Sexology for All (eBook)

The Forbidden Fruit

As in other cases, there is only one defense against insufficient and therefore ill-used knowledge - more complete knowledge.

Stanislav Lem

Why do we know so little about human sexuality, although people have always been interested in it? Sex differences, anatomy and physiology of the genital organs, sexual technique, conception, pregnancy and childbirth occupy one of the central places in the mythology and art of all peoples of the world. Ancient Chinese treatises on the art of the bedroom, the Indian "Kama Sutra" and "The Art of Love" by Ovid are of more than historical interest today.

The ancient erotology of the peoples of the East considered sexuality as a natural, normal side of human life, approaching it not analytically, but syncretically. Closely connected with ethics, aesthetics and religious and philosophical values, it offered people not objective knowledge and private recipes, but a holistic philosophy of life, including a certain attitude towards the body, emotions and sensuality. Description and explanation were inextricably linked with prescriptions.

The European culture of modern times, which developed on the basis of Christianity, in contrast to the ancient or ancient Eastern culture, was consistently anti-sexual.

Not only sex life, but the entire bodily "bottom" was considered dirty and obscene, which decent people are not supposed to think about, let alone speak aloud. In England at the beginning of the 19th century, even asking a tablemate to pass a chicken leg was considered indecent, since the word "leg" evokes sexual associations. Coming to the doctor, the woman showed where she hurt, not on her own body, but on the doll. In some libraries, books written by women were kept separate from books by male authors.

The German writer Hans Fallada, who was born in 1893, in his autobiographical book "At Our Home in Distant Times" recalls how once, while visiting an old aunt, his mother made a remark to him, an eleven-year-old boy: "Sit still, Hans! Do not dangle your legs !" The aunt was horrified: “It’s better for a real lady not to mention it, below,” she pointed to my legs with her eyes, “it’s better not to mention it, Louise! As if she didn’t know anything, Louise! But if she really needs to name it, then she says "pedestal" or, in any case, "pedestal"... Hans, leave your plinth alone, that sounds decent, Louise!

In the 19th century, as never before, moral censorship was rampant. For reasons of decency, the works of Ronsard, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Prevost, Beranger and other authors were banned. Even the Bible was banned. In 1857, two trials took place in France. The author of "Madame Bovary" was acquitted, because "offending the chastity of the place", "although deserving of all reproach, occupy a very small place in comparison with the size of the work as a whole", and "Gustave Flaubert himself declares his respect for morality and for everything as regards religious morality. On the other hand, Charles Baudelaire was condemned for "rude and insulting to modesty realism" and six poems from "Flowers of Evil" were banned. In the words of the Journal de Bruxelles, "this vile novel, Madame Bovary, is but a pious reading in comparison with the volume of poetry which has come out in these days under the title "Flowers of Evil". The judgment was only annulled in 1946.

In 1865, the Russian journal Sovremennaya letopis discovered "eroticism" taken to its most extreme, "most cynical expression" - where would you think? - in the dramas of A. N. Ostrovsky "Pupil" and "Thunderstorm"! In the play "In a busy place", according to the reviewer, the playwright "stopped only at the very pillars of Hercules, beyond which the reign of the Marquis de Sade and the brethren already begins."

The first people who began a systematic study of sexual life were doctors - Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Richard von Kraft-Ebing (1840-1902), Swiss entomologist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist August Forel (1848-1931), German psychiatrists Albert Mol (1862-1939) and Magnus Hirschfeld (1863-1935), Austrian psychiatrist, creator of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), German dermatologist and venereologist Ivan Bloch (1872-1922) and English publicist, pharmacist by training Henry Havelock Ellie (1858-1939).

Why doctors? Firstly, they more often had to deal with non-canonical forms of sexuality, from which the sanctimonious society turned away in horror - "there are no giraffes"! Secondly, the clinic, especially the psychiatric one, was to some extent protected from moral and religious criticism - what can you take from crazy people?

