[UA] MPAA / Nookie

[Jess Nevins]

-----Original Message-----
>From: Chris Cooper <insectking at yahoo.com>

>> And even the Victorians weren't really that uptight
>> about sex--that's another one of those historical
>> myths.
>> 
>> Frankly, I tend to think that "they were uptight
>> about
>> sex" is something that every generation say about
>> their predecessors without really examining how 
>> they actually acted. 
>
>There was certainly lots of shagging and the emergence
>of the pornographic industry but according to
>Victorian society's regulations, sex was a taboo. It
>was just about biological reproduction or it was about
>nothing.

That is what the opinion-makers said, but if you actually
look at what the vast number of people actually did and
said to each other, you get a completely different picture 
of how the Victorians *really* felt about sex. It's one thing 
to look at, for example, a Victorian sex-guide, but that 
doesn't actually tell you how the Victorians really felt 
about sex; it only tells you what the opinion-makers felt 
people *should* think about sex. There is an enormous
gap between what clergy and expounders of morality
said to the middle and lower classes, and what the 
middle and lower classes said to each other. 

After all, the late Victorian period (which is what most
people think about when they talk about the Victorians)
was a time when the mistresses of the great and powerful
were parading around Hyde Park--and middle-class
mothers would bring their daughters to the Park to
watch the demi-mondaines with admiration. 

Peter Gay, in his multi-volume "Bourgeois Experience:
Victoria to Freud," covers this in great detail. A shorter
and more accessible work on the subject is Michael
Harrison's Fanfare of Strumpets. 

jess