Sex life in England / Iwan Bloch.

  • Iwan Bloch
Date:
1934
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sex life in England / Iwan Bloch. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    SEX LIFE IN ENGLAND I I I I I I! I I I I ! I I I 1 I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I stimulants of Italian libertinism and then popularizing them. Those who are ever ready to assume congenital perversities quite underestimate the tremendous influence exerted in the sexual affairs of human beings by example. When we hear that Catherine of Medici brought with her to France many Italian artists who flooded the country with obscene pic- tures and sculptures representing the most unnatural crimes in the most seductive fashion and that this dissolute princess was surrounded by a court that glorified homoerotic love almost exclusively, then we will be able to understand how it was that tribady and pederasty became the fashion and found its way even among heterosexuals. This does not exclude the possibility that in certain cases a morbid diathesis can out- right assume the form of a sexual perversity. Unfortunately the more recent medical writings concerning sexual psychopathies have aroused the belief not only among laymen but even among physicians that in those cases we are nearly always dealing with a disease, and only seldom with an anthropological or social phenomenon accompanying normal psychological development. It is my belief that the opposite is more nearly true. The depraving influence of distinguished society can be traced with greater certainty in those periods where it stands over the people as a small and alien entity. Today, when high society is constituted from the wider circles and serves as the upper stratum of the whole population rather than as a distinct class existing in opposition to the entire group, this influence cannot be exactly measured. But it is still present. There are still fashionable modes and amusements which have taken their rise from the circles of the upper ten thousand and were then accepted by the profanum vulgus with great joy. There can be no doubt of the in- fluence of society even today upon the form and direction of sexual life. England had the chief part in the creation of modern society. At the same time, in the seventeenth century, this modern sophisticated society developed in France too, but the influence of the latter was ephemeral. The concept of high life included not only the aristocracy of birth but also those of money and mentality, and in general, every man standing out from the mass by virtue of his excellency and merit. No-
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