— “Fierce Desires,” by Rebecca L. Davis, is a wide-ranging survey of how Americans have thought about and practiced and policed sex

By Becca Rothfeld

Clashes over sexual morality in America are, in large part, about what is new and what is old. Is premarital intrigue a timeless natural indulgence, or is it a byproduct of a newfangled venture called feminism? Is contraception an innocuous safeguard, or is it a contrivance of that devious plot against America, the sexual revolution?

Conservatives are nothing if not determined to confuse tradition with vindication, and it is no surprise that they are wont to appeal to history in hopes of endowing their bedroom hang-ups with the sort of gravitas that clings to musty antiques. One of their favorite relics is the fantasy of a golden age that might be recuperated, a period when pleasurable mischief was confined to marriage, babies resulted from every tryst and gender roles were strictly delineated. And what brought this utopian era to an end? “Feminism,” the conservative commentator Matt Walsh tweeted last year, is “perhaps the most destructive force in human history.” In a subsequent podcast episode, he clarified that “feminists have succeeded in destroying … the nuclear family,” a process that he alleged has “eaten away at the very fabric of civilization.”

Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America,” Rebecca L. Davis puts Walsh’s picture to the test. Her important, ambitious and entertaining study reminds us that many of the practices portrayed by reactionaries as radical and new, such as same-sex love, are in fact long-standing, whereas the sort of conjugal bliss lauded by the likes of Walsh as normal and normative is a relatively recent invention.

But Davis, a professor of history at the University of Delaware, demonstrates that Walsh and his ilk are true traditionalists in at least one sense: Americans have always displayed a special talent for prudery, sanctimony and moral panic. Any whiff of enjoyment or nonconformity that has ever materialized in the land of the strait-laced and the home of the stifled has attracted a scold, eager to wag a disapproving finger.

Davis divides American sexual history into three sometimes overlapping eras: 1600-1870, 1840-1938 and 1938-2024. It is not clear which of these strikes sexual reactionaries as an epoch of erotic virtue and sexual tranquility.

In some respects, the first of these eras was not as retrograde as some might wistfully imagine. The practice of “bundling,” whereby courting couples spent the night together before they wed, was so common that, “by the 1770s, between 30 and 40 percent of the brides in New Haven were already pregnant when they spoke their marriage vows.” Contraception and abortion were also widespread: Davis writes that many women “used pessaries, a substance or device placed in the vagina to block or neutralize sperm,” and pharmacists stocked herbal remedies that they euphemistically claimed could restore women’s periods (that is, terminate pregnancies).

But early America was also wretched in ways that even the most unapologetic chauvinist would be hard-pressed to defend. Marital rape and domestic abuse were rampant and largely unregulated. In one harrowing chapter, Davis details the plight of a 17th-century woman trapped in an abusive marriage to a man who beat her and regularly raped one of the couple’s daughters. This woman was nearly without recourse: Divorce was difficult (and in some states impossible) to obtain, and a wife was not legally entitled to live separately from her husband or even to enter into contracts on her own.

Sexual abuse was also one of the most pervasive and abominable features of slavery. Sexual propriety was heavily racialized from the country’s inception, and Davis writes that in the 17th century, “correct sexual behavior became an essential means of distinguishing Christian from heathen, civilized from savage.” Formerly, women as a whole were cast as lustful and licentious; now, White women were reimagined as fragile and infantile, and their alleged innocence served to distinguish them from Black women, who were derided as bestial and promiscuous, and Black men, who were stigmatized as predatory. These stereotypes were used to justify atrocities: For the next two centuries, Black men suspected of seducing White women were beaten or lynched, and enslaved Black women endured rape at the hands of their exploiters. There is little about the sexual politics of early America that anyone but the most depraved racist could find redeeming.

The second period considered in “Fierce Desires,” 1840-1938, is perhaps more promising from a conservative perspective. In the late 1800s, the anti-sex vigilante Anthony Comstock successfully campaigned for the passage of the Act for the Suppression of Trade in and Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, or, as it is more commonly known, the Comstock Act. The infamous policy outlawed interstate trade in erotica, a category that included contraception and abortifacients. As enforcement agencies and vice squads sprung up right and left, several prominent abortion providers found themselves at the receiving end of Comstock’s zealous harassment and ended up taking their own lives. Davis notes in an epilogue that certain contemporary conservatives are so unabashedly enthusiastic about this period of American sexual history, they are attempting to summon “the ghost of Anthony Comstock”: In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, many antiabortion activists hope to enforce a clause of the Comstock Act that was never formally repealed and that would proscribe the distribution of abortifacients by mail.

