Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History.

Twentieth-Century Sexuality: A History. By Angus McLaren (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1999. viii plus 296pp. $59.95).

In Twentieth Century Sexuality: A History, Angus McLaren succeeds in accomplishing in a little over two hundred pages exactly what his title promises; to provide a history of twentieth century sexuality, at least in the West. And in the process of reaching this ambitious goal, he gives us vast stimulation and food for thought.

McLaren has therefore written a very important book and one that crackles with insights while being as comprehensive as can be imagined. As such, his work is quite unique, with considerable strengths. This is all the more so because McLaren sets up certain ground rules. McLaren here writes a rare international history, insisting, rightly, that national histories "can blind us to the more important sex and gender conventions that the nations of Western Europe and North America share". (p3) McLaren practises what he preaches and his blending together of international trends is one of the most effective parts of the book. Also McLaren makes good his promise that his book will not be "historically impoverished" like many others by expanding on the key international themes in the history of sexuality since 1900. Each chapter represents a different discourse underlying his core premise that "there is no truth about sex to be discovered" (p5). The First World War established the theme of "sexual panic" that has so characterised the Twentieth century as in the 1920's fears of "hypersexual youths" drove policing of young people in Europe and America and a youth culture emerged on the back of an incipient and U.S.-led mass culture.

In the 1920's too, marriage manuals proliferated as a stream of advice poured out aiming to ensure marital success in an era of "great expectations" amidst radical calls to prevent "race suicide" by legalising birth control and abortion as a means to family stability. As this "compulsory heterosexuality" developed a counter discourse appeared that identified "mannish women" and "effeminate men", that is homosexuals, as an "other" group on the outskirts of society.

Then in two stunning chapters, McLaren turns his attention to Freud and the Nazis. Freud came to prominence in a context where sexual science was beginning to undermine the notion that reproductive heterosexuality was a natural given. With particular reference to his work on the frigid woman, McLaren discusses how Freud cast even more doubt on this by showing that the reproductive instinct was "the result of a variety of psychic combinations and developmental processes". (p123). This further divorced reproduction and procreation from sexuality. At the forefront of international sex reform was the Weimar Republic. In this context of fears of racial suicide and expanding sexual boundaries there emerged the Nazi attempt to force women back into traditional roles and to impose a strict system of eugenics-led reproduction on Germany, most notoriously manifested in the SS Lebensborn program. Hence Germany, which before 1933 led the world in sex reform, after 1933 headed a conservative reaction.

Since 1945, the leader in changes in sexual discourse has been the United States. Other nations were either in sync with or behind the Americans in this regard. McLaren rightly identifies Kinsey as in the vanguard. His matter of fact reduction of sexuality to a variety of outlets for orgasm divorced procreation from sex altogether and publicised internationally the prevalence of homosexuality. But, equally (and much more dubiously) the United States in the 1950s took over the discourse of reaction that the Nazis had pursued so effectively: hence the Cold War sex panic over heterosexuality echoed the Nazi persecution just fifteen years earlier. McLaren is able to make this observation because he understands the context in which Hitler appeared--"the Nazis invented very little" (p140). This is useful because we see the Nazis' sexual policy as a genuine product of culture and history. But McLaren, by doing this, also enters into debates about the peculiarity of Nazism which are best left for elsewhere. McLaren handles the sexual revolution of the 1960s11970s very well too. He piles on a mass of facts relentlessly as in sentence after sentence he reels off a narrative of the sensational completion of the divorce of sexuality from procreation. He is almost deadpan in his promised determination to maintain a sense of historical perspective as he goes through some of the more dated and off the wall boundary expansion of the 1970s. Yet he is surprisingly weak in gay history. Did Stonewall really spark off a burst of liberation (as opposed to reform) movements? Or did these movements not have indigenous origins? Equally, his view of 1970s gay men having "more egalitarian relationships than straights. Whereas once gay men sought 'trade' they now sought equals" is uncharacteristically wide of the mark, as is his contention that "increasingly, the goal was not casual sex but longer term relationships." (p191). The evidence from the time simply does not bear this out.

In keeping with his contention in the introduction and conclusion that sexuality is too complex and diverse for there to be "truths" about it, McLaren's final chapter critiques the standard "liberalization" trope used so often by North American historians of sexuality, and of which the most stunning result is a growing homogenization, notable for example in the willingness of 1990s gays to get married. This approach ignores the persistence of homophobia, as evidenced by the attempts to defeat President Clinton's efforts to permit gays in the armed forces. Equally, McLaren is at pains to point out that "standardization came at certain costs" (p222). In particular, he notes the lamentations of Graham Heath and the late Christopher Lasch of the "new pressure to conform to the unrestricted pursuit of sexual gratification". McLaren cites the popularity of Viagra as evidence of this. And, finally, McLaren notes that the idea of homogenization "shores up the belief... that sex now takes place in a private realm--th e bed being the one place at least where everyone was autonomous and equal" (p223). Echoing Foucault he argues that "there is little doubt that a new rhetoric of romantic love blossomed in the Twentieth century; the question is whether it was as 'liberating' as is so often assumed or chiefly served to disguise and mystify existing disparities in power relationships" (p223).

McLaren therefore demonstrates empirically Foucault's notion that Twentieth century sexual history reveals that there are no truths about sexuality. But it is a measure of McLaren's brilliance that he does not leave us there. The old assumptions about a "natural" link between sexuality and procreation are no longer tenable as "few celebrate the loss of the natural". So far so good, but "most people lament the notion that nature no longer provides a solid basis upon which the organisation of sexuality can be built" (p223). In one simple sentence he both accepts Foucault's postmodern view of sexuality; and makes it clear that such a perspective just won't do.

McLaren's remarkable book tells us why we feel so upset about this divorce of sex from procreation, yet one cannot help but note that even in Europe and the United States, the powerful counter-discourse of the Roman Catholic church still holds sway at least as an ideal; and that thus most people do still accept as a "truth" that sex and procreation are inexorably linked!! In a work that deftly avoids the most politically-charged controversies of recent sexual history, his only perceptible bias is academic incomprehension of Catholicism. Yet this leads him to a cursory dismissal of Pope Paul V1's powerful 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, the key document of sexual reaction issued just as the sexual revolution began. Perhaps ironically, and certainly unintentionally, McLaren's book can also be read as explaining why, except perhaps for academics and the Western middle class, and pace M, Foucault, truth, even absolute truth, resides for most people self evidentially in procreative heterosexuality. We ultimately n eed to understand more about why this is, but in the meantime we have no better guide to the roots of our conformism than McClaren's excellent book.