Orgasm and the West

The Vermont legislature’s vote to uphold the law granting the right to same-sex marriage this week was another victory for gay rights in the U.S. So far though, only Vermont and three other U.S. states (Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa) have legalized same-sex unions. Canada, on the other hand, made same-sex marriage legal in the whole country in 2005. French historian Robert Muchembled notes the difference between how the two countries deal with this gay rights issue in his new book about the politics of sexual pleasure over the last 500 years. It’s called Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the Sixteenth Century to the Present.

“Canada seems more relaxed and less dominated by the laws of the market,” Muchembled writes. He argues that American culture wars, raging since the 1990s, have split the U.S. into fiercely opposed camps on issues such as gay rights and abortion. Unlike Europe and to some extent, Canada, the U.S. seeks “to preserve the dogma of the heterosexual family and the principle of the strict control of sensual pleasure.” Yet paradoxically, market-driven America has also cashed in on orgasms with legalized brothels in Nevada for example, and a booming trade in sex toys.

“The first West Coast Good Vibrations, an adult store, opened in California in 1977,” Muchembled writes. “Initially modest, around $15,000 a year, its sales reached more than eight million dollars by 2000.” He adds that by then, Americans had bought more than a million vibrators manufactured by four large sex toy companies while Europe had a dozen such firms of its own. “The globalization of pleasure is underway,” he concludes.

A central argument in Muchembled’s complex book is that for 500 years, patriarchal European societies experienced periods of sexual repression followed by ones in which strict rules were relaxed. This gave Europe a dynamism that enriched society, Muchembled writes. The repression of sexual energy, he adds, channelled it in other directions making Europe globally dominant. “[M]any people subjected, willingly or not, to the tyrannies of moral rigour developed a behavioural structure which literally drove them forward, helping to develop their personal talents to the full in many fields of activity, such as religious proselytism, war and world conquest, artistic and intellectual activities and international trade.”

Muchembled notes that Christianity had always preached against sinful bodily pleasures as the soul’s sure ticket to hell, but the slow rise of capitalism also brought sexual repression. “States became increasingly concerned to ensure the obedience of their subjects, and the towns, thriving thanks to nascent capitalism and obsessed with economic efficiency, demanded more discipline on the part of their inhabitants.” That may explain the current cultural battles in the U.S. where a strong Puritan religious tradition coupled with capitalistic fervour idealizes Mom, Dad and the kids as the perfect, churchgoing, economic unit.

Muchembled argues that the sexual revolution of the 1960s provided a sharp break from the 500 year cycle of repression and relaxation. American academic surveys (the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953) had revealed that even good girls enjoyed orgasms, that nearly everyone indulged in masturbation and that large numbers of men and women had homosexual experiences. Better and more widely available birth control methods also freed women from the fear of unwanted pregnancies bringing “the sudden irruption of the female orgasm onto the public and private stage.” Feminists started demanding equal rights for women, everywhere, including in the bedroom. Gays too, started pushing for an end to the repressive laws which tried to deny them their rights to pleasure and respect.

Europe's new era of sexual freedom, Muchembled suggests, is reflected in the larger social realm as well. "The project for a European constitution put forward in 2004," he writes, "spoke of 'cultural, religious and humanist heritages', without explicit reference to Christianity. The desire for peace, entente and the enjoyment of the things of this world has made rapid progress in an area ravaged by incessant wars for centuries, up until 1945."

Muchembled tends to see this process of liberation as unstoppable even though he warns that as an historian, he should stick to studying the past rather than predicting an uncertain future, one in which sexual pleasure could also become a tyranny with healthy individualism turning into navel-gazing narcissism.

He concludes that even though the family-values neo-cons are resisting fiercely in the U.S., Europeans have never had so much freedom of choice “to make the most of their bodies and live out their desires in a newly possible erotic equality between men and women or between partners of the same sex.” He adds that this renegotiation of communal values, one which requires sexual partners to give and take mutual satisfaction, “now means that we all have to take account of the best-kept secret since the origins of Christian civilization: the pleasure we call carnal.”

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