Last love: The ‘double standard of ageing’ and women's experience of gender and sexuality at mid-life

Officers and Gentlemen

Itch, Clap, Pox ◽

10.12987/yale/9780300217056.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 14-61

Author(s):

Noelle Gallagher

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Venereal Disease ◽

Early Modern Period ◽

Double Standard ◽

Gender And Sexuality ◽

Medical Texts ◽

Male Power ◽

Positive Representations ◽

Disease Focus ◽

Sexual Promiscuity

This chapter asks what imaginative representations of venereal disease say about Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward gender and sexuality. It does so by considering the portrayal of venereal infections in men. It is no coincidence that many of the positive representations of the disease focus on male rather than female subjects. It has been suggested that the sexual double standard (whereby men were applauded for sexual promiscuity and women punished for it) played some role in shaping imaginative representations of the infection. However, so too did a culture that linked infection to manliness and male power. While historians working with medical texts from the early modern period have tended to conclude that the disease was seen as originating with, and spread by, women, many eighteenth-century literary and artistic works imagine venereal disease as male—as a condition predominantly experienced by men, caused by male sexual indiscretion, and passed on by philandering husbands to their faithful wives and innocent children.

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Marias and marriage: ethnicity, gender and sexuality among Italo-Australian youth in Perth1

Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1177/144078339903500101 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 35 (1) ◽

pp. 1-22 ◽

Cited By ~ 34

Author(s):

Loretta Baldassar

Keyword(s):

Ethnic Identity ◽

Cultural Transmission ◽

Second Generation ◽

Double Standard ◽

Gender And Sexuality ◽

Traditional Model ◽

Sexually Active ◽

Culture Clash ◽

Generational Changes ◽

Social Scientific

Using an ethnographic account of weddings and network activities among Italo-Australian youth in Perth, and, in particular, a symbolic analysis of garters and bouquets, this paper explores the intersections of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and reviews social scientific theories of ethnic identity and cultural transmission. By investigating the double standard-where men are free to be sexually active and women are not-it confronts some of the stereotypes about 'second generation Australians' and 'culture clash', female oppression and the control of sexuality. Of particular concern is the way that some Italo-Australian women perceive sexual freedom in Australian society. The paper argues that the moral community represented by the youth network and, in particular, the challenges posed by it to the traditional model of female honour, allow for significant generational changes in the construction of ethnic identity. By analysing how identities are constructed and articulated across difference, and how 'this kind of relativising' is 'embodied in the habitus [cf. Bourdieu 1977] of the second generation' (Bottomley 1992a: 132), the paper explodes homogeneous conceptions of what is Italian, and ltalo-Australian culture.

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