“Our forebears embraced the joy of sex. They had a great time”
Ellie Cawthorne: What do you think are the main things that we’ve got wrong about the history of sex?
Fern Riddell: Everything. If you look at what you learned in school, perhaps what you were told by family and friends, by TV and films, there’s so little that anyone has got right about sexual culture in the past. For example, we tend to have this belief that everything we do, we do for the first time – that we’re the most modern and progressive. But when actually you look at the past, that isn’t true at all. There is nothing new, especially in terms of sexual identity. We may be using modern terminology by talking about “sexual identity”, and that might not be the way that people in the past would have phrased it, but those identities nonetheless existed.
Every time we talk about gender or sex in the past, it’s about how men and women lived by very specific rules, or weren’t allowed to do certain things, all because of their gender. That’s become a received belief that we need to challenge. I think we really struggle to understand that the ability to reject binary definitions, and not believe you had to fit into a box, existed in the past.
More traditional histories of sex have focussed on legal or religious prescriptions or the work of scientists and sexologists. But
