Sex and the gender revolution

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[Trumbach tells us that in north-western Europe, after 1700] men no longer had sex with boys and women - they now had sex either with females or with males. They were now supposed to be either exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. The majority of men now desired only women. This necessarily brought them into more intimate relations with women, and their intimacy could threaten the continuing male desire to establish domination. This dilemma was in part resolved by assigning those men who desired males to a third gender role that was held in great contempt. This role played its necessary part in the new relations between men and women produced by the emergence of individualism and equality in eighteenth-century society since it guaranteed that, however far equality between men and women might go, men would never become like women since they would never desire men. Only women and sodomites desired men, and this was true for males from adolescence to old age. [...]

The first generation of the century saw the emergence of a sodomitical minority and a heterosexual majority among men of all social classes. In the second generation landed society and the middle classes experienced the effects of romantic love and the domesticated family. It is reasonable to presume that the changes in these two different generations were related. It is likely that a heterosexual male majority used their new sexual identity to guarantee that the closer association with women brought on by romance and domesticity did not undermine male domination. This can be seen simply as a strategy for reconstructing patriarchy. But it is also true that women usually are more highly regarded in societies where sexual relations between males are organized through an effeminate male minority rather than by differences in age. It is, however, of some interest that while the change in the first generation affected all social classes, the domesticity of midcentury was limited to the prosperous and did not become part of the lives of the poor for another two or three generations. Similarly the sapphist role that emerged in the third generation can at present be documented only among the middle classes and gentlewomen, and it certainly did not have the effect on the lives of women of any class that the sodomite's role had on men of every class. These are the uncertainties that remain in constructing the history of sexual behavior and its relation to gender in the first century of the modern Western world's existence. I hope that others will take them up, and I mean to pursue them myself in a succeeding volume on the history of sodomites and sapphists and the origins of Western homosexuality.

source: From the book 'Sex and the Gender Revolution' by Randolph Trumbach; www.boychat.org/messages/1518643.htm; University of Chicago Press; 1998