MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Marital sex instruction literature was available to and consumed by a broad swath of American society during the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century. Though the hundreds of books written in this vein had a diverse authorship—clergy, physicians, novelists and athletes were all well represented—they all tended to converge on a fairly rigid formula grounded in the authority of medical science. While the emphasis and approach of marriage manuals changed over time, the genre as a whole tended to move as a pack, with little variation among contemporaneous books as to content. Though far less normative or censorious than might be expected, while this literature was the predominant form of adult sexual education (through at least the 1940s), it noticeably narrowed the popular American discourse about sex.

The postwar rise of sex advice columns in newspapers and magazines, as well as the inclusion of more overtly sexual topics in established advice columns, was a significant factor in the decline of the marriage manual’s outsized influence on American sexuality. Beginning with a monthly question-and-answer feature in Sexology (an ostensibly nonpornographic pulp magazine with a broad subscription base), these columns had a democratizing effect, putting expert and interlocutor on a more even footing. Reader-driven explorations of sex were radically out of step with the established categories of expert-driven sex education. While recent scholarship has downplayed the notion of a sudden sexual revolution in the late 1960s, the discourse around sex did become markedly more broad, both ideologically and in terms of subject matter. In this paper I argue that the new sex advice columns were an important causal agent in this process, and trace the influence of several of the most widely read ones.