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13 - Sex in Eighteenth-Century Paris
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- By Nina Kushner
- Edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Mathew Kuefler, San Diego State University
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- Book:
- The Cambridge World History of Sexualities
- Published online:
- 26 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2024, pp 261-284
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Summary
Eighteenth-century Paris was the site of multiple sexual cultures ranging from permissive to conservative. All these sexual cultures operated within a set of prescriptive legal, religious, and moralistic discourses that prohibited sex outside of marriage while often supporting sexual pleasure within it. Many Parisians ignored these prescriptions, often with impunity. The police concerned themselves with public sex and intervened in private affairs only when asked to do so. Paris was home to a diverse permissive sexual culture. It was comprised of a portion of the financial, social, political, and intellectual elite, often identified as libertines, for whom sex outside marriage was both widespread and widely accepted. It also included men who had sex with each other as part of Paris’s extensive sodomitical subculture, though there is little evidence of a modern homosexual identity. Prostitution was endemic in Paris, encompassing numerous forms of transactional sex that translated into a sort of hierarchy, with women kept as mistresses by men of the elite at the top and those catering to marginal men at the bottom. We know least about the sex lives of other ordinary people, though evidence suggests many had sex outside of marriage and many cared deeply for their spouses.
Contributors
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- By Graeme J.M. Alexander, Heung Bae Kim, Michael Burch, Andrew J. Butler, Tanveer Butt, Roy Calne, Edward Cantu, Robert B. Colvin, Paul Corris, Charles Crawley, Hiroshi Date, Francis L. Delmonico, Bimalangshu R. Dey, Kate Drummond, John Dunning, John D. Firth, John Forsythe, Simon M. Gabe, Robert S. Gaston, William Gelson, Paul Gibbs, Alex Gimson, Leo C. Ginns, Samuel Goldfarb, Ryoichi Goto, Walter K. Graham, Simon J.F. Harper, Koji Hashimoto, David G. Healy, Hassan N. Ibrahim, David Ip, Fadi G. Issa, Neville V. Jamieson, David P. Jenkins, Dixon B. Kaufman, Kiran K. Khush, Heung Bae Kim, Andrew A. Klein, John Klinck, Camille Nelson Kotton, Vineeta Kumar, Yael B. Kushner, D. Frank. P. Larkin, Clive J. Lewis, Yvonne H. Luo, Richard S. Luskin, Ernest I. Mandel, James F. Markmann, Lorna Marson, Arthur J. Matas, Mandeep R. Mehra, Stephen J. Middleton, Giorgina Mieli-Vergani, Charles Miller, Sharon Mulroy, Faruk Özalp, Can Ozturk, Jayan Parameshwar, J.S. Parmar, Hari K. Parthasarathy, Nick Pritchard, Cristiano Quintini, Axel O. Rahmel, Chris J. Rudge, Stephan V.B. Schueler, Maria Siemionow, Jacob Simmonds, Peter Slinger, Thomas R. Spitzer, Stuart C. Sweet, Nina E. Tolkoff-Rubin, Steven S.L. Tsui, Khashayar Vakili, R.V. Venkateswaran, Hector Vilca-Melendez, Vladimir Vinarsky, Kathryn J. Wood, Heidi Yeh, David W. Zaas, Jonathan G. Zaroff
- Edited by Andrew A. Klein, Clive J. Lewis, Joren C. Madsen
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- Book:
- Organ Transplantation
- Published online:
- 07 September 2011
- Print publication:
- 11 August 2011, pp vii-x
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