The Rise of Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Historical Context and Historiographical Implications

This article rehearses the claim that, as a consequence of political, cultural, and epistemological changes, the sexes came in the eighteenth century to be ordered as two opposite sexes rather hierarchically ordered versions of one. It connects this change to the advent of masturbation as a great moral problem by arguing that both reflect a still more major shift: sexual pleasure and the whole gigantic apparatus of desires, institutions, and restraints that had for so long been linked almost entirely to reproduction began to become unmoored. This is the problem that so unsettled Thomas Malthus, among many others. The triple revolutions of the eighteenth century—French, industrial, and commercial—are critical. By focusing on them rather than on governmentality and the creation of subjectivities, as Michel Foucault did, the the chronology of change is shifted from the late nineteenth century to an earlier period. One can, however, give up Foucault’s chronology without giving up the larger project of understanding how sex and sexuality are constructed.