And how the stereotype flipped.
In the 1600s, a man named James Mattock was expelled from the First Church of Boston. His crime? It wasn’t using lewd language or smiling on the sabbath or anything else that we might think the Puritans had disapproved of. Rather, James Mattock had refused to have sex with his wife for two years. Though Mattock’s community clearly saw his self-deprivation as improper, it is quite possible that they had his wife’s suffering in mind when they decided to shun him. The Puritans believed that sexual desire was a normal and natural part of human life for both men and women (as long as it was heterosexual and confined to marriage), but that women wanted and needed sex more than men. A man could choose to give up sex with relatively little trouble, but for a woman to be so deprived would be much more difficult for her.
Yet today, the idea that men are more
interested in sex than women is so pervasive that it seems almost
unremarkable. Whether it’s because of hormone levels or “human
nature,” men just need to have sex, masturbate, and look at porn in a
way that simply isn’t necessary for women, according to popular
assumptions (and if a women does find it so necessary, there’s probably
something wrong with her). Women must be convinced, persuaded, even
forced into “giving it up,” because the prospect of sex just isn’t that
appealing on its own, say popular stereotypes. Sex for women is usually a
somewhat distasteful but necessary act that must be performed to win
approval, financial support, or to maintain a stable relationship. And
since women are not slaves to their desires like men, they are
responsible for ensuring that they aren’t “taken advantage of.”
The idea that men are naturally more
interested in sex than women is ubiquitous that it’s difficult to
imagine that people ever believed differently. And yet for most of
Western history, from ancient Greece to beginning of the nineteenth
century, women were assumed to be the sex-crazed porn fiends of their
day. In one ancient Greek myth,
Zeus and Hera argue about whether men or women enjoy sex more. They ask
the prophet Tiresias, whom Hera had once transformed into a woman, to
settle the debate. He answers, “if sexual pleasure were divided into ten
parts, only one part would go to the man, and and nine parts to the
woman.” Later, women were considered to be temptresses who inherited
their treachery from Eve. Their sexual passion was seen as a sign of
their inferior morality, reason and intellect, and justified tight
control by husbands and fathers. Men, who were not so consumed with lust
and who had superior abilities of self-control, were the gender more
naturally suited to holding positions of power and influence.
Early twentieth-century
physician and psychologist Havelock Ellis may have been the first to
document the ideological change that had recently taken place. In his
1903 work Studies in the Psychology of Sex, he
cites a laundry list of ancient and modern historical sources ranging
from Europe to Greece, the Middle East to China, all of nearly the same
mind about women’s greater sexual desire. In the 1600s, for instance,
Francisco Plazzonus deduced that childbirth would hardly be worthwhile
for women if the pleasure they derived from sex was not far greater than
that of men’s. Montaigne, Ellis notes, considered women to be
“incomparably more apt and more ardent in love than men are, and that in
this matter they always know far more than men can teach them, for ‘it
is a discipline that is born in their veins.’” The idea of women’s
passionlessness had not yet fully taken hold in Ellis’ own time, either.
Ellis’ contemporary, the Austrian gynecologist Enoch Heinrich Kisch,
went so far as to state that “The sexual impulse is so powerful in women
that at certain periods of life its primitive force dominates her whole
nature.”
Yet the times were clearly changing. In
1891, H. Fehling tried to debunk the common wisdom: “It is an altogether
false idea that a young woman has just as strong an impulse to the
opposite sex as a young man.... The appearance of the sexual side in the
love of a young girl is pathological." In 1896, Bernhard Windscheid
postulated, “In the normal woman, especially of the higher social
classes, the sexual instinct is acquired, not inborn; when it is inborn,
or awakes by itself, there is abnormality. Since women do not know this
instinct before marriage, they do not miss it when they have no
occasion in life to learn it."
So what happened?
So what happened?
Of course, ideas about gender and
sexuality are not the same everywhere, and within every place and era
there are always debates and differing views. The story of how this
stereotype became reversed is not a simple one to trace, nor did it
happen evenly and all at once. Historian Nancy Cott points to the rise
of evangelical Protestantism as the catalyst of this change, at least in
New England. Protestant ministers whose congregations were increasingly
made up mainly of middle-class white women probably saw the wisdom in
portraying their congregants as moral beings who were especially suited
to answering the call of religion, rather than as besmirched
seductresses whose fate was sealed in Eden. Women both welcomed this
portrayal and helped to construct it. It was their avenue to a certain
level of equality with men, and even superiority. Through the gospel,
Christian women were “exalted above human nature, raised to that of
angels,” as the 1809 book The Female Friend, or The Duties of Christian
Virgins put it. The emphasis on sexual purity in the book’s title is
telling. If women were to be the new symbols of Protestant religious
devotion, they would have to sacrifice the acknowledgement of their
sexual desires. Though even the Puritans had believed that it was
perfectly acceptable for both men and women to desire sexual pleasure
within the confines of marriage, women could now admit to desiring sex
in order to bond with their husbands or fulfill their “maternal urges.”
