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Rebecca L. Davis, "Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America" (Norton, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Tom Disena from the Department of Communication, Journalism and Public Relations at Oakland University. My guest today is Rebecca L. Davis, the author of Fierce Desires, a new history of sex and sexuality in America. From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s and and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Rebecca Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating 400 year account of this nation's sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica and 18th century romance novels, she recasts important episodes, Anthony Comstock's crusade against smut among them, and at the same time unearthed stories of little remembered pioneers and iconoclasts. At the heart of the book is Davis's argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the 19th century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in The Process. My guest, Rebecca L. Davis, is professor of history and a professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Delaware, where she held the Miller Family Endowed Early Career Professorship. She is the author of several books, including Public Confessions, the Religious Conversions that Changed American Politics, and More Perfect Unions, the American Search for Marital Bliss, and is one of the co founders and co hosts of the podcast this Is Probably a Weird Question About Body, Sexuality, Health, and History. Rebecca Davis, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [03:02]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [03:03]
B
So, as we get started today, I usually like to start with a pretty broad question, which is what got you interested in this project in the first place?
- [03:12]
C
I've been teaching a class on the history of sexuality in America at the University of Delaware since my. Since basically I set foot on the campus in the fall of 2007. It was a class I had never taken as an undergraduate or graduate student. And in fact, I sort of realized as I was in my fifth year, even possibly my sixth year of graduate school, that I was doing the history of sexuality. It was something that I had to learn as I taught it. And I looked to a book, a wonderful book called Intimate Matters by John d' Amelio and Estelle Friedman, which was at the time the only single volume history of the subject. And like a lot of people teaching the class, I relied on that book to help me figure out how to structure a lecture course. And then over the ensuing years, I kept, you know, rethinking how I wanted to approach certain topics. I experimented with narrative about telling stories to help draw students into the topics I was discussing. And so when I understood that there was an opportunity to do this book, do a new approach to writing a single volume history of sex and sexuality in America, I thought about all those stories that, that I'd been telling with my students and their responses to those, and I thought that that was how I wanted to go about writing this book.
- [04:27]
B
So it's interesting I chose this book when I saw it, mostly because this is not a subject that comes easily for me. This is not. I've done a lot of podcasts on labor and I've done some on feminist movements more generally. But discussing section sexuality is a little outside. And like you, I've been teaching a class, social change subject that my students are really, really interested in and that I don't feel prepared to talk about. Yeah, the book itself is absolutely chock full of historical detail and brings to life a wide range of fascinating individuals through their stories and their narratives. It complicates our understanding of sexuality and sexual practice in ways that I think challenge a lot of assumptions about what sex was like once upon a time.
- [05:25]
C
I think that's one of the parts of the research and the learning and the teaching that I've loved so much, is realizing how differently people three and 400 years ago, 200 years ago, thought about what was important about sex, thought about how they valued their bodies, other people's bodies, and the relationships among them. So. So really from a situation where you sort of had a role and you played that role and the social role was as important as anything else to our sort of modern sense of a sexuality that's intrinsic to who we are and that we express, you know, ideally and through, you know, with bodily autonomy and so on. And I've really learned a lot from scholars of early America, learned a tremendous amount as they have helped me understand that. So four or 500 years ago, a sexual identity might have been sex worker. Your sexual identity could have been wife or patriarch. Your sexual identity could be celibate, priest, right? It was. It could be gentleman, it could be wench, right? There were lots of different words that people used to assign people to a certain social category that implied also a sexual identity or a sexual purview. Like, what was that person allowed to do? What were their privileges? What were their restrictions in terms of expressing themselves? And, you know, when we look at this early American period, what's a fat. One of the things I find most fascinating is how differently indigenous North Americans thought about those very same questions. So a lot of the most catastrophic confrontations between indigenous people and Europeans were over European attempts to tell indigenous people what to do with their bodies, like to stop having polygamy, to. To eliminate premarital sex, to publicly flog people who engaged in queer sex, Things like that, which were among indigenous people, for the most part, completely tolerated. So, you know, I think that because they had a different understanding of what sex meant to them, you know, it was connected to. For indigenous North Americans, it was largely connected to whole understandings of nature, of the world, of the life cyc. And there wasn't built in a sort of patriarchal idea that men had more access to pleasure or autonomy than women did, which was part of what Europeans thought. So I've just really entering into that weirdness, you know, entering into that discomfort, because I hear you about that. Really acknowledging. I mean, I think we all, as adults like to think that we know something about sexual, um. And then to, you know, enter into this, to the history of it, is to realize no I actually don't know what these people hundreds of years ago wanted from Sacks. I don't necessarily know how they felt about it, what they desired, what that desire meant to them. Was it important to them? Was it, you know, incidental to their lives? And I. And then of course, it does raise questions for many of us about sort of how we understand ourselves. But, yeah, I find it the really opening our minds to explore how differently many, many people have understood sex and sexuality is part of what fascinates me.
