Against Sex

Living in an era when advertising and entertainment sexualize all aspects of American life makes it difficult to imagine an earlier period when impulses toward lifelong celibacy or sexual restraint exerted a significant influence on the national consciousness. Kara M. French's Against Sex explores early national sexual identities encompassing either the complete abstinence from sexual intercourse, in the case of the Shakers and Catholic clergy, or the adherence to strict limitations on the frequency of intercourse, even for married couples, as in Grahamism. All three groups, French notes, “shared a belief that the disciplining of the body through sexual restraint could have crucial spiritual, physical, and moral consequences,” attempting through “sexual abstinence ... to control the uncontrollable, whether that was the soul's fate in the afterlife or the health of the body in an era where the causes of disease still remained mysterious” (p. 11). Using letters, diaries, published works, and artifacts, French examines how these three groups embodied a sexual identity that both responded to and challenged emerging notions of sexuality and heteronormativity

Abstinence · Afterlife · Art · Casual · Celibacy · Developmental psychology · Heteronormativity · Human sexuality · Literature · Political science · Population · Psychiatry · Psychosexual development · Sexual abstinence · Sexual desire · Sexual intercourse · Sexual revolution · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Demography · Gender Studies · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity