Lucy Worsley reviews a new book on the subject, Faramerz Dabhoiwala's The Origins of Sex:
Philip Larkin facetiously claimed that "Sexual intercourse began/ In nineteen-sixty-three … Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And The Beatles’ first LP". If perchance you thought that Larkin was being serious, Faramerz Dabhoiwala will put you right. The Oxford historian sets out to show that sex began in the 18th century – or, to be fair, that’s when people started thinking and talking about it in a recognisably modern way.
From an Economist review:
[T]he key driver, Mr Dabhoiwala believes, was the spread of religious tolerance and nonconformity, which eroded the church’s authority and let people define morality more personally. Samuel Johnson, a high Tory Anglican, spoke for many in 1750 when he opined that "every man should regulate his actions by his own conscience". His close friend and amanuensis, James Boswell, chronicled his own frequent encounters with whores and musings on polygamy with little show of guilt. For Boswell and many of his contemporaries, morals were "an uncertain thing".
From a series of book excerpts, Dabhoiwala touches on homosexuality:
Some of the most remarkable utterances of the 18th century were the first principled defences of same-sex behaviour as natural, universal and harmless. One night in 1726, William Brown, a married man, was arrested at a notorious pick-up spot with another man's hand in his breeches. When surrounded by hostile watchmen and challenged as to "why he took such indecent liberties … he was not ashamed to answer, 'I did it because I thought I knew him, and I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body'". That sodomy had been accepted by all the greatest civilisations of the world was one of the themes of the young clergyman Thomas Cannon's Ancient and Modern Pederasty (1749). "Every dabbler knows by his classics," he pointed out, "that boy-love ever was the top refinement of most enlightened ages."
The Dish 