Oleksandr Zholud’s Reviews > Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity > Status Update

Instead, the inevitable consequences of an all-male adolescent environment lent a peculiar anxiety to British elite attitudes to masturbation and homosexuality, particularly because of the widespread conviction that (in the words of an old Etonian and noted cricketer, who returned to Eton as Headmaster) ‘animal desires [are] far stronger in the male than in the female, at least in England’.

The ideal products of Victorian public schools were obedient but resourceful officers in the armed forces, or colonial administrators programmed to endure lonely leadership amid alien cultures. Socialization even with female siblings, let alone any other variety of female, was not on the syllabus.

in 1600, it would have been widely accepted that such matters as fornication and adultery should be punished publicly and exemplarily by corporal punishment. By 1700 that would have seemed unnecessary; and by 1800, any public punishment of such misdemeanours was almost inconceivable, particularly in urban settings, and instances of it provoked special comment

Protestant ...a patriarchal double standard which demanded harsher penalties of an adulterous married woman. Men (except those committing adultery with another man’s wife) were generally punished on the same level as fornicators, with gaol and fines, but a woman had offended against the obedience due her husband, and thus she had approached the crime of a sodomite in transgressing on the natural order; death

Part of the shared regulation of marriage was the successful cross-confessional curbing of medieval lay assumptions that a marriage started when the couple consented in ‘espousal’, with a wedding in church as an optional extra. Protestants and Catholics both relabelled as ‘fornication’ sexual activities previously seen as the first stage of marriage after espousal

This became a Counter-Reformation theme, for instance as set out in starkly traditional form in Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s influential ‘larger’ catechism of 1598: ‘Marriage is a thing human, Virginity is angelical. Marriage is according to nature, Virginity is above nature.’

Florence explicitly saw a cure for its exceptional concerns for sodomy and its low birth rate when it set up a municipal brothel in 1403, regulated by ‘Officials of Honesty’ (Ufficiali dell’Onesta) and recruiting women from beyond the city to staff it.