Worker sexuality

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Worker sexuality is a term introduced in Germany by Gunter Schmidt and Volkmar Sigusch in the early 1970s in sociology and sex research and stands for a sexuality of workers that is perceived as distinct from bourgeoisie . Historically, the discourse of workers' sexuality can be classified in the discussions about the sexuality of the so-called lower classes.

Discourses on Worker Sexuality

Turn of the century: eugenics and racial hygiene

In the middle of the 19th century, the economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) saw the lower classes as unbridled instinctuality and called for the lower classes to starve if they did not want or cannot refrain from “instinctual increase”. Neo-Malthusianism, i.e. eugenics and the racial hygienic approach of the turn of the century, adopted this stereotyping of the sexuality of the lower classes of the population. Bettina Rainer sums it up as follows:

The racial hygienists justified their demand for a birth policy based on eugenic principles, in particular with the allegedly different reproductive behavior of the “superior” and “inferior”: while the ambitious, capable and sensible people limited their number of children, those classified as “inferior” from a racial perspective stood out lower social classes through their “unbridled instinctuality” and corresponding “over-fertility”. As a result of these “differential fertility rates”, the race hygienists painted the almost apocalyptic picture of a general “ racial degeneration ” on the wall.

In the United States around 1923, in response to mass unemployment, the eugenic associations considered carrying them out with mass sterilization.

1930s: sex pole and the sex suppression thesis

The sex researcher and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) began at the end of the 1920s with sex-economic studies that differentiated between workers and citizens. He founded the Sexpol movement (abbreviation for Sexualpolitik), a political movement that was initially identical to the KPD's “German Reich Association for Proletarian Sexual Policy”. The movement set up sex-economic advice centers primarily for workers (initially in Vienna and later in Berlin). Reich and the Sexpol group he founded conducted sex education in the counseling centers , turned against jealousy and family structures, and provided information about masturbation and contraceptive methods. In Vienna there was also a dispute with the Social Democrats surrounding Karl Kautsky junior, who set the “healthy” (professional) worker sexuality apart from the “brutalized” sexuality of the ragged proletariat , while Reich was more likely to “petty bourgeoisie” of the working class through repressive sexual morality saw. One of the theses of the Sexpol movement was that sexuality in the petty bourgeoisie is suppressed and that workers have a less suppressed sexuality. The family structure and sexual morality extend into the upper class, but even more into the working class:

The ideological and educational inhibition of sexuality on the one hand, and the watching and experiencing of the most intimate processes among adults on the other hand already lay the foundation for sexual hypocrisy in children. This is somewhat mitigated in industrial worker families, where the emphasis on the eating and digestive functions is less strong, but genital activities are more occupied and less prohibited. The contradictions are therefore smaller and the path for genitality is freer. This is entirely due to the economic way of life of the industrial worker family. If an industrial worker rises economically into the ranks of the labor aristocracy , his outlook changes accordingly, and his children come under greater pressure from conservative morality.

Michel Foucault criticized the sexual suppression thesis in his volume Sexuality and Truth . Nevertheless, a distinction must be made between bourgeois and working-class sexuality: one must say that there are class bodies. In terms of sexuality and truth , he advocated the thesis that sexuality was a bourgeois construction, a sexuality dispositive: It was not about suppressing the sex of the classes to be exploited, but about the body, strength, longevity, fertility and the offspring of the " ruling classes. What blood was to the nobility, sex was to the bourgeoisie.

1950–1970: Kinsey and further empirical research into worker sexuality

Various studies of worker sexuality took place between 1950 and 1970. Until then, the stereotype of the “unbroken naturalness” of worker sexuality was valid, but these studies turned worker sexuality into a “problem case”. According to the sex researcher Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894–1956), men and women from the “lower classes ” took up coitus relationships earlier than members of other classes. However, this would not go hand in hand with greater freedom of movement in sexual contact. The US studies drew

rather, a picture of sexuality in which the satisfaction, emotionality and equality of the partner are distorted by orgasm disorders and prudish coital monotony, by lack of communication, fear, resignation and brutality, by defamatory double standards and rigid gender role clichés.

A gender-specific differentiation was made here. The best-known studies were the two Kinsey reports on male and female sexuality, which also differentiated according to class.

In the Federal Republic of Germany, studies on worker sexuality only took place between the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Above all, the work of Gunter Schmidt and Volkmar Sigusch should be mentioned here. A survey of 20-year-old factory workers gave similar results as before in the United States:

Tenderness such as kissing, breast stimulation, manual-genital and oral-genital contacts are much less common with them. Likewise, the sexual positions are varied much less frequently. After all, the nudity of both partners in coitus is much less common in the lower classes than in the higher education and professional classes. The differences mentioned can be observed in single people as well as in married people.

Gerhard Vinnai attributed the rigid worker sexuality that emerged in these results to the reification in the work process:

The use of the body as a work instrument under capitalist production conditions sabotages the development of sensuality: The reification of the body in the work process leads to its desensitization and mutilation. Unregulated lust, playful behavior and spontaneous action are driven out of those who have to let their bodies be used by a terrorist economy.

