THE recent liberalization of sexual attitudes didn't spring full-blown from the "in" generation. It arose from the toil of researchers and writers for over a century. Edward Brecher, in his book The Sex Researcher, has traced changes in attitudes about sex through the growth of the sex researchers themselves. The first of these, Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), made an honest attempt to catalog and describe sexual aberrations. He mobilized his readers' terror and disgust by detailing the most horrifying cases of sadism in the history of criminal law and did much to further the rigid repression in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Psychopathia Sexualis
stressed that the simplest acts between lovers were perilously
close to perversion. An innocent kiss served as the
precursor of a monstrous act. Perversions were the inevitable
sequel to childhood masturbation. Guarding the child
against self-abuse saved him from the insane asylum or the
gallows, and protected future generations. Krafft-Ebing
described one woman who began to masturbate as a child
and continued in marriage even during her twelve pregnancies.
Due to this, five of her children "died early, four were
hydrocephalic and two of the boys began to masturbate." The
fate of the twelfth child was not recorded.
It remained for Havelock Ellis and his contemporary, Sig
mund Freud, to alter the cultural climate. Havelock Ellis
was born in 1859 and died in 1939. His childhood was overwhelmingly
Victorian. None of his four sisters ever married
and Havelock himself remained a virgin until his marriage
at thirty-two. He was exposed to all the antierotic horror stories
with which Victorians stuffed the minds of their children
at an impressionable age.
Although his books never gained
the preeminence and worldwide popularity of Krafft-Ebing's
melodramatic work, he was the first to proclaim that masturbation
is normal and perhaps a necessary part of healthy
development in both boys and girls. He presented human
sexuality in an altogether different context, as a pathway to
joy and fulfillment. Several years in advance of Sigmund
Freud he published a series of case histories which delineated
the vast range of sexual experiences and interests
among young children.
He included not only those who were
later identified as perverted or criminal, but also children
who grew up to be happy and healthy pillars of society. He
indicated that the early repression of sexuality in girls was a
major factor in female frigidity. He anticipated Kinsey and
Masters by describing male impotence and female frigidity
as psychological in the overwhelming majority of cases.
His motivation to become a physician and to collect and
publish his gargantuan eight volumes, Studies in the Psychology
of Sex, stemmed from his own sexual problems.
Instead of rationalizing or denying his partial impotence, he
developed openness, which enabled him to accept homosexuality
without prejudice, and to rework his own sexual conflicts.
At the age of sixty, Havelock Ellis finally found full
sexual potency with a young French woman who loved him.
They lived together happily until his death at the age of
eighty. He was the first to dispel the stereotypes of his time,
emerging as the true father of the "sexual revolution."
Sigmund Freud also developed within the Victorian corset.