The Guide to Getting It On (153 page)

Soon after the railroads were built, Americans turned to building public transportation in our cities. Public transit helped America’s downtowns and new amusement parks become centers of social activity. Not only would young men and women have places to go for socializing after work, the new networks of public transportation would give them a way to get there.

Technology also transformed how long we lived. For instance, from 1800 to 1870, the average white American could expect to die at the ripe old age of 39. But suddenly, between 1880 and 1900, our life expectancy leapt to almost age 50. Infant mortality dropped in half. Why the sudden change? Cities began installing sewer and water systems between 1880 and 1900.

Imagine how bad our cities smelled before the installation of sewers and the diseases we suffered due to the lack of sanitation and potable water? It was the new sewers and plumbing, rather than advances in medicine, that added ten more adult years to the lives of Americans. Ten more years for romance and sex!

What Used to Happen in Private Becomes Public

It wasn’t until the very end of the 1800s that dating and the social mixing of young men and women started becoming a normal part of popular culture. Before then, males socialized with males, and females with females. And when young males were allowed to be with young females, there was often a chaperone.

The segregation between the sexes was so great that during the last third of the 1800s, nearly one-in-every-five men in America belonged to a male-only fraternal order—from the Freemasons and Odd Fellows to the Knights of Pythias, Modern Woodmen of America and Improved Order of Red Men. These secret fraternal organizations required men to be at the lodge many nights each month for the initiation rites that were held when a member rose from one level in the fraternal order to the next. Membership in fraternal orders began to decline rapidly as technology helped transform American popular culture into a dating culture at the end of the 1800s. To survive, the fraternal organizations had to trim their elaborate initiation ceremonies.

Only a few years after the invention of the electric light bulb and the telephone, the moving picture arrived. This marvelous invention would herald in the era of the majestic movie theater—yet another public place where males and females could meet and date.

At the same time, magnificent events called “world’s fairs” and “expositions” were awing millions of Americans. 14 million people attended the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. By 1904, another 19 million people would attend the great expositions in Atlanta, Nashville, Omaha, Buffalo and St. Louis. These events impacted their hosting cities like the Olympics do today.

In 1895, there had been no amusement parks on New York’s Coney Island. By 1904, three newly-built amusement parks were attracting more than 4 million visitors to Coney Island each year—many of them young couples on dates. One of the first amusement parks on Coney Island was lit up by 250,000 of Edison’s miraculous light bulbs.

After the first years of the 1900s, almost every city in the country had amusement parks. Some of the new amusement parks were as amazing as Disneyland and Disney World are today. They became popular venues where millions of American couples and families would spend the day or evening.

Visitors to these story-book amusement parks could marvel at exhibits such as “Streets of Cairo and Mysterious Asia.” They could see the latest in technology in the great halls, or listen to the new phonographs and view the new moving pictures. Visitors could enjoy the carnivals with their magnificent carrousels, roller coasters, skating rinks, and even “Blowhole theaters” where jets of air would blow women’s dresses up into the air.

Some of the most popular attractions in America’s amusement parks were their dance halls and ballrooms where single men and women could meet—men and women who didn’t know each other beforehand and who were not chaperoned. Before then, unsupervised meetings of single males and females were often in sleazy surroundings, where it was assumed that the women were prostitutes and the men their customers.

Until the end of the 1800s, much of America’s nightlife had centered around the hard-drinking, whore-loving, sporting culture of males. The new amusements prided themselves on having no beer gardens and on quickly removing any thugs or drunken patrons. They were some of the first places in America where members of all genders and economic classes could mix and mingle, and they helped transform the way that Americans socialized. They marked the beginning of dating as we know it today.

Beyond the Boundaries of Home

During the 1800s, the American woman of the middle and upper classes had prided herself on being the anchor of the home. She provided her man with a refuge against a working world that was difficult and demanding. The home was where he went to escape the gambling, whoring, and bawdy street life of the lower classes.

However, as one author put it, “God Bless Our Home” never meant “God Make Our Home Happy.” By the end of the 1800s, the American woman’s options were evolving. It was becoming safe for women of any social class to be out in public, laughing and dancing with men they didn’t know—without having to worry so much about their reputations. There were now places where young Americans could meet, and the public transportation to get them there and back.

Venereal Disease in the Time of Victoria

No discussion of sex in the 1800s would be complete without a look at venereal disease.

An interesting thing happened to venereal disease over the course of the 1800s. In the mind of physicians, syphilis and gonorrhea went from being no more serious than a headache or cold, to a social and moral plague that was worse than cancer or leprosy. The truth was somewhere in between.

It wasn’t until 1837 that scientists discovered that gonorrhea and syphilis were two distinct diseases. Even then, there was little awareness that syphilis could cause blindness, heart failure, insanity and death. The more devastating forms of the disease that did not occur until years after the initial infection were not understood to be parts of syphilis until the late 1800s. Before then, physicians thought that these were separate diseases that had nothing to do with sexual infection.

As for gonorrhea, physicians believed that it was a benign infection, often resulting from too much sexual activity. Well into the 1870s, many physicians believed that it was normal for women to have gonorrhea and that there was no reason for concern. It wasn’t until the latter part of the 1800s that we learned gonorrhea was a cause of sterility in women, and could cause blindness in a child who was born to a woman with an active case.