Class-specific studies of sexuality were also carried out in the Scandinavian countries (Hertoft 1967, 1968, 1970, Zetterberg 1969). In contrast to the German and especially the US studies, which believed to have identified clear class-specific differences, hardly any differences were found between the lower and middle classes.

Current debates: sexual neglect of the lower classes?

In the context of the discourse on the new lower class , the media looked at the sexuality of young people from the so-called lower class from the perspective of neglect . In particular, this shows itself in a callous, re-enacted, fast hard sex without love, which is inspired by sexist music texts by rappers .

Current studies that support this thesis are not available. A Danish study could not confirm the neglect of the sexuality of young people from the lower class, which the media claimed. She came to the conclusion that male adolescents between the ages of 14 and 17 consume an average of 30 minutes per day, female adolescents an average of 9 minutes of pornography, with no differentiation according to social class.

The thesis of the higher instinctuality or neglect of the "lower classes" is criticized by Hans Peter Duerr, among others . Show

... that neither the bourgeois commentators from the early days of industrialization and the Victorian-Wilhelmine epoch, nor Norbert Elias and his successors, can refer to any facts, but merely adhere to prejudices and ideologies that were already widespread about the lower class in the Middle Ages In later times they certainly contributed to the fact that many a gentleman and his sons approached the servants from the proletariat or from the country without hesitation, because they were convinced of their instincts and sexual availability.

Current research areas

Queer Studies

The interpretation of homosexuality from a proletarian point of view was not uniform. The young Soviet Union was one of the first states in the modern era to temporarily allow homosexuality by abolishing the relevant paragraphs. A few years later, however, the homosexual paragraphs were reintroduced under Stalin . This went hand in hand with a dichotomization of “healthy workers sexuality ” and the “ decadent ” decadent former ruling classes and their sexuality. This is how Henri Barbusse expressed himself in 1926 on behalf of many social democratic and communist comrades:

I think that this perversion of a natural instinct is, like many other perversions, a characteristic of the profound social and moral decline of a particular section of contemporary society. At all times the signs of decay have shown themselves in refinements and anomalies in the life of the senses, of sensation and of feeling.

Today homosexuality is only registered as a middle class phenomenon. Studies of homosexuality often remain in the middle-class milieu. This becomes particularly problematic when, for example, HIV prevention is only geared towards the middle-class milieu, although gay men from the lower class are more affected due to the socially unequal probability of falling ill.

According to a recent study, coming out in the Federal Republic of Germany seems to be more difficult for lower-class gay men than for middle-class gay men:

23% of lower-class men hide their homosexuality from heterosexual people who are important to them, compared to only 9% of middle-class men. 65% of men from the lower classes see their homosexuality as accepted by their social environment, for middle class men the figure is 70%. Acceptance in the family is 62% for respondents from the lower class and 70% for men from the middle class. As a result of greater social isolation, 15% of lower-class men compared to 3% of middle-class men state that they have no closer circle of friends.

Porn Studies and Prostitution Research

Most male and female sex workers belong to the lower classes. Historically, prostitution developed in its modern form in Europe in connection with the increasing urban poverty with the beginning of industrialization. The women's movement , which came from the middle-class milieu, campaigned for the prostitutes. This campaign, which saw prostitutes less “guilty” than victims of male lustfulness, “changed [...] the political landscape of Britain in late Victorian times . The campaign challenged social and sexual conventions that had never been publicly discussed before. The campaign radicalized numerous women, hardened them against public attacks and slander and created an infrastructure for political protest ”. (Philipps, p. 86) In 1886 it finally achieved the abolition of the decrees that made prostitutes victims of state arbitrariness. However, it followed from the closure of the brothels that from now on the prostitutes were sent to the streets by the pimps , which made their situation even worse. Today, the majority of prostitutes also come from lower social classes, although the type of sex work must also be differentiated according to class. While women from the lower class tended to work in brothels and on the street , the escort service was more likely to be used by sex workers from higher milieus - in recent years, however, an alignment has taken place here.

In the discussions about the legitimacy of pornography and prostitution, the social origin of sex workers plays an important role. Martina Schuster pointed out that studies like that of Høigård and Finstad, prostitution evaluate negative and criminalizing free calling, mainly focused to the curb, where the social background of sex workers is the working class and the lower class. On the other hand, the study of the sex-positive feminists Giesen and Schumann is mainly based on call girls who came from the middle and upper classes. While Høigård and Finstad mainly criticized the exploitation of sex workers with low social origins, Giesen and Schumann called for social recognition of the call girls provided by the middle classes.

The American scientist Constance Penley, who comes from the lower class, shows a completely different perspective. Based on the porn film John Wayne Bobbit: Uncut , she explains that certain porn films can be interpreted as a protest against class privileges and civic values ​​( The White Trashing of Porn ).

