“Are We to Treat Human Nature as the Early Victorian Lady Treated Telegrams?” British and German Sexual Science, Investigations of Nature and the Fight Against Censorship, c. 1890-1940

Abstract

Existing scholarship on the history of sexology and sexual science has frequently presented sex researchers as unfortunate victims and staunch opponents of censorship. Focusing on sexual scientific debates from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1930s in Britain and Germany, this article examines how understandings of “nature” and the “natural” were mobilized by sex researchers when navigating the reality and threat of censorship. First, presenting sexual desire and intimacy as natural elements of human life supported sex researchers’ claim that sex was an appropriate and necessary object of scientific study. Second, the assertion that sex was natural was used to counter and upend the argument that sexological knowledge was potentially dangerous or damaging. Sex researchers suggested that those who sought to protect individuals from sexological findings were preventing people from having access to vital knowledge that could improve individual and social health and morality. This robust defense of sexology as a beneficial science of human nature, however, also led to intellectual incoherencies that meant that sex researchers often remained complicit with arguments in support of censorship. In attacking repressive approaches to sexual knowledge as damaging, they accepted and reinforced the premise of many arguments in favour of censorship, namely, that natural sexual impulses needed guiding, since the sexual instinct was a volatile and changeable force that could easily be influenced and even corrupted by external influences. Acknowledging this construction of sexual desire meant conceding that there were circumstances and contexts within which sexological knowledge itself needed to be regulated to prevent the sexual instinct from being misdirected. As a result, sex researchers – as well as their publishers, reviewers and readers – agreed with and, at times, actively developed censorship strategies to control the production and circulation of sexological knowledge. This was not simply because sex researchers caved into external pressures, but because the very understanding of the sexual instinct as open to influence was key to the legitimation of sexual science. The idea that human sexuality could be shaped and altered meant that it required careful scientific guidance, which sex researchers promised to provide. Sex researchers were not simply victims of censorship, but often played an active role in censoring and regulating the production and circulation of their own findings.