- [08:55]
B
Yeah. And it comes through in the book just all of the different ways that people, as you said, you know, and let's go back. So I wanted to start sort of, you divide American history here into sort of three distinct periods with a lot of significant overlap between the themes that are developed. There are. But we have this periodization. The first of these you talk about as the idea of establishing order. And the very first story you tell, and I think it illustrates the theme beautifully, is that of Thomasine Thomas Hall. Tell us a little about their story.
- [09:32]
C
So Thomas, Thomasine hall is a story that we know through the research of Kathy Brown, who's a story at A.T. penn, who first came upon these records and now many other people have also written about this case. Hall was an indentured servant in the village of Weraskayak, which was an indigenous village that English people had invaded and taken over near Jamestown. And around 1628, 1629, hall got into trouble after being discovered in the bed of a female scene servant named Bess. And part of the question became, was hall another female domestic servant? And in which case, bed sharing was fine. Lots of people shared beds. There weren't that many of them. And the nights were very cold. So there was lots and lots of bed sharing in early America as there was in Europe at the time. But there were people who suspected that t. Hall, that this person was male and in that case, that indentured servant was getting away with things that other indentured servants weren't allowed to do. Indentured servants weren't allowed to get married, and premarital sex was forbidden. So you really couldn't have permissible sex as an indentured servant. And so there were these forcible examinations of Hall's body. And, you know, and what's fascinating is that this. These court records show people looking at Hall's body and saying, yes, this is a woman. And other people looking at Hall's body and saying, yes, this is a man. And. And the determination of the general court was that hall would have to go about wearing the clothes of both genders. And, you know, there's lots of different ways of interpreting that. We can speculate that hall was possibly intersex, that had an intersex condition, that hall perhaps would today think of themselves as transgender in some way. We just don't know there's there. And we don't need, I don't think, to import those labels. What I find fascinating about that is how concerned they were not with whether hall had sinned, but with whether hall was misbehaving and that women had certain roles to do in this English society. Men had other roles to do. If hall was a male, hall could become a head of household and a patriarch. If not, hall would have to obey a patriarch. And the other part of it that I find really fascinating is the willingness to sort of allow ambiguity in the end, as part of the determination of the court that this is someone who has stepped out of line is going to be sort of humiliated through the clothing they're forced to wear. And, you know, beyond that, we don't really know what happened to them.
- [12:18]
B
Yeah. It was also interesting, and I think, if I'm remembering this correctly, that hall presented at different times in different ways themselves. At one point, Thomas hall was a soldier.
- [12:32]
C
That's correct, yes. The research that these scholars have done on hall suggests that they served as a soldier in the English army for some war in France, may have been a male sailor aboard the ship that took them from England to Virginia, and were quickly employed as a female domestic servant in Virginia. And so how these transitions occurred, you know, at what point hall wore different sets of clothing, we don't know. We're pretty sure that hall grew up learning how to make lace, which was absolutely a feminine female occupation. So there's a lot of movement across lines of gender in Hall's life, that they themselves were participating in the ambiguity.
- [13:19]
B
And that idea of fluidity. Right. That we think somehow is an invention of the 21st century. To hear some people talk is there with us hundreds of years ago?
- [13:32]
C
Yes. There's a historian, Jen Mannion, who has this wonderful way of talking about transing gender, that there are people who, throughout their lives. And Manning is looking at people from the 18th and 19th centuries and finds many stories of people who moved through gender through their lifetimes and thinking of gender as something that we do and that people historically have recognized to be something they could express differently at different stages of their lives.
- [14:05]
B
One, and we've already sort of touched on this. But I want to talk about in A little bit more detail, because one of I think the really fascinating things in the book is the way that you explore how non white people sort of play into this American history that we're all living. You tell stories about, as you mentioned before, indigenous people and how, again, that sort of repression that happened when they encountered white people. But also the stories of the enslaved tell us a little bit about our listeners, some of these stories.
