We supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. 
 So the image of the “imperial prude” becomes a part of our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality. 

 

Beginning of the 17thcentury- Frankness was still common, sexual practices were not secretive – the obscene and the indecent were quite lax compared to those of the 19th century. It was a time where people could be quite open. 
 a period when bodies “made a display of themselves” 

 

This ended, following the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Sexuality became confined and was moved to the home. It became absorbed into the serious function of reproduction. 

 

Everything became sanitized. Children didn’t have sex so they couldn’t talk about it. These are characteristic features attributed to repression. Repression operated as a sentence to disappear but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence and by implication, an admission that were was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see and nothing to know. 

 

Felt that it was necessary to make room for illegitimate sexualities, the bourgeoisie tried to reason and decided to “let them take their infernal mischief elsewhere: to a place where they could be reintegrated, if not in the circuits of production, at least in those of profit” – Brothels and mental hospitals became the places of tolerance. The prostitute, the priest and the pimp all in the same place – they were seen as the “other” Victorians along with the “hysterics”. 

 

These were places where anything could happen within a strict puritan society which posed its “triple edict of taboo, nonexistence and silence”. 

 

But we are still not liberated – some progress was made by Freud.

 

If we have been informed that repression is the fundamental link between power, knowledge and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. 

 

The repression of sexuality seems to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. 
 Sex is so rigorously repressed because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. 

This was a time when labour capacity was being systematically exploited. – how could this capacity be able to indulge in pleasurable pursuits, except in those reduced to a minimum. 

There was a demand for sexual freedom, but also for the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak about it- it becomes legitimately associated with the honour of a political cause: sex is too placed on the agenda for the future.  

 

There may be another reason that makes it so gratifying for us to define the relationship between sex and power in terms of repression: if sex is repressed- condemned to prohibition, nonexistence and silence, then the mere fact is that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. – makes you place yourself to a certain extent outside the reach of power. – upsets the established law and somehow anticipates the coming freedom. 

 

The notion of repressed sex is not, therefore, only a theoretical matter. The affirmation of a sexuality that has never been more rigorously subjugated than during the age of hypocritical, busting and responsible bourgeoisie is coupled with the grandiloquence of a discourse purporting to reveal the truth about sex.