In his Essay “History Of Sexuality” Foucault addresses the censorship of sexuality from the 17th onward. In most of the western world sexuality was exclude from common everyday language, and vocabulary. The upper class or bourgeois as it was known during this time, established these cultural traditions and  laws of sexuality not being a topic that could be openly discussed. According to Foucault, restrictions on sex existed even among close relationships between parents and their children, teachers and their students, or even workers and their bosses or masters. Another common practice that was established during 17th century was that the topic of sex had its time and place to be discussed. Surprisingly these types of restrictions and rules were much more clearly defined than at any other time of history.

One thing i found interesting in Foucault’s essay was the involvement and strong participation of the church in the insertion of sex as a part of the confession institution. I was very surprised to see that so much emphasis was given to controlling and manipulating people’s connections and relationship to the topic of sex, but during confession this topic was not only addressed, but also dealt with with incredible transparency and detail. This is something that particularly surprised me because I’ve always known church to be extremely restrictive and preserved about sex, but to see that at one point, this institution was the only place where sex was actually spoken of explicitly surprised me very much.

Lastly another thing that captured my attention was the way the Victorians made a connection between “perverseness and mental illness”. This is something that exists to a certain extent today because many sexual offenders are regarded as mentally deficient, although they also spend time behind bars for some of their actions. These legal sanctions and prohibitions to this form of behavior also developed during the Victorian era. As a result one can see that many of the concepts of sexuality that are still present today began during the Victorian era. As an example of how the government and politics is still part of the culture of sexuality today, one can use the struggle for abortion and planned parenting as an example. One of the most recent is the struggle to include anti-conception pills in the medical programs of companies is a perfect example of how the government is still very much involved in the cultural development of sex.

 Foucault attempts to demonstrate this idea of power with the use of discourse of sex.  He uses the idea that if one does not want to think about something you will think about it 3x more by trying not to think about it. If someone were to tell you to not think about pink elephants. The first image in your mind would be a pink elephant. This is because it is human desire to look and rebel against the laws that prevent us from our natural instinct to investigate. In the Victorian Era sex was something that was not appropriate to discuss in public. It was a taboo to talk about such things and therefore causing this censorship on sex. 

      Foucault also uses the church and the act of confession as another cause of the desire to think and act sex out more. In class we discussed the idea that the priest plays the role of God. The priest must help the sinner by examining  “all your thoughts, every word you speak, and all your actions…”(1504). Now one must identify the bad thoughts and judge ourselves in order to get rid of the thought of sexual discourse. The more that we fight against the use of language to allow sexual discourse to be mentioned, the more people are falling prey into thinking about discourse. The church transformed this practice of confession. It no longer only became confessions about the sin, but it became confessions on our thoughts and our desires. It was a sin to think anything that was not holy. 

         As the centuries past we focused this on this taboo of sexual discussion. We no longer focused on the primary issue that started this conversation. This means that people no longer were concerned about couples that had sex in marriage anymore. They were more concerned when sexual intercourse happened outside of these boundaries that we socially constructed. Now as a result Foucault demonstrates that this new taboo involves things such as pedophilia, homophobia, and beastiality. Why have these issues been causing issues recently? It is because they are the taboo of this era.  This makes me question that once gay is accepted socially as an appropriate sex form, what would the new taboo be?

        The discussion of sex became a big priority in society. The more society knew about the sexual discourse that occurred in their time period, the more they wanted to control this aspect. People began to study sex and analyzed this information to get power. As this idea of power became important to society, they began to construct certain rules that would help regulate the amount of sexual discourse.  Population, birth rate, and demographics became a study. Children’s sexuality became important, causing strict rules and restrictions on their age group. Foucault wanted to demonstrate this issue of power and how they used it to censor sex.