Sex – Lessons from History: A brisk history of sex in western culture

Sex: Lessons from History

Author: Fern Riddell

ISBN-13: 9781473666252

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton

Guideline Price: £20

“Understanding the lives of our ancestors, their passions and their desires, is a fundamental necessity to understanding the problems in our own sexual culture,” writes Dr Fern Riddell in the introduction to this brisk history of sex in western culture.

Riddell, a high-profile cultural historian, with expertise in sex in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, has written this book, in part, to remind us that debates around sex – who should be having it, where and with whom – are nothing new, but also to present a rendition of “ordinary people’s sexual culture” in history.

It’s a culture, writes Riddell, that tells a very different story to the one we might be expecting, once it has been taken out of the hands of the scientists, sociologists and anthropologists who have long defined it by means of order, statistics, boundaries and clinical analysis. Riddell is less interested in fitting our sexuality into prescribed boxes than she is in considering “the reality of humanity”, a reality which, from her historian’s perspective, makes clear “there is nothing new, or modern about the sexual culture we live in today”.

Riddell writes: “People have always loved the opposite sex. People have loved their own sex. They have loved both their own sex and the opposite sex, and those without a binary sexual definition. We have always recorded the existences of citizens who have felt their physical body – their genitals, their bodily organs – has forced them to appear as the wrong sex; and some people have felt they are more masculine or feminine . . . without the belief or feelings that their body is wrong . . . Today, that is something we define as ‘gender non-conforming’.”

Her book, with chapter titles that include Loving Who You Want and The Body, thus fits thematically with other recent publications, such as Olivia Laing’s Everybody, which considered what it might mean to live and love in a free body. While Riddell’s work, written in clear and chatty prose aimed at a broad reading public, does not compare to Laing’s in terms of literary thoughtfulness or critical depth, it is nonetheless another offering of nuance and shade regarding sex and identity, another book that can be picked up as blessed relief from the polarised arguments of social media and even the mainstream press.

Most interesting, therefore, to this reader, was Riddell’s chapter about fluidity, of gender or sexuality, which she reminds us, is not a modern concept. While she welcomes the emergence of contemporary trans culture and identity, the chapter is also a discussion of the fact that although there have always been those for whom binary sexuality was an absolute, there have, equally, always been those for whom it was not, something that can get lost inside today’s either/or shouting matches.

The chapter documents the work of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, who performed gender reassignment surgeries in the open and tolerant Berlin of the 1920s and 30s, before the Nazis destroyed his building and set fire to all his records. (This is not the first account of Hirschfeld’s Institute in recent culture: Laing discusses it in Everybody, while it also featured in the second season of Transparent, the Amazon drama about an ageing father who comes out as a trans woman.) Riddell also suggests the history of trans people is not necessarily one of degradation and horror: her reports of Charley Wilson (originally Catherine Coombes), and the 20-year-old servant Elijah Scott, a “‘man known as Eliza’”, both of whom lived and thrived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, indicate, she writes, that all kinds of sexual identities have existed – and publicly so – throughout history.

Although Riddell’s interrogations reach back as far as Chaucer and Aristotle, she spends a lot of her time with the Victorians – understandable given she has already written a book on sex in the Victorian era – reminding us often they were not the prudes we think they were. She also makes frequent use of primary sources – newspaper reports, court proceedings, diaries, and a “gorgeously graphic” letter from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle – which lend historical weight to her discussions.

But the book has too wide a sweep: it covers everything from the history of female sexual desire, to sex toys, to contraception, to sex work, to flirtation, masturbation and rape. This is to its detriment, as it is difficult to offer more than a superficial discussion of each of the topics, and in general, the publication feels rather rushed and squashed.

Nonetheless, her final chapter The Future of Sex, makes the case for the book’s existence. Our modern sexual culture – which prioritises “the cult of self-satisfaction”, where free pornography websites present sex without consent; where “‘how to be a woman’ is an idea everybody has, and nobody can agree on”, and in which we live, following #MeToo, without “our social innocence”, – has much to learn, writes Riddell, from the sex of the past. Lessons, most notably, of “openness, understanding and acceptance”. Because history, she says, should not keep us in the past, but “like a child’s night-light, should show us the dark before the dawn”.