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Foucault's History of Sex

            Foucault sought to explore the history of sex in three volumes of his book History of Sex namely: The Will to Knowledge (La volonté de savoir), The Use of Pleasure (l'usage des plaisirs), and The Care of the Self (le souci de soi). .
             In his books he mainly tries to tell us that what we perceive of sex today and the paradox about how we talk about not talking about sex is not something that is of recent coming but has been in the society for quite some time. He says that in the 17th and the 18th century, the bourgeoisie actively tried to confine sex to something that should be talked about with specific people at specific times. And he thinks this lead to an undercurrent. He believed that this was just the show of power that the upper class tried to have on people. Keeping in mind that fact this was a time when they were going to rule a population and not just a group of people that infested threats about population control et al. He believes this the reason why they sought to keep sex as something that happened behind closed doors and between man and wife. But this was also ironic of them as they themselves practiced sex as something that wasn't taboo which according to me only strengthens Foucault's arguments that the bourgeoisie class used sex mainly to control the sexual urges of people that might have lead them to deal with major social problems. .
             He also highlights how efforts were made to confine sex to medicine and prostitution so as to actively take part in such feelings of sexual urges but not publicly. This also explicates Sigmund Freud's chief concepts are based on sexuality. He came from a time when the ruling class basically asked the world of medicine to talk about sex and explore sex and hence that is that Freud did. He sought to explain psychology as a part of sexuality and thus his debatable concepts. Also such undercurrents of sexual talks were also present in classrooms where students were of course not allowed to talk about sex but the way the class was arranged the way they were seated, the dormitories et al all pointed towards the 'taboo' of sexuality.


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