Once physicians started becoming aware of how dangerous venereal diseases could be, the pendulum swung far in the other direction. A moral panic ensued in the ranks of our medicine men. Although they had no clinical tests to confirm the presence of venereal disease, leading physicians made bold, unfounded declarations that venereal diseases caused more death and destruction than all other diseases combined. They made outrageous claims that as many as 80% of American men had a venereal disease. They declared that we could get venereal diseases from cups, kisses, pens, pencils and toilets. Cases of vaginitis among school girls were said to be gonorrhea, and people had to be especially wary of contact with America’s immigrants, who, physicians warned, were naturally disposed to moral and physical degeneracy.

Once the medical community became aware of the danger of venereal disease, they did not treat it as a medical matter, but as a problem of morality. When they did provide “education” about venereal disease in the 1900s, it was fear-based and shame-based. And when some states started requiring proof of no venereal disease before issuing a marriage license, it was only the man who was examined. Such examinations were thought to be disrespectful for a proper woman.

America’s physicians, who were starting to view themselves as the new high priests of morality, stated that venereal disease posed an even greater threat to the American family than birth control. Perhaps, they wrote, the decreasing size of the American family wasn’t the fault of selfish women who were practicing birth control, but of philandering husbands who were bringing home venereal diseases that were making their innocent wives sterile!

These ideas fit nicely with the sentiment of America’s finer minds that women were constitutionally weaker than men. Not only were women’s bodies being emaciated by foolish pursuits such as attending college, but America’s leading physicians were now declaring that our women were being cheated from their sole purpose and destiny in life—to bear and raise children—by the venereal diseases of an immoral society.

Just how much the general population paid attention to our physicians’ hysteria is not known. While popular newspapers and magazines were happy to accept paid advertisements for quack venereal-disease cures, they were terrified to actually report on the subject. In 1906, the popular
Ladies’ Home Journal
became one of the first magazines in the country to publish articles on venereal disease, and it lost 75,000 subscribers as a result. As late as 1912, the U.S. Post Office seized Margaret Sanger’s pamphlet
What Every Girl Should Know
because it talked about syphilis and gonorrhea. It was declared obscene under the Comstock Law.

Even if the general population did know about the physicians’ fears, history shows that this might not have altered their behavior. For instance, in the 1840s, physicians started declaring that masturbation caused insanity, but there is no evidence that their dire warnings stopped a single person from masturbating. Even today, when we know that unprotected anal sex can cause AIDS, the practice of barebacking remains epidemic in large parts of the gay community. And good luck getting more than a small percentage of Americans who are having intercourse with a new partner to use condoms—at least at the time of this volume’s publication.

It is difficult to know how extensive venereal disease was in America during the 1800s. Since the more devastating secondary and tertiary phases of syphilis were thought to be caused by other diseases, we don’t know how many people died from them in the 1800s. And once the connection to syphilis was understood, physicians would often change the cause of death to protect the reputation of the family. Also, the diagnostic criteria for venereal disease was so broad that many people who did not have it were diagnosed with it.

What we can assume is that venereal disease was a significant problem and that many people died from it in the 1800s. We also know that the “cures” for syphilis were often toxic and could cause as much pain and suffering as the disease itself. However, because the initial symptoms of syphilis usually became dormant as a natural part of the disease’s progression, even the strangest of the quack cures were thought to cure it.

While prostitution was often blamed as the source of venereal disease, it is unlikely that fear of catching the disease caused the decline in prostitution in the United States. The decline in prostitution started in the last decades of the 1800s, while awareness of the true dangers of venereal disease had not become part of the nation’s consciousness. Even then, the newfound knowledge did not stop people from visiting prostitutes.

Anti-Obscenity Laws of the 1800s

The 1800s brought us the light bulb, telephone and magnificent railroads that tunneled through mountains and spanned rivers and gorges. The 1800s also brought America its first anti-obscenity laws.

By the end of the 1800s, our government had given itself the authority to throw people in prison for up to ten years at hard labor for mailing information about condoms or for printing or receiving a romance novel that was declared obscene by postal inspectors—men whose sole basis for expertise was their membership in the Young Men’s Christian Organization or the Society for the Suppression of Vice.

A name that has become synonymous with anti-obscenity laws in America is that of Anthony Comstock. The anti-obscenity laws of 1872 that were nicknamed after him were the most far-reaching of any in our nation’s history. Yet America’s first federal anti-obscenity laws were enacted in 1842, when Anthony was a mere twinkle in the eyes of his evangelical Christian parents.

These laws were part of the Tariff Act of 1842. This might seem strange, given how tariff acts are supposed to regulate foreign imports. But that was the point. Our politicians assumed that the indecent materials that were circulating in America in the 1840s were imported from abroad, particularly from Satan’s country of birth, France. America’s first federal anti-obscenity law attempted to stop “the importation of all indecent and obscene prints, paintings, lithographs, engravings and transparencies.”

It was beyond the comprehension of American politicians that some of the erotica that was starting to flood our cities may have been homegrown. From their perspective, the new wave of printed filth must have followed the immigrant aliens from Europe who were landing on the sacred shores of our forefathers.

The second round of anti-obscenity laws were enacted in 1865. These were an expansion of the Tariff Act of 1842. Again, Anthony Comstock had nothing to do with them, as he was still a proselytizing and unpopular Civil War soldier stationed far from combat in Florida.

By 1865, the newer printing presses had the ability to mass produce photographs, particularly those of Victorians doing nasty things. As a result, dirty books were fast replacing the Good Book as the mainstay of the Civil War soldier’s knapsack. Special X-rated booklets were made in smaller trim sizes that allowed them to conveniently accompany the Civil War soldier. While it was fine for a soldier from New York to kill a soldier from Virginia, our government believed it was morally unacceptable for a soldier to keep a picture of a naked woman next to his spare ammo.