‘Amate ma non generate’: Sexual Pleasure and Marital Hygiene in Paolo Mantegazza’s Sexual Science

Abstract

Summary By exploring the links between popular marital medicine and Paolo Mantegazza’s sexual science, this article will shed light on the positive discourses on sexual pleasure that circulated during the second half of the nineteenth century in Italy. By doing so, it aims to draw attention to popular medicine’s contribution to the emergence of modern ideas on sexuality. First, the article will show how nineteenth-century marital sexual guides were influenced by eighteenth-century embryology, which considered mutual sexual pleasure as necessary for procreation. Second, it will demonstrate how, in Mantegazza’s sexual science, pleasure acquired importance in itself, as demonstrated by his committed advocacy of methods of contraception that safeguarded pleasure for both partners. Finally, the article will argue that the sexualisation of marriage in the 1920s can be understood as part of a long-standing positive discourse on pleasure embedded in the genre of marital sexual guides.