American Manhood by Rotundo

While middle-class ideas and experience took different forms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, recent research has shown that there was far more to the history of Victorian sexuality than a reign of re-pression. The repressive reputation of the nineteenth century grew out of ide-ology more than behavior. Middle-class moralists preached the doctrine of sexual restraint from the pulpit, in the medical press, and on the lec-ture circuit. They started from the assumption that nature had endowed men with tremendous sexual passion while leaving women with little or perhaps with none at al1.27 Working from there, the preachers of purity urged manly self-control. They called not only for premarital chastity but for complete mastery of sexual feeling. One important step in this process was the suppression of masturba-tion. The missionaries for self-control insisted that this "solitary vice" would lead to the breakdown of intellect and the destruction of will, and thus to effeminacy, to insanity, and even to premature death.28 Even if he never touched a woman, a man's sexual desires could ruin him: he had to cut them off at the source to save his own body and soul. Clever men, concerned with the welfare of youth, invented tools to help young males tame their impulses. One such device, when worn by a man, would cause a bell to ring every time he got an erection.29 Even with such technical help, the individual male bore the burden of responsibility for suppressing his sexual desires. Sylvester Graham, one of the leading missionaries for self-control, declared that "LASCIVI-OUS DAY-DREAMS" amounted to "unchastity of thought." He warned that "this adultery of the mind, is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family." Such fantasies, by their very nature, were subject only to self-control. Graham and others like him set an immense task for men: to master their behavior by subduing their feelings and even by suppressing their daydreams. One historian has rightly called the ideal of the nineteenth-century sex advisers an "athlete of continence" who was constantly "testing his manliness in the fire of self-denial.'N This stringent code developed in the early nineteenth century, when the expansion of commerce lured young men away from the traditional values and communal vigilance of small towns. The ideology of sexual repression offered an alternative to the unchecked selfishness of the marketplace; it provided a sense of personal control and a form of moral discipline at a time when ethical chaos seemed imminent.3' This doc-trine of self-control hardened into a public orthodoxy once the migration
Love, Sex, and Courtship 121 from country to city became a steady, permanent flow. The twentieth-century view of nineteenth-century sexuality is based largely on that re-pressive Victorian orthodoxy. But historians have begun to uncover a different set of male sexual values. In fact, the very existence of the ideology of self-control—and the vehemence with which it was asserted—might have suggested long ago to historians that an opposite doctrine existed. The quiet, powerful opposition to the orthodoxy of self-denial came from an ethic of male aggression. Although this doctrine was rarely articulated on paper, it made its power felt in many ways. We can guess that such an ethos of sexual aggression existed at the start of the nineteenth century simply by look-ing at the premarital pregnancy rate. Between 1761 and 1800, roughly one American bride in three went to the altar pregnant. The rate for the next forty years dropped to one in four. Even with the rate in decline, it is clear that many young men were ready to engage in coitus before marriage. Presumably, some of those young men were from the Northern middle class. Another kind of evidence for the doctrine of sexual aggression comes from the testimony of those who opposed it. Many evangelicals com-plained of the widespread pressure on young men to experiment with sex before marriage, and a late-century American physician railed against fathers who tickled the penises of their baby sons into a state of erection to assure themselves that their sons were "robust." Purity advocates pointed out time and again that the ethos of sexual aggression had its roots in two widespread assumptions—that nature had endowed the male with an immense sexual appetite, and that it was necessary for him to satisfy that appetite. A physician who joined the purity movement of the late 1800s denounced "those among the males of our generation, who attribute to men an inherent natural need to gratify passions, claiming that the weaker sex understands it to be necessary to man's nature, and willingly tolerate lustful ante-nuptial and post-nuptial practices." Observations of a general tolerance and encouragement of male sexual aggression came from individuals in their private writing as well as from public advocates in books and speeches. MA.ud Rittenhouse, an Illi-nois woman, lamented in her diary that "boys are taught all their lives that purity is only for women (some women) and vice a necessity to them and 'natural.'" The assumption was widely held in nineteenth-century America that males had urgent sexual passions; the next logical step was the belief that it was natural and necessary for men to express those pas-sions. An assumption