Worker Sexuality in the Media

Movies

Novels

See also

literature

  • Michel Foucault : The will to know . In: Sexuality and Truth . tape 1 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-28316-2 (Original title: Histoire de la sexualité . Translated by Ulrich Raulff and Walter Seitter).
  • Constance Penley: Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn . In: Linda Williams (Ed.): Porn Studies . 2004, ISBN 0-8223-3312-0 , pp. 309-335 (English).
  • Kathy Preiss: "Charity Girls" and City Pleasures: Historical Notes on Working-Class Sexuality . In: Ann Snitow (ed.): Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality . Monthly Review Press, 1983, ISBN 0-85345-609-7 (English).
  • Marc Rackelmann: What was the Sexpol? Wilhelm Reich and the Union for Proletarian Sexual Reform and Maternity Protection. In: emotion. Contributions to the work of Wilhelm Reich , 11 (1994), pp. 56–93 352 kB)
  • Wilhelm Reich : The Sexual Revolution . For character self-control of people. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1971, ISBN 3-436-01422-2 .
  • Gunter Schmidt , Volkmar Sigusch : Worker Sexuality . An empirical study on young industrial workers. Luchterhand, Neuwied / Berlin 1971, DNB  458852961 (without ISBN).
  • Christa Uhlig: Sex reform , sex education and the labor movement. Discourses in the magazines “Die Neue Zeit” and “Sozialistische Monatshefte” from the turn of the century to the First World War. In: Yearbook for Research on the History of the Labor Movement, Issue I / 2003.

swell

  1. ↑ For example, the sex researchers Gunter Schmidt and Volkmar Sigusch speak undifferentiated of worker sexuality and lower-class sexuality in their study on worker sexuality from 1972.
  2. ↑ Bettina Rainer: The discourse of overpopulation. On the metaphor and function of a prospective global catastrophe , page 68, chapter 3 - dissertation, FU Berlin, 2003
  3. ↑ Bettina Rainer: The discourse of overpopulation. On the metaphor and function of a prospective global catastrophe , page 233, chapter 3 - dissertation, FU Berlin, 2003
  4. ↑ Journal for Political Psychology and Sexual Economy - Organ der Sexpol -. Wilhelm Reich - Sexpol - ZPPS (1934–1938)
  5. ↑ Marc Rackelmann: What was the Sexpol? Wilhelm Reich and the Union for Proletarian Sexual Reform and Maternity Protection. In: emotion. Contributions to the work of Wilhelm Reich , 11 (1994), pp. 56–93. (PDF; 352 kB)
  6. ^ Wilhelm Reich: The sexual revolution , p. 90 f. Part 1; Chapter V: The forced family as an educational apparatus.
  7. ↑ With this thesis, Reich tried to explain the subject mentality under National Socialism in his work Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus .
  8. ↑ During the student revolt, Reich's writings were rediscovered, and the idea of ​​the liberation of sexuality ( free love ) led, among other things, to the establishment of Commune 1 and Commune 2 .
  9. ↑ Michel Foucault: Sexuality and Truth. Vol. I, p. 121.
  10. ↑ a b Schmidt, Sigusch: Arbeiter-Sexualität, p. 10
  11. ↑ AC Kinsey: The Sexual Behavior of Men , AC Kinsey: The Sexual Behavior of Women
  12. ↑ Gerhard Vinnai (1973): Social psychology of the working class. Destruction of identity in the educational process , p. 39.
  13. ↑ Schmidt / Sigusch (1971): Arbeiter-Sexualität , p. 11.
  14. ↑ Gerhard Vinnai (1973): Social psychology of the working class. Destruction of identity in the educational process , p. 38 f.
  15. ↑ Schmidt, Sigusch: Arbeiter-Sexualtität, p. 18.
  16. ↑ Walter Wüllenweber: Sexual neglect. Full porn! , in: Stern  issue 06/2007
  17. ↑ Walter Wüllenweber: Lower class: The true misery , in: Stern  Heft 52/2004
  18. ↑ Anette Dina Sørensen: The mainstreaming of Pornography in Mass Culture , p. 3 (Word document) ( Memento of the original from October 9, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sm.ee
  19. ↑ Hans Peter Duerr 2002: The Myth of the Civilization Process. Volume 5: The Facts of Life. P. 371 f.
  20. ^ Kurt Hiller: Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform , 1928
  21. ↑ Klaus Fischer: Social inequality before illness and death in HIV and AIDS   Gesundheit Berlin eV ( Memento of the original from January 18, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gesundheitberlin.de
  22. ↑ Michael T. Wright, Michael Bochow: The particular vulnerability of homosexual men from lower social classes   Gesundheit Berlin eV ( Memento of the original from October 22, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  (2003) last updated June 23, 2006 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gesundheitberlin.de
  23. ↑ Martina Schuster: Struggle for respect. An ethnographic study on sex workers Tübingen 2003, p. 18 ff.
  24. ↑ Constance Penley: Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn.