Jean-Louis Flandrin - Sex In The Western World

The Development of Attitudes and Behaviour

by
Jean-Louis Flandrin
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris

Translated from the French by
Sue Collins
Services for Export and Language, University of Salford, Salford

Originally published in French in 1981 as Le sexe et l'occident: Evolution des attitudes et des comportements by Editions du Seuil, Paris

First published 1991 by Harwood Academic publisher

Published 2019 by Routledge
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Copyright 1991 by Taylor & Francis.

1981 by Editions du Seuil, Paris

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Front cover photograph of Le Djeuner sur l'Herbe by Edouard Manet.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flandrin, Jean Louis.
[Sexe et l'Occident. English]
Sex in the Western World: the development of attitudes and
behavior / Jean-Louis Flandrin: translated from the French by Sue
Collins.
p. cm.
Translation of: Sexe et l'Occident.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 3-7186-5201-3
1. Sexual ethicsEuropeHistory. 2. Sex customsEurope--History.
3. e. I. Title.
HQ31.F65413 1991
306.7'094dc20

ISBN 13: 978-3-7186-5201-3 (hbk)

As twentieth century Europeans, we are conscious of our long history and, like the noblemen of old, we are quite proud of it. Their history was for them proof of their nobility; ours has for a long time made us feel that we were "civilised", as opposed to those people supposedly without a history, and whom we referred to as "primitive" or "savage" . How could such pride be justified? The ways of thinking, feeling and acting which formerly marked the nobility were not acquired in one generation; nor were those of the modern Western world. Yet we ourselves have for a long time asked only that history soothe our vanity, like those gentlemen who gloried in the heroic deeds of their ancestors but cast a modest veil over their family's slow passage from the commonest of the common ranks to the nobility. We have not troubled ourselves to determine how we became what we are, how much our present and our future depend on the past, and to what extent those who do not have the same history as we do can be or become similar to us.

Let us carry this comparison a little further. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, those noblemen who complained so often about the adversities of the time never tried to find out whether the dying out of so many illustrious families was not, in part, the result of patterns of behaviour peculiar to the nobility such as economic or demographic behaviour which, along with the ideals of nobility, they had inherited from their ancestors. Have we not similarly inherited from the past those difficulties which confront us in our daily lives?

It is widely believed today among Western peoples that we have specific difficulties relating to sex, and that they are attributable to our fundamentally Christian moral traditions. But will we overcome our difficulties by ruthlessly renouncing our forefathers' morality and by attempting to adopt that of the Nambikwara or other peoples reputed to be close to nature? In reality, we are not free to deny our heritage: it is an integral part of us. The more we try to ignore it, the more we are its prisoners.

Furthermore, it surprises me that in a century when psychoanalysis excites so much enthusiasm, there is so little consciousness of the power which the past exercises. There is something illogical in scrutinising so attentively the past experiences of individuals undergoing psychoanalysis, and yet paying so little attention to their collective past, or at least to that of it which survives in our culture.

No man behaves naturally, in the sense that all human behaviour has been moulded by a culture. All cultures have evolved progressively and have been profoundly marked by past organisations and traumas. From birth, we have been surreptitiously pervaded by the past, through literature, morality, law, language, sciences even, technology and the arts, all that which makes up our culture. May I be forgiven for going into such detail about that which is self-evident. But when I hear sociologists, psychologists, psychoanalysts, sexologists, journalists...and many historians speaking of sexuality, I get the impression that they forget these obvious facts. By not paying the past the attention it deserves, they prevent us from liberating ourselves from it.

I do not accept just any analysis of the past. Too often, it seems to me, history functions like a faulty memory, which only retains that which hurts us ancient hatreds, distrust of previous generations, misplaced loyalties and increases the tendency to see the present as a simple repetition of the past. On the other hand, when the past permeates through ways other than history through language, literature, morality, law, etc. as is the case with sexuality, among other things, then history could have a therapeutic function. By acknowledging what we have repressed of past events, by showing the relationships which existed between a given ancient attitude towards sexuality and other aspects of Western culture, whether or not still in existence today, history should allow us to reassess our value system, and thus to overcome present difficulties.