- [14:39]
C
Sure. So. So one of the stories that I talk about comes from the American Southwest. A woman named Juana Hurtado, who, from the evidence that scholars have found, was the daughter of a Spanish captain and a Pueblo woman born in the 1670s. So her mother may have been sort of a servant in the household. It may or may not have been a consensual relationship. And Juana is at one point captured sort of amid the conflicts around the 1680 PLO revolt. But ultimately, one of the things that I found so incredible about her is that she is multilingual through her mixed ancestry, but as well her mixed parentage. And also then her experience of captivity. She's captured by Dine, or Navajo warriors, so she learns that language that she then is able to establish. She's ransomed by her Spanish half brother and through him negotiates some reward for her time in captivity, which is land. She gets livestock, she gets wealth. And she becomes sort of an arbitrator, a mediator among the Spanish Catholic priests who want to convert indigenous people and other interests in the area. And she remains defiant. She has children, possibly from her time in captivity, possibly also from later. But she has a long running relationship with a man who is married to another woman. She takes his last name because she also sees herself as his spouse and refuses the attempts of the mission priests to force her to renounce that relationship. And there are other examples of that. I didn't even make it into the book of her son is about to be punished for some sort of indiscretion or sort of misdemeanor type thing. And she goes into the public square and says, if you're going after him, you have to go after me. And they drop the charges. So this defiant woman who's able to kind of make her own way and be sexually autonomous to a degree with the stories of the enslaved. I was really moved by there's a whole generation of black women historians, and now also some black male historians who have centered the stories of enslaved women and of sexual coercion within histories of slavery. And that is that scholarship exists because of black feminism and because of changes in the academy that brought in women scholars asking different questions and really attempting to honor the personhood of the people they're writing about. So I was trying to figure out ways of telling stories that would at once convey to readers how awful these circumstances were and at the same time, I hope, honor the humanity of the people that I was writing about. So they're under American slavery. There was terrible sexual coercion and fear of coercion. You know, often there's these horrible events, but then the fear that that could happen again is often just as powerful in people's lives. But there were also loving relationships. There were parent child bonds, there were adoptive bonds, kinship bonds. There are. There's just so much evidence about how important, you know, negotiating sexual autonomy within that system was for enslaved people. And that that's also really part of the story. So I, I attempted to bring that in as well.
- [18:07]
B
Yeah. One of the things about history is that it sort of challenges our simplistic thinking about things, doesn't it? So a big part of policing sexuality that takes place in this early period happens through literary works that discuss sexuality. Your chapter on the book, Fanny Hill is one example.
- [18:31]
C
Yes. So I had a lot of fun writing that chapter, I won't lie. So Fanny Hill Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was one of the best selling books on either side of the Atlantic for about 100 years. And it was written in 19. I'm sorry, it was written in 1748 and 1749 by John Cleland, an English author who was in debtors prison. And it was the most pornographic, explicitly pornographic book of its time. But Cleland modeled it on the romantic novel. So all the sort of standard tropes in terms of plot construction and so on mirror that story. And the book even ends with a wedding, which is sort of a joke that Cleland's making at the end because she's instead of the chaste young lady who has survived various trials like a Jane Austen character would, to then find her perfect mate at the end. This is a woman who's had wild sexual adventures for years and then ends up marrying one of her clients. So the book though, was a sensation. It was, you know, there weren't copyright laws, so people just mass produced it and replicated it in other places. And there were lots of other ways that people were expressing sexuality in print. There were, you know, sort of off color poems and almanacs. There were stories about, you know, lusty widows. There were all kind, you know, if you're looking in like 18th century periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. There were discussions and gossip about men in London who went to certain houses where men socialized with one another in ways that were slightly scandalous. There were, you know, we didn't, don't seem to have had those clubs in colonial America, but they were in London at the time. And anyway, but the conversation about it crossed the Atlantic and there were initially no mechanisms for, for curtailing that flow of information. So American print culture, North American print culture was pretty lively when it came to talking about sex. And it's really in the 1800s that through tariff measures and then through anti obscenity measures, the US Government tries to stop the flow of obscenity, as they start calling it. And the fact that it's initially a tariff act in the 1840s is. It's defining obscenity as something that comes from abroad. Right. We have to tax. It's those French authors that are always corrupting the good American reader. But of course, a lot of it was domestically produced. And one of the things that I enjoy is every technological innovation from cheaper paper and cheaper ink and printing presses to photography. It just almost immediately seems to become another way to create and convey pornographic or erotic material.
- [21:28]
B
It's interesting just. And again, I was been struggling about questions to ask you about book and it just so happened that earlier in the week I was invited to a parents program at my son's school on the subject of cybercrimes. Oh. So okay, so I'm going to go to a program on cyber crimes. And a hundred percent, like a hundred percent of the content was about sex. There every cyber crime, there was nothing in there about gambling or, or losing your money or I guess because it's teenagers, it was a hundred percent about sex.
- [22:13]
C
Right. And of course that the laws around conveying erotica with, you know, or pornography with children are very, very serious and strict laws. Yes. I mean the conversation by the 1860s and 70s in the United States is that simply by looking at these materials, by reading a book like Fanny Hill, by looking at a photograph of a naked woman, that young people's minds, and particularly young men's minds would be corrupted. I mean, the idea was that men, by the 1860s, 70s, the prevailing view is that white men are sexual and will be more sort of tamed by marriage, that white women aren't terribly sexual and will learn how to tolerate it during marriage, perhaps enjoy it, and that people of color, African Americans and people of other people from Mexico are much more sexual in ways that aren't as under control. It was part of the racist language of the time and the racist thinking of the time. But for these anti obscenity reformers, they were very worried about young white men who they thought should grow up to be the leader. Captains of industry and, you know, elected officials and leaders of the nation were consuming so much pornography, and in a way they weren't. The part that they got right was that young people were consuming so much more pornography. If you think about what happened during the Civil War, they built tons of roads and railroads, so the transportation networks in the United States vastly expanded because they had to move people and material as quickly as possible. The US Mail service got much more sophisticated and faster. And one of the things that people were shipping back and forth through the mail during the Civil War was pornography. And, and so the production of it, the distribution of it got cheaper, easier to get a hold of, and it really was quite prevalent. Now, whether or not you think that looking at it corrupts someone's mind is another question.
