Rereading Sex

Author Essay

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz on REREADING SEX

Rereading Sex puts the 1873 Comstock Law in the context of the nineteenth century’s quarrel about sex. At one level it tells a national story about sexual knowledge, based on materials about sex published between 1820 and 1880. In a complex conversation about the body, reproduction, and desire, four voices emerged: American vernacular sexual culture; evangelical Christianity; moral physiology reimaging the body, nerves, health, and the relation of mind and body; and a new sensibility placing sex at the center of life. Rereading the texts that animated this conversation demands reimagining sexuality in nineteenth-century America.

At another level, Rereading Sex tells a New York story. As the leading cultural center of the nation, it was the location of those who produced and distributed both erotica and works about reproduction and sexuality. New York was also a center of reform agitation about sexual questions. It had the courts that established the central traditions of legal practice dealing with obscene libel. Perhaps most tellingly, it had the critical social forces to battle what was perceived as obscenity. The Young Men’s Christian Association of New York came into being in the 1850s to offer young male clerks moral alternatives to the culture of sporting life. Confronting printed erotica, it turned to suppression. These efforts were successful after the Civil War in getting federal and state legislation to curb not only commercial erotica, but books on sexuality and sexual reform. Anthony Comstock became empowered to enforce the law as a federal agent of the U.S. Post Office.

In 1879 the constitutionality the law was affirmed, but a community of dissenters emerged, committed to keeping free speech alive in an era of suppression. What began as a New York struggle became a national battle over sexual knowledge and suppression that still resonates in our own time. American culture remains profoundly divided over questions of morality and its relation to government. At the dawn of the twenty-first century each day’s news presents reports of contemporary clashes over medical research, abortion, pornography, teenage sex education, and censorship of the Internet. New technology and new sources of sexual knowledge bring new threats to freedom of expression. As we read sex in our own times, echoes of America’s nineteeth century battles over sexual knowledge and suppression, one of our first culture wars, still reverberate in our ears.

–Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz