Our Sexual Hierarchy

“Keep away from whores and all loose women.  KEEP AWAY FROM WHORES!” said a pamphlet given out to soldiers during World War I.  This pamphlet was ancillary to a pro-kit that was also distributed in order to prevent further outbreaks of venereal diseases.  It contained a tube of ointment, a cloth with soap, a cleansing tissue and directions on how to apply it to the body immediately following intercourse.  This was all part of the “Keeping Fit to Fight” Campaign.  In most of the posters for this campaign VD is portrayed as an attractive and seductive woman, a “loose” woman.  One poster reads, “You may think she’s just your ‘gal’, but she may be everyone’s pal”, while the others promoted the preservation of the family.

This reminded me of Jeffrey Weeks’ “The Social Construction of Sexuality”, particularly the part regarding “the laws of sex” (3).  Weeks discusses our culture’s “deeply embedded assumption” of a hierarchy of sexual correctness and says that it is this philosophy that warrants “uncontrollable male lust… and the downgrading of female sexual autonomy ” (3).  Further, Weeks hypothesizes that our “sexuality” is a historical fabrication comprised of “gender identity, bodily differences, reproductive capacities, needs, desires and fantasies” (4).

It is an interesting theory to apply to the soldiers of WWI, who were bombarded with media that identified VD with the image of a woman.  Referring back to the posters that beg to protect the family, the importance of the nuclear family at the time also plays into the stigma of the “loose woman”.  Further, this is confirmed by the government’s Chamberlain-Kahn Act of 1918, which allowed the arrest of not just prostitutes, but any woman considered to have “loose morals”–a rather subjective definition of a law, but a law that followed established social laws of sex no less.   The social atmosphere in the first half of the 20th century was not one that promoted women’s rights, so any woman that went outside of these social norms, or “laws of sexuality”, would be seen as abnormal.  This idea of sexual “perversions” refers back to Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, regarding 19th century society’s categorization of sexual deviants like the homosexual (Foucault, 43).  This culture that carries a hierarchy consisting of “gender identity and bodily differences”, completely disregards the fact that men could just as easily be carriers of VD without even showing symptoms.

Though laws such as the Chamberlain-Kahn Act were certainly a realization of Weeks’ ideas of social regulation, informal methods of control also had deep impacts on our sexual culture.  “A language of sexual abuse”–i.e. “loose women”, “whores”, “sluts”–“works to keep girls in line, and to enforce conventional distinctions between girls who do and girls who don’t” (8).  This type of socially accepted language did its job of keeping women, “nice girls”, out of “trouble”.  Of course good behavior, or rather acceptable behavior, had it’s own standards in society and this name-calling produced “bizarre manifestations of sexual behavior”: plenty of foreplay, but not going all the way like the “bad” girls (8).  Our society’s “will-not-to-know” seems, as Weeks and Foucault both proclaim, not a repression, but evidently a part of a greater hierarchy of sex, keeping those catalogued as deviants at the bottom.

Tags: Chamberlain-Kahn Act, family, Jeffrey Weeks, Keeping Fit To Fight, language, museum of sex, perversions, sexual hierarchy, sexual regulation, venereal disease

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Foucault: History of Sexuality, Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality, Mila Matveeva. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.