3Q with Rebecca Davis, author of Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America

Rebecca L. Davis is a professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Delaware. Her most recent book is Fiery Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (Norton, 2024). She is also the author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics And More Perfect Relationships: America’s Quest for Marital HappinessShe writes the Carnal knowledge newsletter and is co-host of This is probably a very strange questiona podcast about LGBTQ health and history. Here I ask her about her new book, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America, published by Norton. You can follow her on Twitter @historydavis here and on Instagram @rebeccadavisinsta

How have debates about the meaning and importance of sexuality influenced life in the US over time?

There is a common, but incorrect, notion that it was the “Puritans” of the 17th century who most strictly policed ​​sexual behavior as part of their quest for a godly society. What the evidence shows instead is that it was typically only when sexual behavior threatened to disrupt community cohesion—or drain local coffers—that early American officials charged people with sex crimes. What mattered most to them was the cohesion of the household, a unit consisting of a male husband/father and his dependent wife and children, as well as any servants or enslaved people. For this reason, we see a high number of prosecutions for fornication (sex with an unmarried woman) and bastardy (a child born out of wedlock) and very, very few charges of sodomy. A child born to an unmarried mother disrupted the patriarchal order: whose household would they belong to? Who would pay for the child’s education?

The growth of the federal government after the Civil War and the expansion of local police powers in the late 1800s were major turning points. Now, local, state, and federal authorities increasingly recognized sexual behavior as an arena for government power. A key example of this shift is the Comstock Act of 1873, which prohibited the use of the U.S. mail for anything deemed “obscene” or related to contraception or abortion. So too was the Dawes Severalty Act of 1888, which broke up Native American tribal lands and forced the formation of male-led nuclear households. At the local level, police departments across the United States increasingly prosecuted “vagrancy” and “public disturbances,” laws that targeted a growing number of sex workers, transgender people, men who have sex with men, and other sex/gender nonconforming individuals. During World War II, Selective Service boards screened inductees for signs of homosexuality, and the military instituted a new policy banning gay men and lesbians. This policy would have been unthinkable at any previous time in American history. The sexual equality and liberation movements of the United States after World War II sought to reverse these and other punitive sexual regulations.

Today we are witnessing a revival of the regulatory impulse. But now it is confronting entire movements organized around the idea that freedom of sexual self-expression is intrinsic to the identity of each individual and that punishing that expression is a violation of an American’s civil rights.

How have we as a society gone from viewing sexual behavior as personal traits to viewing sexuality as a fundamental aspect of who someone is?

This shift is one of the main themes of my book. On the one hand, Americans had long believed that some people had certain “inclinations” or “inner urges.” The idea was that you should be able to control these urges so that your outward behavior reflected a morally correct character. But the expansion of government into the regulation of sexuality, as I described it above, created new ways of “seeing” and thinking about a person’s erotic interests. At the same time, the growing world of urban nightlife allowed people to create and enjoy their sexuality, whether as creators or consumers of erotic or queer performances. Individuals who resisted the increasing government censorship of non-heterosexual sex began to articulate a new theory of sexuality as a fundamental, intrinsic aspect of what makes a person who he is. By the mid-1920s^and century, that new concept competed with the older idea that sexual behavior reflected personal morality. Today, the two ways of viewing sexuality are in conflict.

How new are gender nonconformity, queer love and abortion?