I don’t know about the rest of you, but learning about sex was an interesting experience for me. I know when I was 12, my mother had me go to facts of life seminar in the Catholic grade school I went to. But that was no help. The guy who gave the seminar assumed we already knew how to have sex. And it was basically a seminar about biology. Like this one kid Geoff said at the end of the seminar, “So how do you have sex?”
I finally put it all together, rather by accident, at age 13. A little late I know. But better late than never, I suppose.
My question is simply: How do people learn about sex in more conservative times, like the Victorian era? It couldn’t be always easy. Yet the human race continues. So somehow people must know.
When I was in high school, one of my friends remarked that he and his two brothers learned the facts of life early. They spent summers on the grandparent’s farm 20 miles away. So they saw what the various animals were doing. Far more farmers in the Victorian era than today.
I sometimes wonder if we have the wrong impression of the 19th century. I remember one female author who wrote fiction saying it was surprising how frank soldiers in the American Civil War were in writing home. Ans salacious stories of sex and murder sold well in the penny newspapers of the day.
It was, in fact, very easy. Depending on which Victorians you’re talking about, they’d have grown up around animals who had sex, shared sleeping quarters with adults who had sex, and seen prostitutes on their streets.
Assuming they weren’t introduced to sex by being prostituted as kids themselves, of course.
Why didn’t the two of you just talk to one another?
This has been discussed many times here. The vast majority of people pre-20th century lived together in farmhouses in the country and tiny apartments in the city. There was no privacy. Kids not only saw animals doing it - in the city as well as on the farm - but they saw their parents go at it as well. Sex was never hidden away, except for the tiny percentage of the aristocracy and upper middle classes.
For those classes, men had it easier because it was a standard practice for fathers to take sons to brothels to lose their virginity. Girls were of course left out of the loop. Their marriage nights were often difficult, painful, and confusing. The prevailing attitude said they didn’t have to enjoy sex; they just had to bear children.
As the middle classes grew and took control over an increasingly urbanized 20th century sex was deliberately moved out of sight. A few doctors started writing sex manuals as far back as the 19th century, mostly with notions we today find somewhere between hilarious and appalling, and many more were written starting when society opened a bit in the Jazz Era, but they were always condemned by a large segment of society.
So how did couples learn? Tab A goes into slot B. The mechanics aren’t that mysterious. Making the leap from basic intercourse into satisfying sex was much more difficult for many couples. The argument today is in fact the opposite. So much explicit, but exaggerated, sex is available that couples till aren’t learning what good complementary sex is.
The standard way (if farm animals or enlightened parents were not available) was as in my case to hear the facts from older boys, or from the brothers of older boys. It’s a popular topic of discussion once children are old enough to be interested, and you’d be surprised what tidbits also are overheard, or what printed materials are found hidden. Of course, not all of it is correct.
Just that in the Good Old Days with less privacy, there were certainly more learning opportunities.
Keep in mind too, that for the upper class, servants were everywhere. There’s the story that Prince Charles has never put his own toothpaste on his brush. Someone has always done it for him. The situation was worse before running water and washing machines, and when ovens needed to be fed fuel. Servants certainly saw and heard a great deal. The upper class just paid them no heed; they were almost part of the furniture. So young servants certainly were going to get an educational eyeful.
Plus if we go back even further - Samuel Pepys relates a lot of his sex life in his diary, which recounts a decade or so of his life; including carrying on with the servant girl and getting caught by his wife.
"How do people learn about sex in more conservative times,*** like ***the Victorian era? "
The OP seems to be interested in the Victorian era as only one exemplar of “more conservative times”
Yeah that’s definitely not a nitpick. There is not some linear graph of prudishness starting at the modern day and increasing the further back you go. Different eras had differing views on sex.
Country vicar to tiny girl leading a very large cow through the village
“Where are you taking that animal, child?”
“To the bull, sir, it’s time for her to be serviced”
“My child, that’s disgraceful. Shouldn’t you father be doing that?”
“Oh no sir, it has to be the bull”.
You could also try reading Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie - recollections of a young boy’s growing up in an era only just emerging from centuries of relative isolation.
Ordinary folk in both towns and country knew all about such things in outline, if not in today’s biological and emotional detail. In the more buttoned-down middle classes, men would know more (though, as ever, not as much as they thought) and women were traditionally supposed to know nothing before their marriage night (“Close your eyes and think of England”). The upper crust could be more adventurous, provided appearances were kept up; they had servants for experimentation, or indeed it wasn’t unknown for a young man to be introduced to an accommodating lady (professional or otherwise) by an older male relative.
Of course, while girls, in particular, may well have been aware of the mechanics of sex, they were also well aware of the consequences. At different times and in different places, getting pregnant before getting married carried more or less stigma. Commonly, the young couple would have headed for the church before the bump started to show. In some rural societies it was expected that the girl would be pregnant - who would want to marry a barren woman?
The 19th century was a period of enormous social upheaval huge double standards. Prostition was often the only recourse for a woman with no family to support her and the migration to the towns concentrated the poor and destitute into a small area. Hypocrites abounded - pontificating in church about the morals of the poor, and then paying for sex with a prostitute, sometimes a very young prostitute.
And we have to be clear that the common modern idea of the Victorian era is not based on what it actually was, but rather on the certain types of documentation that were given preference, from certain, very selective sources.
