Day 85 : Book Excerpt : Sexuality in Europe

For a long time, prostitution had been the “open secret” supplement to marriage. It had been quietly tolerated as a necessary evil or even a basic good. It was considered the normal way of things – both the accepted site for young men’s initiation into sex and a recurrent side opportunity for men also after they were married. But around 1900, prostitution emerged as a focus for loud and vitriolic controversy. This was due in no small part to the perceived (in some cases quite real but often hysterically exaggerated) spread of venereal disease, especially syphilis, but also gonorrhea and soft chancre. And it was above all this fear of disease that initially prompted medical doctors to urge governments to be more active in sex education (or rather, anti-sex education) addressed both to adolescents in schools and to soldiers in the various nations’ militaries.

Public health experts expressed special concern about the need to combat venereal disease in European nations’ overseas possessions: in northern and western Africa (in the cases of Italy and France), the East Indies (in the case of the Netherlands), Africa as well as India, Hong Kong, or Singapore (in the case of Great Britain), and yet other parts of Africa (in the cases of Portugal, Belgium, and Germany). Very frequently, colonized men of color were represented as unable to control their sexual impulses and thus more of a danger to efforts to stem the spread of infections. Notably, the elaboration of these distinctions really served to deny the prevalence of promiscuity among white European men. It was a transparent attempt to use racism to flatter those white men into restraining themselves and desisting from extramarital sex.

Also the growth of urban centers within Europe, with their increasingly large working-class populations, pushed the issues of working-class women’s participation in prostitution as an additional (or, more rarely, sole) source of income and working-class men’s own resort to prostitutes (middle-class men were not the only customers) into public awareness. Much discussion focused on the visible public “nuisance” of streetwalking and/or on the scandal of trafficking (in which innocent rural girls were imagined as lured to the big city and/or across national boundaries with promises of work but then were confined against their will in brothels).

Yet although stories about trafficking garnered avid attention in the sensationalist press, they were usually at best only partially true. They served as a kind of journalistic pornography under the fig-leaf of moral outrage – even as they could have very real legislative consequences. (For instance in Britain in 1885, based on an early set of these stories, legislation was passed in which the age of consent for girls was raised, brothelkeepers were more readily prosecuted, and – through a complex conjunction of circumstances – an amendment was tacked on which criminalized male homosexual acts for more than eight decades.)

Particularly in Poland and Austria-Hungary in the first decade of the twentieth century, stories about trafficking (a profession frequently ascribed to Jews) served more as occasions for lurid anti-Semitic invective. The reality of extensive acceptance of prostitution among gentiles (Polish and Austro-Hungarian police and medical reports made clear how much and how unapologetically gentile men indulged), the economic calculation and initiative taken by women entering the sex trade, and the frequent connivance of their families were blatantly erased as the specter of the Jewish pimp and trafficker captured the frenzied popular imagination. In addition, in some countries – for instance again in Austria-Hungary (especially in Budapest, which was considered a hotbed of vice, as well as in Vienna), but also in Russia, Germany, and France – homosexual male prostitution, while sometimes considered a less likely source for the spread of venereal disease than female prostitution, also garnered increasing (variously alarmed or titillated) public attention.

~~Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History -by- Dagmar Herzog