Vern L. Bullough - Sin, Sickness and Sanity: A History of Sexual Attitudes

Volume 1

VERN L. BULLOUGH AND
BONNIE BULLOUGH

First published in 1977 by Garland STPM Press and New American Library

This edition first published in 2019

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1977 Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-03102-2 (Set)

ISBN: 978-0-429-05663-5 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-17421-7 (Volume 1) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-05665-9 (Volume 1) (ebk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer

The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

By
Vern L. Bullough
and
Bonnie Bullough

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bullough, Vern L.

Sin, sickncss & sanity.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Sex customsHistory. 2. Homosexuality.

3. Sexual deviation. I. Bullough, Bonnie, joint author.

II. Title

HQ12.B843 301.4179 7710206

ISBN 0-8240-7006-2

Copyright 1977 by Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 7710206

ISBN 0-8240-7006-2

First Printing, October, 1977

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

to our colleagues in sex research and particularly to those associated with the Center for Sex Research

We would like to acknowledge the help given to us by many colleagues, but particularly by James and Veronica Elias, Jane Prather, Linda Fidell, Alex Runciman, Robert Reitman, Richard Smith, Donna Hardy, Robert lies, Doris Elias, Martha Voght, Wardell Pomeroy, and John Money. Special thanks are due to Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational Foundation for their support. The manuscript was originally typed by Joy Thornbury, and the final copy was completed by Nancy Meadows and Maxine Chadwick with assistance from Claire Bleiman and Thelma Rosenfeld. Book publication is a collaborative process and without the special understanding and assistance of Liz Darhansoff, our agent, and John Thornton of New American Library the book would never have been published. Mary Pachnos of New American Library saw the manuscript through the publication process and we would like to give a note of thanks to her.

Los Angeles 1977

Sex research has been, and in many ways still is, a taboo area. Only in recent decades has it become the subject of serious scientific investigation. Yet few areas of human behavior remain so afflicted with misinformation and erroneous assumption. A major reason for this is that despite public inhibitions about sex research, sex itself is a subject about which almost every person considers himself or herself knowledgeable. Inevitably each generation, often shamefacedly and surreptitiously, tends to pass on its own erroneous ideas to the next, where adolescents fortify their own ignorance with the ignorance of their peers.

The historian who begins to investigate this cycle finds that many of the erroneous assumptions about sex can be traced back to the beginnings of written language and were made by people and cultures who had a different world view than our own and who obviously lacked our knowledge of anatomy and physiology. When serious researchers first began to investigate sexual behavior, they tended to accept the underlying erroneous assumptions without bothering to question them, proving that scientists themselves are very much people of their own time and culture. Usually researchers tend to concentrate their energies in a rather narrow field, accepting as true most of the assumptions outside their own narrow specialty. This was especially the case with sex research, where the new breakthroughs which began to occur in the last part of the nineteenth century coincided with the high tide of sexual prudishness that we call Victorianism.

A good illustration of this is the case of Denslow Lewis, a Chicago physician, who attempted to discuss the hygiene of the sexual act at the 1899 meeting of the American Medical Association. The famous Johns Hopkins University gynecologist Howard Kelly objected on the grounds that the discussion of the subject is attended with filth and we besmirch ourselves by discussing it in public. Inevitably the AMA refused to authorize publication of Dr. Lewiss paper.

In the United States this period of sexual behavior is associated with the figure of Anthony Comstock (18441915) who, though today often painted as a ludicrous figure, was extremely powerful in his own lifetime. As the United States began to change from a rural country to an urban one in the post Civil War period, and as young people flocked to the cities, the older generation of Americans became shocked at what they considered to be the evils of city life. Restraints imposed upon individuals who lived in the villages and small towns seemingly went by the wayside when these people moved to the city, and in the popular mind major causal factors were the indecent literature, the lewd art works, and the immoral possibilities to which the cities subjected the young. Comstock became a leader in the effort to make America pure, to give it back its pristine innocence, and as part of this campaign, which initially had wide public support, he was appointed a special agent by the United States Post Office with power to censor mailed materials. Comstock took his task seriously, collecting all kinds of pornographic material to become better acquainted with them. He prosecuted physicians who wrote on birth control, which he regarded as an obscene subject. In his quest to achieve sexual purity he even went so far as to wonder why decent men and women bought and read newspapers which carried stories about a divorce or contested will case reeking with filthy details. In his mind it was bad enough to have these vile details unfolded in the court, but he questioned whether they had to be admitted into the home.