 78 > 79 continued to stigmatize and penalize single young men, equating bachelorhood with homelessness, vagrancy, unemployment, poverty, and crime.4 Just prior to the 1791 execution of convicted thief Thomas Mount, he confessed that “idleness and bad women” had corrupted him. He entreated all young men “to get married and settled at some honest calling as soon as possible,” lest they end up following Mount’s pathway to the gallows.5 The good news was that choosing marriage offered advantages, including the recognized achievement of manhood and the ultimate masculine privilege: legitimate access to women and their bodies.6 Self-disciplined, middle-class men who chose marriage became the relatively sober, trustworthy, and high-status males who defined and enforced masculine maturity and informally policed lower-status men who threatened to break, or actually broke, the rules of male maturity. Here, policing was mostly a matter of monitoring men’s reputations to see that they actually deserved recognition for their manhood. A man who was honest in his business dealings deserved a reputation for honesty just as a deceitful merchant deserved a reputation for double-dealing. Civic leaders made sure that a man’s reputation accurately represented his true value and virtue and, therefore , that other men dealt with him accordingly. This practice of relatively high-status men monitoring reputation was usually sufficient to ensure that most men behaved properly. American men may have been creatures of passion , but they did a fairly good job of policing men’s passion indirectly by policing men’s reputation. Of course, learning to be a mature man was no simple or predictable matter. Many young males never measured up to the norms of manhood. Quite a few remained bachelors. Large numbers of young betrothed men and ostensibly committed husbands failed to conform to the rules of monogamous Christian marriages. They did not fulfill their patriarchal responsibilities , repress their sexual desires, or stay faithful to their spouses—much less provision and protect their families. Some men walked out on their families . Others informally remarried and started new families. Still others left a trail of pregnant women and bastard children in their wake. As much as the grammar of manhood prompted men to conform to the rules of sexual propriety, it could not shape the behavior of many of the young males who were tempted or determined to experiment sexually with the liberty born of the Revolution. Indeed, such experimentation was encouraged by the fact that young males who engaged in sexual misconduct could usually assume that they would suffer no ill consequences if their behavior was exposed. One could experiment with impunity. Overall, the revolutionary period 80 > 81 rewarded and punished prisoners as they saw...

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