- [24:20]
B
Yes, it's another question. The second part of the book is called Redefining Sex. And here's where we get a variety of ways that this anxiety that I think I trying to tell you that I experienced among parents at this program, this is where they start to get manifested in some very real ways. This is where we get to meet Anthony Comstock. A little about Mr. Comstock.
- [24:47]
C
Yes. You know, I dislike him so much that I had qualms about giving him his whole chapter, a whole chapter. But he. So I do try to balance him out a little bit with some of the free speech activists. But Comstock was a very devout Protestant man who served in the Civil War. Didn't see any action, but sat around with other soldiers and was appalled by what they were looking at. Moved to New York City to sort of take on this one man crusade against vice and filth. And he would personally storm into bookshops and demand to see the, you know, the stock that was in the back or was behind the counter and would try to seize it and destroy it. He eventually got support from businessmen in the city, folks at the ymca, and most remarkably managed to convince Congress to pass federal legislation which we just simply call the Comstock act because it has a very long name. But it was. It allowed through a congressional authority to use the mail, interstate travel, interstate commerce through the mail, to ban the sale, the production, the distribution, the possession of anything that basically Anthony Comstock thought was obscene. Could be on paper, it could be an advertisement, an object, and notably, Comstock put anything related to contraception or to abortion in his definition of obscenity. And those pieces of it had effects well into the 20th century. And in fact, still to this day, the part of the Comstock act that defines anything related to abortion as obscene was never struck down through a court, in a court decision or by statute. And is part of how some judges have said that the Congress could ban mailing mifepristone and misoprostol through the US Mail today because they do aid in abortion care.
- [26:41]
B
But as you point out, Comstock was resisted. Like there were free speech advocates who tried to challenge some of the negative consequences of what Comstock was doing.
- [26:54]
C
Well, I mean, this is where I think that the one good thing Elon Musk ever did for me was I could never understand how someone so unlikable and unliked could have so much power and could get away with it. And then because Comstock was re. Was just ridiculed in the press, you know, because he was, he went so overboard. He wanted paintings in saloons of, you know, a scantily clad woman taken down. He, you know, he was really, he wanted art schools that had live models to be shut down. I mean, any form of nudity. You know, he seemed really offended by. And so there were free speech activists who were the most radical parts of the opposition to him. And then there were just lots of other Americans who thought he had really gone too far. But among the free speech radicals, I write about a woman named Ida Craddock who was very unusual, very sort of just unique person. There's sort of no one else I can think of that's like her. She wanted to go to Penn to study anthropology and she was denied admission because she was a woman. But she sort of self studied. She was interested in what she called phallic antiquities and phallic art. So she was fascinated by sexuality. She worked doing all kinds of odd jobs and at schools in and around Philadelphia. But she eventually became a sort of self styled marriage and sexuality counselor, sometimes by correspondence course, sometimes meeting people in person, trying to answer pretty detailed questions about sexual experiences between husbands and wives. And she based her authority on what she understood to be her marriage to her spiritual husband. And whether or not this was a man she'd ever known on earth is not clear. It seems that it might have been in a completely fantasized relationship. But she was, she was a great writer, she was fearless. She got her ideas out into the public. She just opposed Comstock's ideas whole cloth. And he went after her viciously and he Went after other free speech advocates pretty viciously, too, and was proud of destroying their livelihoods and even proud of the people that he drove to suicide. So he, you know, he was again, like a pretty awful guy who had this enormous influence over what people could safely write about and talk about when it came to sex.
- [29:24]
B
And this is also a period of time when the US Is dealing with a lot of different ideas about sexuality, including polygamy. This is a time when homosexuality is starting to be debated. And sexual themes are also, as we already, as we discussed, showing up in popular culture a lot of. So out of all of that, this idea of redefining sex, what are sort of the big themes that emerge out of this particular period?
- [29:52]
C
One of the major themes is this unprecedented assertion of government power over American sexual behaviors, whether it's federal efforts to prohibit Utah's entrance into the Union as a state unless it outlaws polygamy among Latter Day Saints, or forcing indigenous North Americans into sort of nuclear household units in order to benefit from the Dawes act through immigration law. And it goes on from there. An incredible assertion of federal. And with things like the Comstock act, really intrusive government power when it came to sex and sexuality. But then. But sort of at the same time, it's this completely countervailing tendency toward a popular culture that defines sex for its own sake and that has.
- [30:49]
A
I don't.
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C
Know, sort of a variety of ideas about what sex is for. Some of them related to marriage, many of them not. That is, connecting sexuality to leisure time, to pleasure, to, you know, when we first get the sort of proto dating activities, moving away from sort of chaperoned courtship, but that, you know, mixed sex, peer groups going out at night. This was all new, right? There's electrification by the 18, you know, 80s and 1890s, so you could stay out later safely and you could. There were these amusement parks, there were these penny arcades and all sorts of new entertainments that were coming around. And sexuality becomes part of those pretty quickly, whether it's sexual themes in early film or just the sort of thrill for young people of being away from family supervision. You know, as more and more young people are getting wage jobs, they have perhaps a little bit of money left over at the end of the week to spend on themselves. And so there's just a. Those are two of the big themes of this. On the one hand, this assertion of government authority and intrusiveness, but on the other, this popular culture that doesn't have one definition of what sex is or what it's for or, you know, what people should do about it, but is in a. In the midst of a very lively conversation about it that lots of people participate in.
- [32:12]
B
I remember a conversation once with a professor in a class who was bemoaning the end of courting. And your discussion about how young people managed their relationships in this section is just absolutely fascinating to me. Can you just talk a little bit about what you sort of hit on it a second ago, but just offer a little more description for us.
- [32:36]
C
Historian Beth Bailey has a book with this wonderful title, From Front Porch to Backseat, about the sort of transformation of American dating patterns. And other historians have talked about this new practice of treating where since young men earned more, often two to three times what a young woman working at the same factory would earn, they had more spending money. And so they could ask the girl or young woman out for an evening and maybe pay for her dinner at a cafeteria and pay for tickets to see a show or to go to an amusement park. And there was sort of an understanding that there would be some sort of physical proximity, possibly intimacy of different kinds as part of the evening. But no one involved in those situations thought that they were engaged in sex work of any kind. It was a new form of sociability tied to consumer culture and structured by imbalanced gender relations and in. In which both parties felt that they were getting something from the bargain that they wanted. Now, of course, some people were safer in those bargains than others, and there was a lot of ways that they could go wrong. But this is the beginning of dating culture of, you know, teenage boys taking teenage girls out for. Or treating them to dinner or to a movie or something and moving into adulthood. So. But it does really begin then in these sort of urban settings with young people navigating, having a little bit of money of their own in a world of new possibilities for what they wanted to do when they weren't at work.
- [34:15]
B
Yeah, again, and it's just, it's. And in ways that. Boy, we're still having these arguments today, aren't we?
- [34:21]
C
Yes.
- [34:23]
B
Whole idea of treating just. It just struck me as something that is just. Still, it remains relevant.
- [34:30]
C
Yes. Yes, it does. Yes. So ideally, in dating today, there should. Couples would not have an expectation of a physical exchange at the end of the evening that wasn't entirely mutual, one would hope.
- [34:44]
B
The final part of the book is called Solving Sexual Problems, and you begin with the work of Alfred Kinsey.
- [34:51]
C
Yes, I am fascinated by Kinsey and his research and really do think about it as a sort of before and after. He had this huge influence on the way that Americans thought about, talked about, related to sex and sexuality. And he wrote two big blockbuster books, 1948's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and then 1953's Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The first book was this big media sensation. And that sort of the debate is, you know, by publishing all of this very dry statistical prose, was the Kinsey research team bringing down American values by documenting how many of the men they interviewed had premarital sex, or how many of these men had same sex encounters, or how often they masturbated or any of these things. So it begins that debate then. But it was really a bit of a curiosity, this expose, this sort of lifting the curtain on what American men were doing. The 1953 study was far more controversial because there Kinsey foundation that non marital sex was more prevalent in American women's lives than marital sex, if you added up all the other kinds, and that women who had premarital sex reported more sexual satisfaction during their marriages, that women who had sex with other women reported the highest rate of satisfaction in their relationships, and that extramarital sex among women was not that uncommon. So that was the one where, where the conservative backlash really coalesced to say, he's damaging America. This is. He's teaching women the wrong lessons. Women are going to think it's okay to do this. And in fact, this is. And it basically became an argument of whether or not that's true. No one should be talking about it. But the flip side of that was that there were a lot of people who sort of found copies of the Kinsey Report, you know, young people sneaking into the adult section of libraries or adults coming upon it in their bookstores and realized, oh, I'm not the only person who likes to do whatever the thing is that they like to do. And particularly for gay, lesbian, bisexual Americans, this was incredibly reassuring. So there are letters to Kinsey from people saying, you know, you sort of saved my life. Like, I never. I really thought I was the only one. I thought I was sick or sinful. And now I see that in fact there's a world of people who feel as I do. So there are different kinds of reactions to him. And he also really set sex research on, you know, on a new level of professionalism, of respect within the social sciences. And so he's significant in those ways as well.
