Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

This is Hamlet without the prince. The main character—the transition from "one of the two worldwide systems for organizing homosexual behavior" (p. 6) to the other—is offstage. A system of subordination achieved by differences in age yielded around 1700 to differentiation based on gender, specifically on the advent of a new "third gender role for a minority of men" (p. 6). The effeminate male, the sodomite, the mollie was born, and all this will be dealt with by Randolph Trumbach in future volumes.	1
The subject of this book is the sodomite's doppelgänger: the new majority, the modern male heterosexual who exclusively desired women. Women are absent from the book save as victims because, in the absence of a sapphic counterpart to the sodomite and with their sexual lives "much more likely to be have been confined to marriage" (p. 13), they remained in the earlier world with its three kinds of bodies (men, women, and hermaphrodites) and two genders (male and female) instead of proceeding into the new one in which for males only there were now two bodies (male and female) and three genders (man, woman, sodomite).	2
The history of this world as told by Trumbach is "substantially a history of extramarital relations" (p. 13), of what men did, or did not do, to distinguish themselves from the despised sodomites. They, but not women, were warned against masturbation because only a woman's body should satisfy a man. Women could still be dishonored throughout the eighteenth century by being called whores, but calling a man "whoremonger" only showed to his credit that he was not a sodomite. Prostitution flourished, largely untrammeled, because it allowed married men to avoid intimacy with their wives and unmarried men to show where their exclusive sexual interests lay. Whores, in short, allowed males "to establish that they were not sodomites" (p. 195).	3
Widespread venereal disease was "the harsh legacy of modern western heterosexuality" (p. 225) because, due to all the new extramarital sex, it came to infect not just a narrow strata of sailors, soldiers, and gentlemen as before but everyone. So was the rising illegitimacy rate and the suffering of women who bore children out of wedlock, because seducing women with promises of marriage and then abandoning "may have reinforced" in the minds of men "the power and standing of exclusive heterosexuality" (p. 275). (For women, bearing bastards proved nothing since "there was no comparable standard of female behavior" [p. 275] to justify their lapse.) So, too, was violence against women "a major source of sexual excitement for men," inspired, especially in the middle classes, "by a combination of traditional patriarchy and the new heterosexuality (p. 325). And so were adultery and divorce. The "new heterosexuality" encouraged close friendships between men that were not sexual; a man might bring his friend home, his wife might fall in love with the friend, the two might have sex, and the husband would feel that his wife's adultery "brought with it the sting of homosexual rape" (p. 395). She was ready to humiliate her husband because romantic love had raised the expectations of women, and "usually after they had been married a few years they expressed their needs by falling in love" with men who had entered their domestic worlds.	. . .