Sex in History  

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Fashionable Contrasts (1792) by James Gillray
Sex in History is part of the human sexuality portal

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Sex In History (1954) is a book on the history of human sexuality by Gordon Rattray Taylor. It analyzes trends in civilization by way of a matrism/patrism dichotomy. "Patrism combines two ideas: hierarchy and discipline. The individual fits into an organizational structure, in which orders come from above, and rules exist to cover almost every kind of situation. In contrast, matrism sees the individual as free from all external compulsions and hence obviously equal to all other individuals, in the sense of having no authority over them, nor recognizing any." Gordon Rattray Taylor Rethink, p 30

Historical revisionism

"It is therefore very strange and most lamentable that historians have almost entirely avoided such study, and have maintained something like a conspiracy of silence about such facts as they do know. Look at the most erudite of social histories and you find that they make no mention of sexual matters—apart, perhaps, from a summary of the marriage and divorce laws—and this remains true even when suppression of the facts creates a wholly false impression of the period and makes many events quite mysterious. The most obvious example of this is probably the paederastic practices of the Greeks: even a basic work of reference such as Holm-Decke-Soltau's "Kulturgeschichte des Klassischen Altertums" omits all reference to it. Pauly-Wissowa's "Realenzyklopaedie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft", which gives twenty pages to the hetairae, gives but three to it. ... School histories are naturally bowdlerized even more thoroughly, and many students leave school without discovering that Henry VIII was a syphilitic—with the result that his marital affairs remain quite incomprehensible—and even without being told of such a major historical event as the arrival of syphilis in Europe, as a result of which (according to some estimates) one third of the population of Europe died within a few years." --Gordon Rattray Taylor in the foreword to Sex in History

Patrism vs Matrism

"To sum up, then, we may expect to find as limiting cases two distinct alternative systems of attitudes, the main features of which can be expressed in tabular form as follows:"

See also

• Matrism
• Patrism