Free Love: Gratis or Libre?

What are we running away from, and what are we running towards in our efforts to change social ideas of sexuality? Or, perhaps in more Foucauldian terms, who are we running circles around? This week’s readings bring new light to the realm of sexuality in Victorian America. The era we commonly define by the repression and prudery that we associate with Queen Victoria in actuality saw ideas of sexuality vastly different than those of prudishness our culture consistently associates with that era. Advertisements in newspapers promising menstrual regularity were commonly known to be advertising concoctions for abortions. Women’s close female friendships (which may or may not have been sexual) could be foundational to their lives, often in spite of their marriages. Yet the veil of language through which these matters were discussed has allowed for a great deal of historical reconstruction. Julia Deane Freeman’s praise of deep and intimate female friendships, for example, could be interpreted in countless ways. She remains silent about whether or not these woman-friendships were sexual or not. Calling the womanly point of view “weak” and declaring the relationship between women as lower than that between men and women, she could be construed as arguing for simple friendship that Victorian women were often denied. Or she could be interpreted as arguing for the acceptance of sexual relationships between women as normal and beneficial to all parties involved.

It is a testament to Foucault’s ideas of the broad influence of the myth of the Victorian Era as an era of sexual repression that this week’s readings may come as a surprise to many of us, me included.

Although these documents very likely account ideas of sexual relationships between women and abortions as being routine in daily life, most of the documents are vague enough to seem, to someone unaware of the culturally specific references, like they might not be referring to anything explicitly sexual at all. It is not hard to frame these documents through prudery due to the reserve of the language, although that in and of itself does not at all necessitate the reserve of the people involved. We can see the dramatic differences in the arguments of the free-love advocates and Comstock’s censorship. It is interesting to note that Heywood and Woodhull’s arguments concretely describe the effects of the ideas they are proposing on individual people’s lives, while Comstock describes vague developmental and societal ills. Woodhull documents the contractual sexual slavery that so many women are ensnared in, while Comstock uses a web of abstract metaphors to describe obscenity: “like a cancer, it fastens itself upon the imagination.”

Heywood and Woodhull’s arguments give power to the individuals, whereas Comstock’s arguments give power to those select few culture makers, while casting a wide net of blame and exerting power over much of society who would choose to speak openly (using veiled terminology or not) about sexuality. By reframing this discourse as obscenity, it serves to sow guilt in those who may have previously felt little if any about discussing such matters. We can see the current trajectories of some of these arguments, for example in abstinence-only education. The cultural transformation of the term “free love” traces a notable arc of power relations. Free love began as a humanistic argument for freeing women from the bonds of sexual domination reinforced by the institution of marriage that accepts, and even promotes sexual abuse and adversarial relationships. It was an argument that promoted free choice of both parties when entering into or refusing an emotional or sexual relationship. Heywood even seems to hold as an ultimate goal fidelity between freely chosen partners. Far from the image of anarchic drug-induced orgies this phrase often calls to mind, the original goal was far more conservative. The argument was simply a call to remove despotic control from love (and sexual) relationships. Today, the phrase has been reappropriated as an argument against the removal of influence of law from relationships, citing the most extreme circumstances as inevitable consequences of this. “Free love” is now commonly associated with the encouragement to give your body away “for free” and exercising little discrimination in rejecting advances when they are unwanted. Rather than opposing discrimination, the original argument meant we see this week to do the complete opposite.

Tags: Free Love, Marriage, sex, Victorian Era

This entry was posted on Monday, March 4th, 2013 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Eli Bierman, March 5. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.