- [37:44]
B
I'm wondering just about that, um, how easy is it to write about sex even from an historical point of view? Like I I'm, I'm. I'm curious about that.
- [37:55]
C
So that's a great question. So, I mean, it's obviously what I spend my days doing, but so I'm.
- [38:02]
B
Wondering what tenure file looks like, I guess is what I'm trying to ask. You know what I mean?
- [38:06]
C
Yeah, I mean, I have all kinds of. Yeah. Subject files. There. There was a moment when I was writing my dissertation and I realized that I had the phrase clitoral orgasm in my dissertation. It was like, well, I guess I've crossed that line now. I guess I'm a person who puts that phrase in their history dissertation. And, you know, there's sort of no looking back after that. But I think, you know, so one of the challenges for historians of sexuality to think about it sort of from the academic side is to be taken seriously. So, you know, a lot of the early histories in LGBTQ history, history of sexuality, are very serious, scholarly books about efforts to regulate abortion, the lavender scare and the gay rights movement. Really profoundly important, serious works that, interestingly, have very little sex in them. So they're books about, you know, or books about contraception or books about even women's liberation. There's. There's very little sex to those books, partly because I think that's part of. May have been the comfort level of the authors and how much they wanted to talk about sex and sexuality. But if you're trying to make a subfield in American history, look, you know, gain legitimacy, you kind of have to do that. And so one of the things I was trying to do as I wrote this book was to keep in mind that sex is very often very fun and pleasurable, and there's a reason why people want to do it and are so insistent on not having other people tell them what they can and can't do. And to try to keep that as part of the book that I was writing, even as I talked about things like coercion and enslavement and anti obscenity prosecutions, which are all, of course, huge parts of the story, to find ways to honor the humanity of the people who have desires and who seek ways to express them. So, I don't know, I don't think about it much anymore. I mean, I think after the 10th time, you stand in front of 100 undergraduates and explain what a diaphragm is and where it goes and what it does. I don't know, you sort of just get used to it. And. Yeah, whenever I have friends who. Or colleagues who talk about, I want to teach the history of sexuality. I say, okay, so you're going to be teaching sex ed, too? Because students questions are often very instrumental. They want to know, wait, what would happen if you did that? You know, how did that actually work? Which are great questions that we should always be asking, but often have a lot more to do with the human body than they do with historical change.
- [40:50]
B
I will tell you that I shared your chapter on the gay rights movement with some undergrads, and it provoked an amazing discussion. Oh, good. With people coming out in the room based on what they had read and very, very moved by that section.
- [41:15]
C
Oh, I'm very moved to hear that.
- [41:18]
B
It was an astonishing moment. I don't know that I was. I always feel like this, like when I'm talking about civil rights or something. It's like, I'm not sure if I'm the right guy to be teaching this stuff, but I guess I'm the best you've got going. So if I like to muddle through.
- [41:32]
C
You know, I just getting a little bit off from talking about the book. But I've had students say to me, you're the first adult who talked to me about sex in a way that wasn't moralizing or in a way that just as a factual thing, like as a normal thing. And so I think often just being in front of the room or sitting around the table and talking about sex and sexuality as a normal part of life and as a thing where there are no wrong questions. And that's what my podcast is about. It's not a weird question. It's a great question if it's about your body or your sexuality. So, yeah, I think that student, like undergrad people who are undergraduate age are really open to having these conversations with an adult they trust. And that adult could really be anybody. You don't have to be part of a sexual minority group or you don't have to be, you know, a woman or queer or anything. You can just be, I think, someone who's willing to say the words and hear the conversations. And I think that that's really important.
- [42:36]
B
And at the same time. And again, this sort of speaks to. This is a little off the topic of the book. But since we're here, they don't know as much as I sometimes think we think they know if that's right. Makes any sense.
- [42:48]
C
Yes. I mean, when I talk about. Occasionally when I teach these classes, I will put slides up that are of typical female anatomy and typical male anatomy. Of course, everyone's people's bodies are all kinds of varieties but sort of the generic versions and say, as you all know, and then talk about the female reproductive system and talk about the male reproductive system. Because I realize that some of them may come from schools where they've had basically no sex education and might not actually know that, you know, you know, some of the basic things about the body. So, yeah, no, the students and tying this into sort of the history. Young people today are having sex at later ages and less often than, say, my generation. I was born in the 70s. So they're, they are statistically speaking, less sexually experienced than students were 20, 30, 40 years ago. So that's also important for us to keep in mind, I guess, as we talk to them about it.
- [43:46]
B
Yeah, there's just a lot of anxiety around it, isn't there?
- [43:49]
C
Yes. Yeah.
- [43:51]
B
So again, there are so many stories in this section as we come up to our contemporary age. One of the things I appreciate and really admire about your writing is the balance that you bring to all of the stories. And you just said you don't want to write about Anthony Comstock, but here he is. Your chapter on Betty Dodson, I think, illustrates this phenomena just brilliantly. You obviously admire her, but at the same time you're not afraid to sort of expose some of the places where she went sideways.
