Intercourse

INTERCOURSE begins, as is so often the case, as a form of currency. Promiscuous from the start, -course takes on multiple origins: with currĕre from Latin and cors or curs from Middle French, all relating to concepts of running, flow & movement (giving also current or currency today). The prefix inter- adds to this movement a sense of being between, among, amid, or in the midst, borrowed into English via the French entre-. The earliest examples of intercourse in Middle English are then styled -- somewhat obscenely -- as entercourse, to mean communication (particularly of commerce) between countries or locales. In the C16th New Chronicles..., we can see such productive intercourse at play in both language and bysynesse, albeit exclusively with Henry VII's southern neighbours:

"And thys yere was great bysynesse for the entercourse bytwene England and Flaunders. And this yere the kynge of Scottes made sharp warre vppon the marches."¹

This specific, transactional sense of entercourse softens with time, in the C17th coming to refer to any social communication between people or interconnection between things:

"For what needed any such remote Plantations be, as long as they had room enough to live one neer another, and so enjoy that civill entercourse, and mutuall society which the nature of Mankind doth most delight in?" ²

We see this sense also broadening in Milton's Paradise Lost published in 1667, when describing the nourishing exchanges of looks and smiles:

"Yet not so strictly hath our Lord impos'd
Labour, as to debarr us when we need
Refreshment, whether food, or talk between,
Food of the mind, or this sweet intercourse
Of looks and smiles, for smiles from Reason flow,
To brute deni'd, and are of Love the food,
Love not the lowest end of human life."

During this time a second current develops within the term, specifying a communion not betwixt people or things, but rather with the spiritual or unseen. The prolific author Daniel Defoe speculates on this connection in An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions in 1727:

"BUT it does not follow from thence that therefore there are no such Things in Nature; that there is no Intercourse or Communication between the World of Spirits, and the World we live in..."³

Such a 'sweet' and somewhat varied view of intercourse is however soured in the intervening years.

In 1753 An Act for the Better Preventing of Clandestine Marriage is introduced into parliament which legislates proto-Malthusian ideas of population management into law. For the burgeoning and increasingly industrious discipline of political economy the connection between the 'right' kind of marriage, a productive population and its concomitant national wealth is becoming evermore apparent.⁴ The act sought to reduce the incidence of so-called "rash" marriage, to eliminate the "frequency of polygamy" and restrict sex to marriage -- most contentiously by removing legal protections from women in the event of 'fornication'.⁵ From this we arrive at a sense of intercourse not as communion, communing or communication but as a fixed, illicit and indeed illegal activity. Malthus himself introduces this arrangement in his infamous Essay on the Principle of Population in 1803:

"An illicit intercourse between the sexes."

The common framing of intercourse as a sexual act thereafter seeks to moralise the term as variously illicit, promiscuous, and extra-marital. Sexual intercourse, a phrase which also comes into use in the late C18th pairs well with this new-found disfavour, specifying the otherwise 'neutral' or perhaps scientific union between the sexes -- whether they be human or otherwise -- exemplified in this 1753 musing from a (not-insignificantly titled) Essay on Celibacy:

"Man might have been made hermaphroditical, like some of the less perfect animals, as snails and worms, which however have sexual intercourse with one another."⁶

The development of such moralistic and scientific connotations reflect broader changes in the social life of the C19th towards increasingly biopolitical forms of governance. This is not to say that discussion of intercourse becomes 'repressed' (as is often said of the Victorians) -- rather sexuality emerges as the object of a newly revived medical, juridical and governmental interdiscourse. Such professionalised contexts and connotations are retained today in the often quasi-anthropological framing of the term, as in Fisher's 1973 tome Understanding the Female Orgasm:

"Some of the decline in intercourse frequency and responsiveness... may be caused by the... physiological decline of their husbands."⁷

During the late C20th Foucault (whose influence should be felt in this account) notes the irony of the sexual-liberation movement -- arguing that to free oneself from one set of norms means only adopting a different set in their stead, that there is no authentic or natural sexuality to liberate.

Perhaps we are then simply free to choose our influence, or in any case pick our poison. Which form of intercourse to have today -- the narrow or the expansive, scientia sexualis or ars erotica --  that of celibacy and science or that of speech, sex, spirits and smiles?

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This article was written for a monthly column in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout

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Footnotes

1. 1516-1533 New Cronycles Eng. & Fraunce, p.686 https://archive.org/details/newchroniclesofe00fabyuoft/page/686/mode/2up ↩

2. Peter Heylyn, 1652, COSMOGRAPHIE in foure Bookes Contayning the CHOROGRAPHIE & HISTORIE of the whole WORLD, and all the Principall Kingdomes, Provinces, Seas, and Isles, Thereof. p.9 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A43514.0001.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext ↩

3. Defoe, 1727, p.2 https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004843878.0001.000?rgn=main;view=fulltext ↩

4. Bannet, Eve Tavor. "The Marriage Act of 1753: 'A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex.'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 30, no. 3 (1997): 233--54 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30054245?seq=3 ↩

5. ibid. ↩

6. 1753, An essay on celibacy ↩

7. Seymour Fisher, 1973, Understanding the female orgasm ↩