Here’s an interesting fact: for most of recorded human history, married couples routinely shared their sleeping quarters with their children. Depending on how far back you go, and the wealth of the couple, it was likely that they bedded down beside aged parents, servants and livestock too. There wasn’t much choice in the matter – many houses were a single room and the concept of privacy had yet to be invented.

Here’s another interesting fact: in psychology, voyeurism is described as the interest in, or the practise of, spying on people who are having sex or engaging in behaviours such as undressing – activities we regard as private or intimate. Certain types of voyeurism are classified as a paraphilia, which is a fancy way of saying that this type of sexual behaviour is not normal.
Marry these two facts together and an interesting contradiction emerges. For countless numbers of years, avoiding seeing or hearing sexual activity was impossible, and chances are it would most likely have been your folks who were getting it on. By default, all humans would have been to some extent voyeurs or exhibitionists, and the idea that there was anything perverse about that behaviour would have been ridiculous.
To modern sensibilities watching people have sex is fine – hence the popularity of porn – but the idea of witnessing your parents at it is somewhat disturbing. What’s more, if you learnt that your neighbours were regularly having sex when the kids were in the room, chances are you’d call your local child protection services.
The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, called witnessing parental sex the “primal scene” and believed it could traumatise a child’s psychosexual development. Even fantasising or imagining the primal scene could have far-reaching consequences resulting in neurosis.
Although Freud argued that not everyone who witnessed the primal scene would develop sexual neuroses, he did regard it as fairly fundamental. If Freud was right, it begs the question: was the world full of neurotics before sexual privacy became common or did the development of sexual privacy help create neuroses?
By the time Freud developed psychoanalysis, which was around the end of the 19th century, sexual privacy was the norm for wealthy Viennese like him and prudishness about sexual matters was the only respectable attitude. However, this was very much a middle-class phenomenon. For the urban poor, small farmers and labourers, privacy was rarely guaranteed, which is one reason why the behaviour of the so-called “lower orders” so shocked the sensibilities of the wealthy.
All of this is really just a preamble to point out that what we regard as appropriate sexual behaviour is very much historically and culturally contingent. We talk about the sexual revolution in the ‘60s as if it freed up sexual behaviour, and to a large extent it did in the industrialised world, but we still have a number of rules of what we think is proper and improper sexual behaviour. Some sexual rules are subject to law, but plenty of others are the product of convention.
Take the issue of voyeurism. Spy on others having sex through a bedroom window and you are a pervert, spy through a computer window and that’s normal.
Then there is the flipside of voyeurism – exhibitionism. Have sex in a field where there is a small chance you’ll be spotted and you are sexually adventurous; have sex in a street where you will definitely be seen and you’re regarded as lacking self-respect, possibly being downright sick.
How about the issue of virginity? We have laws regarding the age of consent, but we also have unwritten rules about an upper age limit too. Reach your mid-20s without having had sex, and unless you are a member of an abstinence club, most of your friends will wonder if you are bizarrely asexual or just a loser with the opposite sex.
Then there is the whole idea of sowing your wild oats. We regard it as normal and proper for people to have multiple sexual partners before settling down with one person. If you think about it, it’s pretty weird that we expect people to go from a sexual feast to a famine after they utter a vow. In many ways it made more sense to ask people to wait until they got married – at least they wouldn’t know that they were missing out on variety.
There are unspoken rules about what you can try, do and enjoy sexually, but only as long as you do them in a certain way or not too often. If you visit lap-dancing clubs frequently to entertain clients, that can be seen as the cost of doing business; visit the same clubs for your own enjoyment on a regular basis and many people will decide you have a problem.
A similar attitude exists with regard to buying sex. According to numerous reports, buying sex is all part and parcel of a stag weekend. Most of the men who do so would never dream of buying sex at home, but away in a foreign country, surrounded by mates, and drunk, paying for sex is seen just part of the fun. Exactly the same behaviour is seen as a laddish lark in some circumstances, but as an admission that you are a loser, a creep or a sex addict in others.
As a society we are quick to judge those whose sexual behaviour flouts convention. We pore over salacious details of celebrities whose infidelities become public knowledge; we argue over whether or not someone’s sexual past makes them fit to hold public office; we shame women who seem too free with their sexual favours or wear too few clothes.
I’m not suggesting that I am above all this. There have been plenty of newspaper scandals that caused me to snort in derision at the protagonists who thought that fame and money would protect them from being caught. However, by far the majority of these scandals did not involve anything illegal or violent. Rather they were people stepping outside the bounds of what is conventionally regarded as proper sexual behaviour, such as sleeping with grandmothers or forgetting their knickers.
Nor I am trying to say that conventions about sexual behaviour are necessarily a bad thing. I have a load of them myself. Hundreds of years of precedent be damned – if I ever have children I am not going to have sex in front of them! This is nothing to do with Freud but simply because the whole idea seems wrong. But I am also pretty sure that my feelings are based on the fact that this is 2011 and not 1511.
Some conventions may be a good thing, others are unfair, but in the end they are all just conventions – nothing more than a mixed bag of ideas handed down by religion, social mores, and the influence of parents, teachers, friends and the media, which have changed significantly over the course of human history and will continue to.
Oddly enough, Freud’s major theory of psychosexual development was that when a child cottoned on to the fact the father had a penis but the mother did not, he or she assumed that the mother had lost hers. This led to “castration anxiety” in boys and “penis envy” in girls. Freud regarded this as a good thing and a necessary step to the development of a healthy adult sexuality.
The first time I read this I was astounded. Okay, admittedly it is a strange enough theory in itself, but what surprised me was the idea that Freud seemed to think that seeing your parents in the all-together was fairly common stuff. What the hell was going on in middle class Vienna? Was nudism popular or did nobody knock before entering bedrooms?
Perhaps Freud would say that a significant part of my sexual development has been damaged because I managed to make it to adulthood without the opportunity to compare my parents’ genitalia. That’s because in the Sexton household – and presumably in yours too – clothes were worn in the presence of others. I for one am grateful for that fact. Naked parents? No thanks!