As everyone from Dick Morris to Robin Williams takes a turn imagining how technology will transform the next millennium, it seems only appropriate to glance backwards and gauge how the predictions of yesteryear's futurists have held up. Sexuality, in particular, engaged the imaginations of women thinkers, writers, and artists at the last turn of the century. Caught up in the Utopia fever inspired by Edward Bellamy's blockbuster success, Looking Backward (which imagined Boston in the year 2000 as prosperous, peaceful . . . and socialist), many of them conjured up the
components of their ideal sexual world, which ranged from celibacy on one extreme to free love and complete sexual equality on the other.
Many fin-de-siècle prognostications were responses to the concern and confusion that arose from changing roles for the sexes. Doctors and scientists warned that the new phenomenon of women's schooling could lead to swollen brains, shriveling wombs, a declining birth rate and even sterility. Men were subjected to similar scrutiny: in the wake of the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895, clergymen and politicians deplored the softness, effeminacy and decadence of the modern young man and the decline of civilization it implied. Moreover, a highly publicized epidemic of syphilis and other venereal diseases led the suffragist Christabel Pankhurst to conclude that 80 percent of men were infected and women should refuse to marry. The militant feminist Frances Swiney went so far as to call sperm a "virulent poison," and argued that even marital intercourse should occur only about once every three years, solely for the sake of reproduction.
Hoping for a brighter future, some Darwinian feminist intellectuals prophesied that human beings in the new millennium would evolve beyond the animal demands of the body. They often translated this ideal into allegories of bodiless sex, hygienic sex and even mental sex. The English anti-sex crusaders Ben Elmy and Elizabeth Wolstenholme, for example, wrote an epic poem, Woman Free (1893), which predicted that with intellectual and economic equality Woman would outgrow that "noisome habit," menstruation, and be able to make intellectual use of all that lost blood: "Her body, saved from enervating
drain,/ Shall lend a newer vigour to the brain." In the United States, the novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined an all-female society, Herland, in which women became pregnant just by wishing very hard.
Women's ambivalent attitude toward sex was intensified by their very real, and justifiable, anxieties about pregnancy and childbirth. Many feminists opposed the forms of birth control appearing on the scene (rubbers, though scandalous, were available, as was a kind of contraceptive sponge), theorizing that they would merely encourage men to demand more (unpleasant) sex. Visionaries of both genders were inspired to advocate other means of sexual self-discipline. In 1891, the American fiction writer George Noyes Miller published The Strike of a Sex, in which the entire female population of a futuristic town called Hustleberg went on sexual strike, refusing to cohabit with men. The women strikers demand — and get — from the men "Zugassent's discovery" — a mysterious process that protected them from unwanted conception.
The Strike of a Sex was based on Miller's participation in the Oneida Community of New York, a commune founded in the early 19th century by John Noyes and his band of Perfectionists. There Noyes preached the technique of coitus reservatus — intercourse without ejaculation — which he attributed to a Swiss doctor named Zugassent. Though the novel didn't spell it
out, "Zugassent's discovery," then, was that by having prolonged intercourse without orgasm, men reabsorbed sperm back into the urethra, thus retaining their vital bodily fluids.
All men at Oneida made an effort to master this technique. Those who could not were labeled Leakers and were not allowed to participate in the Perfectionists' "complex marriage," a practice in which each community member is married to — and therefore allowed to have sex with — everyone else. Noyes himself designed the weekly sexual rota, assigning all women under 25 to men over 50, and vice versa. He also decided, according to eugenics and seniority, which couples would be allowed to have offspring.
By the 1890s, Oneida no longer practiced complex marriage but continued to preach male continence, and Miller believed that it was the sexual panacea of the future. He predicted that when men were relieved of their "primeval curse of brutalizing labor," and women of their
primeval curse of involuntary motherhood, the Garden of Eden would reappear.
The theme of male self-discipline is picked up again in the 1896 novel Karezza, in which American physician Alice B. Stockham praises coitus reservatus as a spiritualization of intercourse that satisfies women's needs without the risk of unwanted pregnancy and rewards male self-control with female pleasure. One feminist follower of Karezza boasted that her husband's "lovemaking was as lengthy as many of his arguments" and that "a Yogi had nothing on him."
Other feminists yearned for the sexual freedoms that men enjoyed. Two American women from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, wrote Unveiling a Parallel in 1893, imagining a future where women had exactly the same rights to experimentation, prostitution and initiative as men. They set their utopia on Mars and gave women access to brothels and drugs for recreation, as well as the possibility to have children on their own.
The turn of the millennium seems unlikely to realize many of these feminist aspirations. In Winifred Harper Cooley's 1902 novel Dream of the Twenty-First Century, the narrator falls asleep and dreams "that it was the first day of the 21st century, and that I, an old woman somehow sojourning still upon the earth, was seeking knowledge as to the new conditions." In Cooley's 21st century, old age has been overcome, slums have been abolished, everyone goes to college and marriage is compulsory. Moreover, everyone meets their spouse at a coeducational college, so "all the unions are happy ones" (perhaps the only vision that would justify modern-day tuition).
The century is upon us, and although we have co-ed colleges (as well as how-to videos, sex advice columns, transgendering operations, and man-free pregnancies), these hardly make for a Utopia. Judging from any current women's magazine, the fin-de-siècle desire to prolong intercourse, make sexuality more aesthetic, and provide women with more reproductive autonomy is as intense as ever — and another millenium's worth of technology probably won't change that.
components of their ideal sexual world, which ranged from celibacy on one extreme to free love and complete sexual equality on the other.
drain,/ Shall lend a newer vigour to the brain." In the United States, the novelist Charlotte Perkins Gilman imagined an all-female society, Herland, in which women became pregnant just by wishing very hard.
out, "Zugassent's discovery," then, was that by having prolonged intercourse without orgasm, men reabsorbed sperm back into the urethra, thus retaining their vital bodily fluids.
primeval curse of involuntary motherhood, the Garden of Eden would reappear.
