The History of Sexuality

A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of “population” as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a “people,” but with a “population,” with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. The growing discourse on sex, particularly in the 19th century, had the effect of turning sex into a problem of truth. Sex was seen as something dangerous: perverse pleasures could be a threat not just to one person, but also to society as a whole. Knowing about sex became increasingly important, but it was equally important that this knowledge should take the side of common morality. Learned discourse on sex was full of distortions and downright falsehoods that supported popular prudishness toward unorthodox sexual practices. Foucault remarks that there was hardly any commerce between the study of human sexual behavior and the scientific procedures involved in the biological study of plant and animal reproduction. Rather than emphasize the biases of this learned discourse, however, Foucault points out that, within this framework of discourses, sex was no longer treated only as a matter for morality, and became treated as a matter of knowledge, and of truth and falsehood.