City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

The origins of sex, a history of the first sexual revolution, Faramerz Dabhoiwala

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

portraitsplatesillustrations

index present

non fiction

The origins of sex

805351964

Faramerz Dabhoiwala

a history of the first sexual revolution

Nowadays we believe that consenting adults have the freedom to do what they like with their own bodies. We publicise and celebrate sex; we discuss it endlessly; we are obsessed with the sex lives of celebrities. All this marks us out from non-Western societies, but few people realize that until relatively recently, Western attitudes were very different. For most of history all sex outside marriage was illegal, and the Church, the state, and ordinary people all devoted huge efforts to suppressing and punishing it. There was no notion that consensual sex should be treated as a private matter, which adults should decide for themselves. The Origins of Sex shows with dramatic detail and a wealth of examples how, by the eighteenth century, this whole world view came to be irreparably shattered. By this time, rather than being a subject never discussed in public, the sexual lives and views of others - women as well as men - were endlessly broadcast and consumed, in a growing cacophony of newspapers, pamphlets, journals, novels, poems, prints, and other media.Dabhoiwala shows that the creation of this modern culture of sex was a central part of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, intertwined with the era's major social, political and intellectual trends. He explores how it helped create a new model of Western civilization, whose principles of privacy, equality, and freedom of the individual remain distinctive to this day

adult