Faramerz Dabhoiwala on the origins of sex

15 Feb 2012

This talk took place at the Royal Institution of British Architects on 15th February 2012. Full audio is now available on our YouTube channel.

Event info:

Rising star historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala describes how the permissive society arrived in Western Europe, not in the 1960s as we like to think, but between 1600 and 1800. It began in England and is now shaping and challenging patterns of sexual behaviour all over the world.

For most of western history, all sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state, and ordinary people all devoted huge efforts to suppressing and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian civilization, one that had steadily grown in importance since the early middle ages. Three hundred years ago this entire world view was shattered by revolutionary new ideas – that sex is a private matter; that morality cannot be imposed by force; that men are more lustful than women. Henceforth, the private lives of both sexes were to be endlessly broadcast and debated, in a rapidly expanding universe of public media: newspapers, pamphlets, journals, novels, poems, and prints.

In his account of this first sexual revolution, Dabhoiwala argues that the creation of our modern culture of sex was a central part of the Enlightenment, intertwined with the era's major social, political and intellectual trends. It helped create a new model of Western civilization, whose principles of privacy, equality, and freedom of the individual remain distinctive to this day.

Speaker

Faramerz Dabhoiwala

Senior Fellow in History at Exeter College, Oxford University, and author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution