“No One in My Family Died from Doing It”: Sex, Health, and the Construction of Modern Masculinity in America

During the 1920s in America, the meaning of modernity was contested in ways that ranged from national politics to personal identity. This paper explores one aspect of this modernity-in-the-making by examining young men's experiences that shaped their sexuality: masturbation, homosexuality, promiscuity, and marriage. Using clinical records from a mental hospital, I illuminate how doctors and patients considered young men's concern about sexuality to be itself a sign of “immaturity”– and the lack of a modern, healthy self-image – requiring medical treatment. My focus on young men allows us to examine one of the key components in our thinking about modernity. These men were struck in unique ways by the era's cultural transformation. As youths, they pursued new freedom in self-expression, while as males, they desired to meet the traditional expectation to be masculine. However, the era's cultural flux made it difficult to satisfy both of these aspirations. The resulting uncertainty became highlighted as the men grappled with their sexual experiences. In examining young men's talk of sex, then, the paper looks at 1920s' modernity through the eyes of individuals who had considerable conflicts with it. This approach illuminates a range of cultural issues such as the shifting meaning of religion and the influx of racial, ethnic, and regional identities into urban life. By exploring these, I make crucial connections between the individual and the social, as well as the clinical and the cultural. I argue that doctors and patients together created a sense of America's changing face, redefining what it meant to be “modern” and open-minded. But this process also created a new category of illness for those who were deemed too concerned about sex. In a sharp contrast with their parents' generation that upheld self-control, a relaxed, and apparently carefree attitude became a new standard of the normal and healthy.