- [44:24]
C
Yes. Yeah. So Betty Dodson was this radical sex educator feminist artist who became sort of singularly focused on teaching women how to masturbate. And this was part for her of a sort of sex education drive. It was part for her of women's liberation, political liberation as well as sexual liberation. She tied to, you know, women understanding their bodies, women being able to experience pleasure autonomously, she thought was extremely powerful and important for women as people, as feminists. And so she was at the center of, you know, some the sexual Liberation in the 60s and 70s in New York and elsewhere. She was very pro pornography. And during this sort of what we call like the golden age of porn, think of, you know, Deep Throat and that sort of period of time. She was a sex educator who appeared at conferences organized by now and also at far less known groups. And she became later, in the 1970s and into the 80s, interested in personally and also publicly in defense of kink and bdsm. And she really enjoyed it. But it became a real division among American feminists. So to explain this a little bit. So BDSM is a very consent based, rule bound series of practices that prioritize safety, but that allow space for play, role play, experimentation, different kinds of toys and things like that and constraints or whatever else people want to do. And there were lesbian feminists, and there were some, like, lesbian activists and pro sex feminists who really enjoyed this. And then there was another group of very vocal feminists who said what we would call maybe the radical feminists who said BDSM reproduces patriarchy and reproduces violence against women. So the 1970s is the decade when Susan Brown Miller publishes Against Our Will. This sort of treatise on rape isn't about sex, it's about power. And it's also when the first women's organizations opposing objectification of women and violence in media come about the boycotting record companies and boycotting movies, movie studios, over graphically violent portrayals of rape and things or. And of women's sexuality that way. And those folks argue that, you know, pornography is violence against women and kink and BDSM are also violent. And so this cre. And. And for the women who are involved in bdsm, they're sort of saying, we didn't fight this revolution just to have other women tell us what to do with our bodies, right? And so Bunny Donson's right in the middle of this, and she's remains an active sex educator into her 90s. She died only in the last few years. But she had no ability to see how being. How her whiteness shaped her experience of her sexuality and her sexual politics, and she just couldn't really take it in. It was a limitation of hers. I think it's important to acknowledge the limitations that people have. For me, it doesn't diminish what she accomplished. I think what she accomplished stands as what it is, but it is part of her legacy that she was often racially insensitive in her conversations with people. She had this black male partner at one point, and she exoticized his body in ways that were pretty offensive. And so, you know, that's part of who she was. But she was also this advocate against shame, which, if you. When we get to the. By the time I get to this part of the book, women. American women have been taught to be ashamed about their sexualities and their bodies. You know, the whole reaction to the Kinsey Report. We don't want women to know these things, right? Like, keep us in. Like, keep it all private, hide it. And Dodson is all about shout it from the rooftops, teach everybody, you know, and, you know, and in that way, I find her pretty revolutionary.
- [48:46]
B
And shame, again, it shows up a lot. Again, I'm thinking about this program that I went to, and it was fascinating how much of the dire consequences of what this police officer was talking about weren't linked to sex per se, but to shame around sex.
- [49:07]
C
Yes, yes. That is a big part of it. And we even see that in the contemporary anti pornography movement around sort of the harms of so called of pornography. Yeah.
- [49:22]
B
So as I said, this is where we start to bump into where we are living now and some of the battles that are still being fought here. I'd like you to read from the book, if you would again that passage on page 274 that we discussed.
- [49:35]
C
Sure. It has become common to describe abortion supporters and opponents as single issue voters in U.S. elections. That framing overlooks how the abortion issue became a referendum on the sexual revolution, gay rights and feminism. Abortion opponents described the procedure as an assault on the American family because they argued it untethered reproductive sex from marriage, women from men and men from their responsibilities as family breadwinners. Abortion struck at their beliefs that the conventionally gendered heterosexual family held the nation together. It was a threat on par with new no fault divorce laws. First in California and soon in many other states, increasingly visible gay and lesbian communities and the feminist demand for an end to conventional gender roles. As such, an individual's sexual decisions were matters of public concern, requiring community vigilance and when necessary, state intervention. This worldview rejected the modern understanding of desire as a discrete aspect of human experience, arguing instead that sexual behaviors indicated how well a person understood and followed Christian values.
- [50:51]
B
So there's so many questions of course that arise out of that. I mean, so here we are and you know, we're sort of, you know, the world's turned upside down on these matters. We're post Roe v. Wade and now people are talking about ending no fault divorce.
- [51:14]
C
Really?
- [51:15]
B
Oh yeah. In a number of places where. Oh my goodness, yeah, that, that there are, you know. Well, it's on the fringes but okay.
- [51:24]
C
I hadn't heard, I, I'd heard more that they're, you know, Texas is going to potentially allow county clerks to not legitimize same sex marriages, allow them to refuse to sign those documents.
