The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality

by Mary Louise Adams

In the years after the Second World War, economic and social factors combined to produce an intense concern over the sexual development and behaviour of young people. In a context where heterosexuality and 'normality' were understood to be synonymous and assumed to be necessary for social and national stability, teenagers were the target of a range of materials and practices meant to turn young people into proper heterosexuals. In this study, Mary Louise Adams explores discourses about youth and their place in the production and reproduction of heterosexual norms. She examines debates over juvenile delinquency, indecent literature, and sex education to show not why heterosexuality became a peculiar obsession in English Canada following the Second World War as much as how it came to hold such sway. Drawing on feminist theory, cultural studies, and lesbian/gay studies, The Trouble with Normal is the first Canadian study of 'youth' as a sexual and moral category. Adams looks not only at sexual material aimed at teenagers but also at sexual discourses generally, for what they had to say about young people and for the ways in which 'youth,' as a concept, made those discourses work. She argues that postwar insecurities about young people narrowed the sexual possibilities of both young people and adults. While much of the recent history of sexuality examines sexuality 'from the margins,' The Trouble with Normal is firmly committed to examining the 'centre,' to unpacking normality itself. As the first book-length study of the history of sexuality in postwar Canada, it will make an important contribution to the growing international literature on sexual regulation.

Genres: History, Politics

256 pages, Hardcover

First published November 29, 1997

Reviews

[Emerson Stokes · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, in the 1950s heterosexuality was not natural but "created" which led to many a crusade for the standard of heterosexuality. Additionally, fears around postwar youth were typically centered around sexuality, and their adherence to the heterosexual standard confirmed to adults whether the future was bright or dark.

Adams argues for a more liberated atmosphere for children and teens to practice their sexuality as well as haughtily pointing to modern social conservatives that their nostalgic visions of family life in the 1950s were not entirely natural and were to some extent constructed.

I have several problems with this book.

To start, I must lay out my biases. I do not like postmodernism and I especially do not like Foucault. His writings were partially a post-hoc rationalization for his sexual attraction to minors. I know that much of that was only revealed later, but the signs should have already been apparent and in general I am disgusted by western academic intellectuals for staying silent about it.

Anyways, another particular issue I have with the book is how it discusses class. Adams positions themselves as the arbiter of class culture and whether this or that social practice is a "middle class" or "working class" practice (Adams does not discuss upper class feelings towards sexuality, arguably because they were more promiscuous than the middle but less exposed to the cultural changes happening within Canadian society than the working). I think the notion that "prostitution" is a part of "working class culture" is about the same as saying that starving is a part of third world culture, it's an insult to those people to label these things in that way. Moreover, Adams intensely follows the construction of middle class culture, and then too easily labels everything that falls out of this norm as "working class culture" which I find sloppy and, once again, a little insulting to the working class.

The idea that we just need to have youth be more free and experimental in their sexuality may have sounded nice and comfortable in the 1990s, but I am writing in 2025 and I no longer think this idea holds up. The rise of mass internet has also led to the rise of mass pornography as well as hosting an array of communities of virulent child abusers on sites as popular as Instagram and games as seemingly innocuous as Roblox. The free experimentation of youth with their sexuality in such environments due to parents' permissiveness and lack of oversight has I think caused several social disasters over two decades which go largely unspoken. Parents, guardians and communities should have more oversight of what children are doing, and at least some of the premises of the 1950s social reformers should not be entirely vilified as they are here.