ABSTRACT
In 1500 in western societies sexual desire was as likely to be organized by differences in age as by differences in gender, and the bodies of men, women, and hermaphrodites were likely to be seen as profoundly similar. This sexual system was of long standing. In western societies it was directly linked with the world that had existed in the ancient Mediterranean. This western system was also in many ways similar to the sexual systems that could be found elsewhere in the world, for instance, in East and South Asia. The way in which the western system operated was influenced by the Christian religion, but it is likely that Christianity had for the most part accepted a system that had long existed independently of it. In western societies a masculinist system that made honourable for adult men sexual acts in which they sexually penetrated others but were not themselves penetrated, coexisted with a Christian moral and legal system that made sinful and illegal all sexual acts that occurred outside of marriage between a man and a woman. Sources suggest that many adult men might desire and penetrate both women and adolescent males. It is likely that women also desired both males and females. This desire for both genders is harder to demonstrate among women because sexual behaviour between women appeared less often in the legal sources than did behaviour between males. But sexual behaviour between males and between females was in both cases organized predominantly by differences in age, men with boys and women with girls. The study of this same-sex behaviour is the easiest way to see the difference between the traditional sexual system and the modern sexual system that came into existence in the first generation after 1700. By 1750 there was no longer a unitary sexual system in western societies. Between 1700
and 1750 a new sexual system came into existence in north-western Europe, in England, France, and the Dutch Republic.1 The traditional sexual system that had prevailed in 1500 continued to exist throughout the eighteenth century in central, southern, and eastern Europe. By 1800 it is likely that the modern system had come to prevail in Germanic Europe and North America.2 But it is not until about 1900 that it can be documented in southern and eastern Europe and in Latin America.3 Over the course of the twentieth century something like the system of European sexual modernity that first appeared in the generation after 1700 in north-western Europe has come to prevail in many societies that are not western. In East Asia it appeared in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century but in China probably not until after World War II.4 It still does not prevail in South Asia5
or in most of the Muslim world,6 and the situation in sub-Saharan African societies is extremely difficult to describe.7