But this protection was unreliable, the founders of sexology were continually attacked and persecuted.

Kraft-Ebing wrote the most delicate passages in his Sexual Psychopathy (1886) in Latin to make them inaccessible to the general reader. Nevertheless, in 1891 a reviewer in a leading English medical journal accused him of maliciously relishing "dirty details" and expressed the hope that even the paper on which this terrible book was printed would be used for equally base purposes. Bloch published most of his sexological work under a pseudonym. Ellis's books were banned by the English censorship as "obscene", and he himself was subjected to legal persecution, and not a single authoritative scientist dared at that time to publicly defend his book "Studies in the Psychology of Sex", now recognized as a classic. The Sexological Institute founded by Hirschfeld in Hamburg was destroyed in 1934 by the German fascists. The Italian physician and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza, because of his book "The Sexual Relations of Mankind", almost lost his professorship and his seat in the Senate. And what persecution Soviet doctors were subjected to when they tried to talk about the problems of sex in the 1940s and 1950s!

The sexuality of the sexologists themselves has caused and continues to cause particular suspicion.

The old theological idea about the sinfulness of sexual life has turned into a strong belief in the mass consciousness that anyone who is interested in "sex" has something wrong with this part himself.

But after all, no one thinks that gluttons (or maybe ulcers) are necessarily involved in nutritional physiology, tongue-tied people in linguistics, morons in the psychology of thinking, and potential criminals in criminology. Sexuality, on the other hand, is a subject of general interest, and the problem of the "norm" here is especially complex.

The fact that a scientist has some problems of his own, if only they are realized, does not prevent him from being objective in his research. Otherwise, you will have to admit that there is no one to study the most important questions. Women should not judge women's psychology because they are biased, and men - because they are incompetent. The worker cannot study the position of the working class because of his subjective interest and lack of education, while the intellectual cannot study it because of his "externality". If a person can understand only what he is personally involved in, objective knowledge is fundamentally impossible: a European cannot understand an African, a healthy person cannot understand a mentally ill person. If personal experience is harmful to knowledge, then Martians will have to be invited to study human problems. The strength of science lies precisely in the fact that it develops objective, albeit relative, criteria that make it possible to assess the degree of evidence of various views and theories, regardless of what personal feelings and predilections inspired the scientist who formulated them. This fully applies to sexology.

Freed from the power of religious moralization, sexology relied primarily on biology. Reproductive biology, that is, the science of procreation, including the anatomy and physiology of the reproductive system, gained recognition and practical application in obstetrics and gynecology long before the 19th century. In addition, biology was the leading branch of natural science in the second half of the 19th century; Darwin's evolutionary theory served as a methodological model for other sciences.

But can sexual behavior be reduced to the instinct of reproduction? Mass, "normal" sex life seemed to scientists relatively simple, unambiguous, requiring no special explanation. Another thing is "sexual perversions", which included all morally condemned forms of sexual behavior and, in general, any sex not related to procreation.

The naivety of the early theories of sex and sexuality is explained not only by the fact that they tried to reduce complex social and mental phenomena to simple and elementary biological laws, but also by the fact that the biology itself, to which scientists appealed, was still very undeveloped. The lack of reliable empirical facts (even sex hormones had not yet been discovered) was inevitably made up for by speculative general constructions, the starting point of which was the usual norms of everyday consciousness and traditional morality. In the apt expression of a modern researcher, in the 19th century, science replaced religion as a justification for traditional mores.

If earlier the demand for sexual abstinence and moderation was supported by religious and ethical arguments about the sinfulness and baseness of "carnal life", now pseudo-biological arguments come to the fore: the waste of "sexual energy" depletes the vital forces of the body, which should have been used for something useful. Most scientists of the 19th century, like Christian theologians, saw the only meaning and justification of sexual life in procreation. All forms of sexuality that are not related to childbearing, in the light of...