As Cott put it, “Passionlessness was on the other side of the coin which
paid, so to speak, for women’s admission to moral equality.”
By positioning themselves as naturally
chaste and virtuous, Protestant women could make the case for themselves
as worthy moral and intellectual equals. They could carve out a space
for themselves to participate in political life as social reformers
advocating for moral causes like charity for the poor and prohibition.
And in an era when men could legally rape their wives (an era which did
not end in the US until 1993), womens’ supposed passionlessness provided
at least some limited grounds for them to abstain from unwanted sex
with their husbands. Yet these benefits were available for only a
certain subset of women. As John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman point
out, “The idea of innate female virtue, or of sexual passionlessness,
applied primarily to native-born, middle class women; working-class,
immigrant, and black women continued to be seen as sexually passionate,
and thus sexually available.” (Think back to Windscheid’s claim that
women, but especially affluent women, were naturally born without sex
drives.) Middle-class white women could emphasize their similarities
with men of their race and class, and thus access some of their
privilege, by embracing an ideology that posited fundamental sexual
differences between themselves and those other women.
Yet if women could raise themselves up to
the level of angels by being passionless, then they had so much further
to fall if they did give in to their desires. As D’Emilio and Freedman
explain, “In the past, as long as she repented, the woman who once
sinned--like the male transgressor--could be reintegrated into the
community. Now, however, because women allegedly occupied a higher moral
plane than man, her fall was so great that it tainted her for life.”
These “fallen women” were barred from their families and communities,
and often had to work as prostitutes to support themselves.
Womens’ supposed greater sex drive was an
argument for their inferiority, but once the assumption became
reversed, no one argued that mens’ lustfulness was a sign of a
fundamental irrationality that should preclude them from business and
politics. Rather than a handicap, a large sexual appetite was positive
once it came to be seen as a characteristic of men. Women, being
passionless, supposedly lacked the drive and ambition to succeed. Much
like sex, the public realm of work was dirty and distasteful, hardly
suitable to womens’ delicate sensibilities. Since their instincts were
maternal rather than sexual, they were best suited to staying virtuously
at home with the children. Black women and poor women, on the other
hand, were firmly shut out from the dainty flower role. They were still
seen as suitable for both work and for satisfying white mens’ sexual
urges that were no longer appropriate for their wives.
But perhaps the longest-lasting
consequence of the rise of the passionless woman was the ushering in of a
sneakier type of sexism--whose evidence we see in any number of
fast-food and beer commercials that portray men as a bunch of dim-witted
five-year-olds in the bodies of adults. Women are smarter, more
responsible, more caring and upstanding; not like men, whose instincts
are base and appetites carnal. Since men are utterly unfit for helping
to raise their own children (as they are little more than children
themselves), that job must fall to women. Since men are too incompetent
to do housework, their stolid, levelheaded wives must do it. Since men
are unable to restrain themselves, women must keep their skirts long,
stay away from alcohol, refrain from flirting. For women, the failure to
have appeared passionless enough means that they are now the ones
responsible if they are raped. “The purity of women is the everlasting
barrier against which the tides of man’s sensual nature surge,” as one
nineteenth-century reformer put it, and this attitude still persists
today.
Even when gender roles change, sexism has
a remarkable ability to adapt--and historical amnesia enables this
ability. The association of men with lust is as much an artifact of
recent times as the association of girls with pink and boys with blue
(less than 100 years ago, this system of gendered color-coding was also reversed). Yet
even with all this switching-around, some things have stayed
suspiciously the same. When women were sexual, their proper place was in
the home as caregivers and mothers. When women became passionless,
their proper place was still in the home as caregivers and mothers.
Isn’t it funny how that works? Gender roles gain their power from the
fact that they appear natural and eternal. By looking to the past, we
can draw aside this veil and see these categories for what they
are--made by people, and able to be changed by people.
