Clio's first codslap for 2012
Spotted in The Observer New Review before noon GMT, Jan 1st (New authors for 2012):
For Philip Larkin, famously, sexual intercourse began in 1963, and this has become something close to a prevailing view of our times. But the 42-year-old historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala decided to dig a little deeper and, after a decade of research, the result is his radical and enthralling debut The Origins of Sex, published in February. Here we discover that the "first sexual revolution" can be dated to the 18th century; even our prurient interest in the sex lives of celebrities can be traced to this time with the rise of media-savvy courtesans such as Kitty Fisher, who gazes out seductively from the book's front cover.
And this is new exciting and rad exactly HOW and Y?
At first I thought, o dear, journalist who no nuffink and is probably embarrassing the historian in question by picking up on stuff that's not what he thinks the book is doing that is new and fresh, but no, on closer examination Faramerz Dabhoiwala appears to think that no-one has ever spotted this before.
Duh.
It's got whiskers on it, though perhaps the egregious Edward Shorter is sufficiently discredited that his thesis about the C18th sexual revolution in The Making of the Modern Family, 1975 (rise in illegitimacy = sexual liberation, woohooo; uh, no, actually it meant that old community controls around pregnancy then marriage were breaking down) has fallen off the map. Even so, there's quite a lot of historiography out there (do I need to invoke the late, great Roy Porter, who showed up as the ODNB Life of the Day yesterday? among many others).
As for the celeb culture thing, having finally got to the First Actresses exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery yesterday, this seems to be rather well known.
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