The facts of life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950

If sexuality is as much a product of what goes on behind the eyes (in the brain) as between the legs, as modern theorization of the erotic suggests, then what our forebears knew, and what we as contemporary sexual actors know, or think we know, matters. This is the starting point for Roy Porter and Lesley Hall's lively and compendious study. Their subject is "sexual knowledge", but a simple phrase poses a host of problems, theoretical, methodological and practical. Take, for instance, Aristotle's master-piece, a popular handbook of reproductive sex, in circulation, in various revised and later bowdlerized editions, for perhaps 200 years until the late nineteenth century, which is discussed at exhaustive length in the first part of The facts of life. Leaving aside the unsolvable question of who wrote it in the first place-certainly not Aristotle-we have a host of other imponderables: who was it for? who read it? how did they read it? how did it influence them? did it affect their behaviour? We can speculate, but we cannot know with certainty. But what we can say, with all the necessary cautions, is that a book so widely circulated for so long must have had some meaning: as part of that inchoate, contradictory, confusing but constitutive body of knowledges, popular, religious, medical, legal, out of which human actors constructed some sense of themselves, their sexual needs, their desires, and their actions. We can lift the curtain on our ignorance about sexual behaviour from a host of records-from legal proceedings, memoirs, surviving correspondence, and newspaper coverage. But we also need to know the limits of knowledge which sets frontiers on what people in the past could have known. This is the signal service of this book. It provides us with a horizon of intelligibility for surveying the erotic adventures of the past three centuries. On the whole, the story they tell is a depressing one, largely because they concentrate on the construction and deployment of knowledge rather than on individuals' reaction to it. The latter could often be creative and imaginative. For example, dire warnings against contraception could be used to glean knowledge of how to employ it. Tracts against homosexuality were useful for homosexually inclined people to comfort themselves that they were not the only such individuals in the world. Porter and Hall, however, pay more attention to the propagandists than the propagandized, for perfectly sound reasons, for they generally set the terms of the debate. And by and large the discourse has been a fear-laden one. The Enlightenment naturalism of the eighteenth century may have encouraged a sexual libertinism for some, as the authors suggest; but at the expense of a fear of the masses, exploitation of women, and execration of the crime against nature, sodomy. By the nineteenth century, Porter and Hall suggest, in the wake of dire warnings of T.homas Malthus about overpopulation, the th'reat of venereal disease, and, at the end of the century, the fear of imperial decline, sexuality had become a zone of danger as well as pleasure. In the twentieth century, sexual progressivism and reformism, a long if often stretched tradition for two centuries, often became an ally of a new norm (for example, of compulsory heterosexuality) whilst attempting to combat a widespread ignorance about, and fear of, the most basic sexual activities. So the book wams against a neat sexual Whiggism, a teleology which sees a long march from darkness into light. At the same time, Porter and Hall engage in a constant dialogue with the work of Michel Foucault, whose The history of sexuality is the most polemically brilliant challenge to teleological