Moreover, in the nineteenth century America, physicians began to take the place of both church and state as the authoritative source of sexual norms and urged men to avoid all sexual stimulation before marriage and to practice sexual control within marriage. Victorian-era doctors and much of the public understood sex by analogy to the second law of thermodynamics, believing that excessive sex led to mental and physical degeneration, thus undermined his ability to rule his family and compete successfully in the business world. With this in mind, entrepreneurial inventors developed such devices as a genital cage that would ring an alarm when a boy wearing it had an erection, to prevent masturbation. Some advice manuals recommended that married couples limit coitus to once a month and then only for the purposes of procreation.

Toward the end of WWII, pharmaceutical companies were able to produce large quantities of medicinal penicillin, which proved to be effective against syphilis and gonorrhea. Ironically, the invention of penicillin only imposed a stricter condemnation of sex outside of marriage during the latter part of the 1940s and much of the 1950s. Moreover, the fear of communism during the cold war era has also contributed to the strict code of sexual ethics. As historian Margo Horn points out, “a range of high-level officials and influential thinkers linked communism with sexual depravity… According to this logic, sexual excess or degeneracy made individuals easy prey for Communist tactics. It was feared that Communist agents would use evidence of homosexuality or extramarital affairs to blackmail government officials into handing over top secret information”. ( page 95, Mary) Gays and lesbians, who had enjoyed a degree of tolerance in the early 1940s, faced severe harassment and discrimination during the early years of the cold war. Heterosexuality, premarital abstinence, and marital fidelity came to be seen as crucial to national security.

Over the next few years, Sanger and other activists gained national support as they wrote and lectured widely on the issue of birth control. Her sympathizers included women’s rights advocates and radical anarchists such as Emma Goldman, who gave provocative speeches praising contraception and criticizing marriage and sexual chastity. With the support of physicians, birth control came to be seen as an important component of public health, family planning, and population control. In 1921, Sanger founded what would later be known as the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America, which is the first of the more than three hundred clinics throughout the United States found within a decade, whose jobs were to provide contraceptive information and devices to women.

The sexual prosperity of the 1920s faded after the stock market crash of 1929, largely because the consumerism and entertainment that invited sexual adventure temporarily lost its touch on the American people. Birth control information and devices, however, became even more widely available in 1936 after a federal appeals court overturned the anti-contraception stipulations of the Comstock Law. Condoms were easily obtainable in grocery stores, gas stations, and restaurants, and sexual activity was no longer presumed to be purely reproductive.

It is also during this period in which the Kinsey Report, compilation of study by the behavioral researcher Alfred Kinsey, which included the Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, is published. According to Kinsey, 90 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women surveyed had engaged in premarital sex, and half of the men and a quarter of the women had had extramarital relations. Moreover, 50 percent of the men acknowledged feelings of sexual desire for other men, and a third admitted to engaging in homosexual activity as adults. Though Kinsey’s data and research techniques were heatedly discussed and challen

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