The Transformation of Sodomy from the Renaissance to the Modern World and Its General Sexual Consequences

Europeans before 1700 presumed that all males desired both women and adolescent boys. In the generation after 1700, some Europeans began to think that most men desired only women and that only a deviant minority desired other males who might be either adults or adolescents. This is documented in leg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2012-06, Vol.37 (4), p.832-848
Main Author:	Trumbach, Randolph
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	1700-1799 Adolescents Age Differences Boys Eastern Europe English literature European Cultural Groups European literature Females France Gender historical approach industrialization male-male relations Males Narratives Politics Sex crimes Sex Differences sexual desire sexual norms social change Teenagers
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Europeans before 1700 presumed that all males desired both women and adolescent boys. In the generation after 1700, some Europeans began to think that most men desired only women and that only a deviant minority desired other males who might be either adults or adolescents. This is documented in legal, literary, and visual sources. The new sexual regime first appeared between 1700 and 1750 in England, France, and the Netherlands. By 1800 it was present in central Europe, but it did not arrive in southern and eastern Europe before 1900. Relations between women are harder to document because there are fewer legal sources. It is likely that women before 1700 were (like men) attracted both to men and women and that their relations with women were usually structured by differences in age. After 1700 it is likely that the modern lesbian minority had less of an impact on the lives of the female majority than the male sodomite minority had on the lives of most men. These changes first occurred in a single generation after 1700. The abruptness in the changes was no greater than the changes in politics and economics brought on by the French and Industrial Revolutions, each in a single generation. The revolution in sexual and gender relations is no easier to explain than those in politics and the economy.
ISSN:	0097-9740 1545-6943 1545-6943