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Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality In History

Article  in  Radical History Review · February 1979

DOI: 10.1215/01636545-1979-20-3 · Source: PubMed

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Robert Padgug
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 EDITORS'
INTRODUCTION

Sexual Matters:
On Conceptualizing Sexuality
In History

Robert A. Padgug

Sexuality-the subject matter seems so obvious that it hardly ap­

pears to need comment. An immense and ever-increasing number of
"discourses" has been devoted to its exploration and control during the
last few centuries, and their very production has, as Foucault points
out, 1 been a major characteristic of bourgeois society.Yet, ironically,
as soon as we attempt to apply the concept to history, apparently in­
surmountable problems confront us.
To take a relatively simple example, relevant to one aspect of sex­
uality only, what are we to make of the ancient Greek historian
Alexis' curious description of Polykrates, sixth-century B.C.ruler of
Samos7 2 In the course of his account of the luxurious habits of
Polykrates, Alexis stresses his numerous imports of foreign goods,
and adds: "Because of ali this there is good reason to marvel at the fact
that the tyrant is not mentioned as having sent for women or boys
from anywhere, despite his passion for liaisons with males ...."
Now, that Polykrates did not "send for women" would seem to us to
be a direct corollary of ''his passion for liaisons with males." But to
Alexis-and we know that his attitude was shared by all of Greek an­
tiquity 3-sexual passion in any form implied sexual passion in ali
forms. Sexual <;ategories which seem so obvious to us, those which
divide humanity into ''heterosexuals" and "homosexuals," seem

RAnr<'AI. HrsTORY REVIEW 20 SPRJNG/SuMMER 1979 PAGES 3-23

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 SEXUAL MATTERS 9

deeply involved with physical reproduction and with intercourse and

its pleasures. Biological sexuality is the necessary precondition for
human sexuality. But biological sexuality is only a precondition, a set
of potentialities, which is never unme�iated by human reality, and
which becomes transformed in quaÜtatively new ways in human
society. The rich and ever-varying nature of such concepts and institu­
tions as marriage, kinship, '1ove," "eroticism" in a variety of physical
senses and as a component of fantasy and religious, social, and even
economic reality, and the general human ability to extend the range of
sexuality far beyond the physical body, all bear witness to this
transformation.
Even this bare catalogue of examples demonstrates that sexuality
is dosely involved in social reality. Marshall Sahlins makes the point
dearly, when he argues that sexual reproduction and intercourse must
not be

considered a priori as a biological fact, characterized as an urge of

human nature independent of the relations between social persons
... [and] acting upan society from without (or below). {Uniquely
among human beings] the process of "conception" is always a
double entendre, since no satisfaction can occur without the act and
the partners as socially defined and contemplated, that is, according
to a symbolic code of persons, practices and proprieties.1'

Such an approach does not seek to eliminate biology from human

life, but to absorb it into a unity with social reality. Biology as a set of
potentialities and insuperable necessities 12 provides the material of
social interpretations and extensions; it does not cause human
behavior, but conditions and limits it. Biology is not a narrow set of
absolute imperatives. That it is malleable and broad is as obvious for
animals, whose nature is altered with changing environment, as for
human beings. 13 The uniqueness of human beings lies in their ability
to create the environment which alters their own-and indeed other
animals' -biological nature.
Human biology and culture are both necessary for the creation of
human society. lt is as important to avoid a rigid separation of
"Nature" and "Culture" as it is to avoid reducing one to the other, or
simply uniting them as an undifferentiated reality. Human beings are
doubly determined by a permanent (but not immutable) natural base
and by a permanent social mediation and transformation of it. An at­
tempt to eliminate the biological aspect is misleading because it denies
that social behavior takes place within nature and by extension of
natural processes. Marx's insistence that "men make their own history

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but they do not make it just as they please" applies as well to

biological as to inherited social realities. 14 An attempt-as in such
disparate movements as Reichian analysis or the currently fashionable
"sociobiology"-to absorb culture into biology is equally misleading,
because, as Sahlins puts it,

Biology, while it is an absolutely necessary condition for culture, is

equally and absolutely insufficient; it is completely unable to
specify the cultural properties of human behavior or their variations
from one human group to another. 15

lt is clear that, within certain limits, human beings have no fixed,

inherited nature. We beco me human only in human society. Luden
Malson may overstate his case when he writes, 'The idea that man has
no nature is now beyond dispute. He has or rather is a history," 16 but
he is correct to focus on history and change in the creation of human
culture and personality. Social reality cannot simply be "peeled off" to
reveal "natural man" lurking beneath.1'
This is true of sexuality in ali its forms, from what seem to be the
most purely "natural" acts of intercourse 11 or gender differentiation
and hierarchy to the most elaborated forms of fantasy or kinship rela­
tions. Contrary to a common belief that sexuality is simply "natural"
behavior, "nothing is more essentially transmitted by a social process
of learning than sexual behavior," as Mary Douglas notes.19
Even an act which is apparently so purely physical, individual,
and biological as masturbation illustrates this point. Doubtless we
stroke our genitals because the act is pleasurable and the pleasure is
physiologically rooted, but from that to masturbation, with its large
element of fantasy, is a social leap, mediated by a vast set of defini­
tions, meanings, connotations, learned behavior, shared and learned
fantasies.
Sexual reality is variable, and it is so in several senses. lt changes
within individuals, within genders, and within societies, just as it dif­
fers from gender to gender, from class to class, and from society to
society. Even the very meaning and content of sexual arousal varies
according to these categories. 20 Above ali, there is continuous
development and transformation of its realities. What Marx suggests
for hunger is equally true of the social forms of sexuality: "Hunger is
hunger, but the hunger gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife
and fork is a different hunger from that which bolts clown raw meat
with the aid of hand, nail and tooth." 21
There do exist certain sexual forms which, at least at a high level

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