- [51:40]
B
We're putting divorce back on the table. Wow.
- [51:44]
C
I mean this is where the historians naivete comes in that we just wish if more people read history they would realize the dangers because of all of these changes come out of movements to save women's lives. Right. The abortion rights movement is from efforts to save women's lives. Divorce reform in the 19th century was about rescuing women from allowing women to rescue themselves from abusive marriages as much as it was about being able to marry the person you loved initially among women's rights reformers in the 1800s, it was about, you know, women could, you know, there are cases of women who were violently beaten by their husbands. And the judge said, well, that is tolerable cruelty, not intolerable cruelty. So literally that's what we're talking about, you know, where these movements come from. You know, so it's, it just. And I don't know what the people pushing these efforts if they just don't know that that's where this all came from or if they don't care or if it's some combination of the two. But any combination of these things will lead to suffering for a lot of people.
- [53:01]
B
And the other thing that strikes me, and it's sort of embedded in that paragraph you just read, the idea of marriage is an oblique. I'm trying to think of the right way to phrase this. This, that somehow we've coupled marriage to need and not to choice. That we want to go back to a world in which a woman has to be married in order to achieve X, Y and Z. And instead this is maybe a typical, not atypical masculine point of view. But if she needs you, she can't love you. Like if you depend on me for a roof over your head, that it's not a free choice. Right.
- [53:48]
C
And the flip side of that is that as women get more financial independence, many of them decide that they don't need marriage. And I think that there's so, you know, all of these things that further destabilize women's lives, create greater need.
- [54:05]
B
Yeah.
- [54:05]
C
And sort of push them into these relationships. I mean, theoretically it hasn't worked. Like there have been many efforts over the last 20, 30 years at so called, like marriage promotion efforts and they don't work very well. So I don't know what it would take for, you know, marriage rates to just keep going down. They're not going up and the birth rate is going down. And there are all these pronatalists wanting to push women. And I know there are these social media influencers and talking about being trad wives and all of their children and so on. I don't know that that's a trend that's really going to take hold. I think there are going to be a lot of unintended pregnancies as women believe social influencers who tell them that birth control is poison, which is also happening. But whether that will create more marriages is an entirely separate question. And increasingly people don't see it as something that they need Necessarily. But certainly, like, lower income people have the lowest marriage rates, so pushing people into economic dependency to push them into marriage doesn't seem to work.
- [55:17]
B
So, again, in Lakota, you reflect on how the themes that you discussed throughout this work are still with us today. So we're now a year past publication date. Anything you want to add to that?
- [55:29]
C
Well, there is. The brand new paperback edition is out with a new epilogue, which I was given 2,000 words to just quickly bring us up to date, and everything that's happened since the book was published in September 2024, which was super easy. So, I mean, what I talk about in the epilogue is the sort of precipice we stand on in terms of where we're headed with all of this. So, you know, I write about this sort of naive hope that abortion would carry Harris to victory, that. That issue, but also the incredible fear that has gripped LGBTQ households, transgender people, and parents of trans children since the election because of all of the threats coming from Project 2025 and the Trump administration against trans people. And I, you know, call back to T. Hall. In 1620s, Virginia hall was forcibly examined by members of the community. We're today talking about forcibly examining children to know which sports team they would be on. How else would you know what team this kid belongs on? I mean, I don't think people. You see somebody walking into a restroom. How do you know what gender that person is? How do you know what their bodies are unless you examine them? Right. And so we're. But we know better. You know, people in the 1620s had limited tools for figuring this out. We should know better now. And I do find it very troubling that that's where we've ended back. But at the same time, I think that, I don't know, use a trite metaphor. The genie's out of the bottle. Like, people are so accustomed to making their own decisions about their bodies, gender, and sexuality. I think it is. We take enormous state repression to end that, and I don't see that happening. I think that there's a lot of resistance to that, as there has been across the whole history that I write about.
- [57:35]
B
Well, Rebecca Davis, thank you so much. Typically, at the end, I ask what people are working on next, but you've got a podcast. Do you want to give a plug?
- [57:45]
C
Sure, sure. So I work with a family physician who specializes in LGBTQ healthcare. It's called. This is probably a really weird question we have. We're in our fourth season.
- [57:57]
B
It's an awesome title.
- [57:59]
C
Thank you. Well, and it was because patients had said that to her, you know, doctor, this is probably a really weird question. And then ask what we describe as a completely reasonable question. And so we've had a lot of fun doing the podcast, and you can find it anywhere you get your podcasts.
- [58:15]
B
Well, Beth Davis, thank you again for taking the time to talk today.
- [58:18]
C
Thank you, Tom. This was a lot of fun.
- [58:20]
B
Once again, my guest today has been Rebecca L. Davis, the author of Fierce A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America from W.W. norton, now out on paperback. My name is Tom Disena, and you are listening to the New Books Network.