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The Sex Police in History

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Journal of Gender, Culture and Health

Abstract

Jean Gerson, Simon André Tissot, and John Harvey Kellogg in the 14th, 18th, and 19th centuries, respectively, advocated the policing of sexual behavior, particularly masturbation in boys. Contemporary manifestations of the policing of sex are victimology and the recovered memory movement. Both historical and contemporary sex policing efforts suffer from the lack of scientific methodology and faulty reasoning regarding causality, as in the revival of prepsychoanalytic Freudian infantile seduction theory. Exigency theory provides a theoretical framework with which to examine sexual transgression, nonjudgmentally, under the rubric of treatment and cure rather than crime and punishment.

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Money, J. The Sex Police in History. Journal of Gender, Culture, and Health 4, 269–279 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023215420826

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023215420826

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