Lecture: The Origins of Sex

Kitty Fisher
by Nathaniel Hone
1765
NPG 2354

Historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala examines the origin of our modern attitudes to sex.

Nowadays we publicise and celebrate sex, discuss it endlessly and obsess about the sex lives of celebrities.  We consider it wrong that in other cultures people suffer for their sexual orientation, that women are treated as second-class citizens, or that adulterers are put to death. Yet until quite recently western society was like this too. For most of western history, all sex outside marriage was illegal and the church, the state and ordinary people all devoted huge efforts to suppressing and punishing it.

Faramerz Dabhoiwala will explore how between 1600 and 1800 this entire world view was shattered by revolutionary new ideas – that sex is a private matter; that morality cannot be imposed by force; that men are more lustful than women.  This modern culture of sex was a central part of the Enlightenment, intertwined with the era's major social, political and intellectual trends.

Faramerz Dabhoiwala is Senior Fellow in History at Exeter College, Oxford and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

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