like this may not be quite the same thing as a moral imperative, but its effect on behavior (by discouraging opposition to male sexual expression) was probably much the same. It provided a basis in belief that encouraged aggressive sexuality in men.34 The existence of an ethic of sexual aggression is also consistent with the experience of males during boyhood. Boys certainly learned from each other that aggressive expression of impulse was appropriate male behavior. This vital lesson could easily be applied to sexual drives. Since boys often expressed their affectionate feelings toward each other through physical aggression, the experience of boy culture helped pre-pare a growing male to accept a code of sexual conduct that stressed the aggressive expression of impulse. There were no tracts that taught this ethic of assertive sexuality, and no preachers who urged its virtues, but its strength is clear by evidence and by inference. Middle-class men, in sum, were confronted by two ethics of sexual conduct, one urging the "natural" expression of aggressive impulses and the other demanding stringent self-control. Charles Rosenberg, who was the first historian to identify these conflicting codes, has observed that "few males were completely immune from the reality of both." 35 How did these two codes develop within the life of a young male? To what ex-tent did they conflict during boyhood? The evidence about the sex education of middle-class boys is thin, but there are enough fragments of data to permit a few informed guesses. A boy's exposure to contradictory sexual attitudes probably began at an early age. The rise of moral motherhood in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries must have focused women's attention on the nascent sexuality of their children.36 The masturbation phobia that gripped the middle class during the 1800s would have provided special encouragement for mothers to stop children from stimulating their own sexual pleasure. On the other hand, we have already seen that purity advocates complained of fathers who tickled their infant sons' penises into a state of erection to assure themselves of the next generation's virility. By the time a boy reached the age of six or seven, he was also subject to a constant and increasing influence from boy culture, which persistently stressed the expression of aggressive physical impulses. If this cursory sketch of boyhood sexual influences is correct, the forces of suppression and expression were already dividing up along gen-der lines during boyhood. As was so often the case in middle-class culture, "female" meant restriction and "male" meant release. Long before adult sexual feeling had surfaced, conflicting pressures—with strong overtones of gender—were building up around sexuality. Then puberty arrived and brought these emotions to the surface. A male youth encountered an intense barrage of sexual advice from ministers, purity crusaders, and an abundant advice literature. This barrage added public anxiety to the forces that already bore upon a young man's burgeoning sexuality. By the time such a young man approached his first romantic relationship, he had been assailed by pressures and counterpressures of great strength. Given the welter of feelings and the tangle of advice attached to sexu-ality, how did young men actually govern their sexual behavior? What happened when they were confronted by a real relationship with an ac-tual woman? Some simply ignored one line of sexual counsel and fol-lowed the other. This pattern was sufficiently common that "neat cate-gories of 'clean men' and libertines" seemed reasonable to thoughtful people. One man wrote about the kind of "boy who was not afraid to tri-fle with the most forward of girls," and who was thereby "esteemed above his years and almost [as] a man." These were the "libertines," the young men who ignored counsels of purity and responded to the social encouragement of aggressive male sexuality. The "clean men" defined themselves in contrast to the sexually active ones. These "athletes of continence" took pride in being "those who practiced [sex] not at all." They constructed barriers of self-denial which Daniel Webster referred to as "the restraints which youth, with infinite pains, imposes on its pas-sions." Young men who embodied the pure types of self-denial or sexual ag-gression were distinctly visible to their peers, but it may have been the exceptional nature of their behavior that made them stand out. Very lit-tle evidence survives to help us make judgments about the frequency of sexual activity among middle-class youth, or about what percentages of this group held various attitudes about sex. The limited testimony avail-able does suggest that the young man who heeded only one extreme of sexual counsel was exceptional. Most seemed to search for a way to obey one sexual ethic without violating the other. As they struggled with this conflict, young men developed different patterns of thought and behavior to help them abide by both codes at once. These strategies—for, unconsciously, they were strategies—were distinct but not mutually exclusive. Young men might use any or all of them, depending on their needs and inclinations. One of the ways in which male youth reconciled the conflicting codes of sexual behavior was by thinking of love in a way that drained its erotic content.