Abstract
Sexual utopia has been a recurrent, if often marginalized, tradition within British radical and socialist thought. Conceptualizing sex as a benign and creative force, such thinkers regarded its negative aspects (possessiveness, jealousy, exploitation, violence) as distortions produced by oppressive social institutions and economic inequality. In their ideal imagined state, sexual associations would no longer be contained within restrictive parameters enforced by repressive institutions, but would be a matter of free and equal choice, continuing only as long as desired by both parties. Such relationships might not even be confined to conventional monogamy, although the underlying utopian vision was quite antithetical to promiscuous libertinism, itself identified as yet another manifestation of inegalitarianism.
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Notes
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See also G. Scott Williamson and H. Innes Pearse, Biologists in Search of Material: An Interim Report on the Work of the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham (London: Faber and Faber, [1938]);
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Lesley A. Hall, ‘No Sex Please, We’re Socialists: The British Labour Party Closes its Eyes and Thinks of the Electorate’, in Meetings & Alcôves: The Left and Sexuality in Europe and the United States since 1850, ed. Jesse Battan, Thomas Bouchet and Tania Regin, Territoires contemporains, cahiers de l’IHC (Dijon: l’Institut d’histoire contemporain) 8 (2004): 65–78;
see also Lesley A. Hall, ‘Venereal Diseases in Britain from the Contagious Diseases Acts to the National Health Service’, and David Evans, ‘Sexually Transmitted Disease Policy in the English National Health Service, 1945–2000: Continuity and Social Change’, in Sex, Sin and Suffering: Venereal Diseases in European Social Context since 1870, ed. Roger Davidson and Lesley A. Hall (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 120–36 and 237–52;
and Lesley A. Hall, ‘Birds, Bees and General Embarrassment: Sex Education in Britain from Social Purity to Section 28’, in Public or Private Education?: Lessons from History, ed. Richard Aldrich (London: Woburn Press, 2004), pp. 98–115.
Lesley A. Hall, Sex Gender and Social Change in Britain, 1880 to 2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 167–76.
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Hall, L.A. (2007). ‘Arrows of Desire’: British Sexual Utopians and the Politics of Health. In: Bivins, R., Pickstone, J.V. (eds) Medicine, Madness and Social History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230235359_11
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