The movement to ban abortion has never been isolated from a broader agenda — one that strives to coerce women into motherhood and thereby reinforce a regressive gender hierarchy — and Comstock, the antiabortion poster child, had definite ideas about women’s place in society. The proper aim of sex, he emphasized, was not pleasure but reproduction in marriage; women belonged in the nursery, and their bodies belonged to their husbands. In a later chapter on the politicization of abortion in the 1990s, when religious extremists staged violent attacks on abortion clinics and even killed providers, Davis insightfully observes that members of the then-nascent antiabortion movement were not “single-issue voters” because “the abortion issue became a referendum on the sexual revolution, gay rights and feminism. Abortion opponents described the procedure as an assault on the ‘American family’ because, they argued, it untethered reproductive sex from marriage, women from men, and men from their responsibilities as family breadwinners. Abortion struck at their beliefs that the conventionally gendered, heterosexual family held the nation together.”

She could just as easily be describing contemporary Trump supporters, or Comstock and his followers. All of these antiabortion crusaders are united in understanding that women’s freedom depends upon reproductive autonomy — and united in opposing that freedom.

Despite his recent resurrection, however, Comstock was not altogether victorious, even in his own day. Nineteenth-century moralists “fought an uphill battle,” as Davis writes. Euphemisms abounded — in a particularly satisfying twist, “Comstock syringe” became slang for a certain contraceptive — and birth rates continued to plummet. Speakeasies thrived in the Gilded Age, and in the late 1800s and early 1900s, queer desire flourished behind the scenes in secret societies, at drag balls in Harlem and among female blues singers who performed in top hats and tails. In chapters that center on memorable characters, some of them famous and some of them simply private civilians, Davis digs up some truly novelistic — and often truly touching — details about queer life.

By reactionary lights, she concludes, the years from 1938 to the present have seen a procession of unmitigated disasters. First came the Kinsey reports, studies based on interviews with thousands of American men and women. Published in 1948 and 1953, these enormously influential documents showed that both same-sex dalliances and premarital sex were quite common: 50 percent of the women surveyed said they’d engaged in coitus before marriage, and, per Davis, “the researchers calculated that 37 percent of American men had at least one sexual contact with another man that resulted in an orgasm.” Then came feminism and, on its heels, the development of sex education curriculums, which conservative Christians argued were “Communist, taught their children to be gay, sexualized very young children, exposed youth to pornography, and contributed to rising teen pregnancy rates” (there’s something perversely impressive about the doggedness with which they’ve trotted out this playbook in the intervening decades, without even gesturing at updating or revising it).

Of course, progressive movements faced setbacks in this last period, too. Throughout the 19th century, Davis writes, “same-sex and otherwise queer expressions of desire were common and mostly unpunished.” Men and women discretely pursued same-sex relationships in single-sex spaces, such as the military and all-girls schools. It was not until the late 1800s that same-sex desires were named or studied, and it was not until the 20th century that the social-scientific mania for taxonomizing (and all too often pathologizing) homosexuality took off. Definition was a double-edged sword: With the recognition of queer identity came persecution at the hands of homophobic vice squads, religious fanatics and sinister physicians who devised cruel “treatments” for desires they regarded as deviant. But the era also heralded the advent of identity-based organizing that was ultimately, if tentatively, effective.

A case can be made that sexual conservatism is the linchpin of the contemporary MAGA movement. It is, Davis writes, “the bridge that linked evangelical Protestants and Catholics across deep waters of theological and cultural difference.” It is certainly the missing link between such otherwise disparate figures as Matt Walsh, JD Vance and Amy Coney Barrett. There is nothing more American than repression, prudishness and bigotry — except, perhaps, mustering the bravery to stand up against them and for the transports of individual pleasures, in all their untamable glory and variety.

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