Sex

Sex and the Rise of a Permissive Society

Since the 1960s, social historians dealing with the psychohistory of the family, childhood, and sexuality have provided a number of partly or completely conflicting interpretations of the past. According to Lawrence Stone, the sixteenth century brought the rise of a new English bourgeois family ideal following the principle of “affective individualism” with a more egalitarian partnership between the sexes. For Philippe Ariès, the ideal of romantic love as the marital basis for the invention of childhood developed in the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century. In Michel Foucault's view, early modernity was the formative age for the disciplined body, but in The History of Sexuality he also drew a different picture—one of the simultaneity of repressive practices and liberalizing discourses. Peter Gay contradicted what he regarded as a simplified myth of bourgeois puritanism steering the sex life of people in the nineteenth century. Norbert Elias's model of a relatively unchecked, spontaneous joy of dominance and male sexual satisfaction at the expense of socially weaker women in a society characterized by an uneven power balance between warlords and peasants denominates the “wild,” barbarian point of departure in the High Middle Ages. “Civilizing” means, in his account, that the power of these feudal lords met at medieval courts the even higher power of princes and kings, or the equal strength of peers and high-positioned women against whom they had to restrain their once spontaneous affects. The relationship between the knightly minstrel and the high-ranking, married lady gave, for the first time in the history of European upper classes, birth to the model of “romantic love.” In Elias's model, therefore, inhibition and refinement of manners go hand in hand. But how does it apply to twentieth-century liberalization? The Dutch sociologist Cas [Page 1277]Wouters, in collaboration with Elias, coined the term informalization for this new process. Its central formula is the “controlled de-controlling of emotions,” gained from an extensive analysis of manners books in four Western societies (Dutch, German, English, and U.S.-American) and over a whole century (Wouters 2004).

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