Historian Rebecca L. Davis’s Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America was published last year, but journalist Marty Moss-Coane aired a wonderful interview with Davis on her radio show The Connection just last week. We think it’s well worth your time. Davis’ project is an in-depth and vast accounting of sexual desires, acts, and identities in the United States from the 1600s through to today. Her project contains many useful tools for helping us to understand society’s present relationship to sex and sexuality. If you don’t have time to read 450 pages of sex history my dear sexual subjects, then at least start with this podcast episode! In it, Davis and Moss-Coane discuss the book’s findings and unpack some of the nuances of digging around in the archives for, and doing research on, all things sex. Davis explains that in “in the history of sexuality, a lot of the earlier records show us when something went wrong: there was a conflict, there was violence, there was an unmarried person who became pregnant, or something of that kind, and that’s when records show up.” To get a fuller account, therefore, historians must be creative in accessing sources that display a greater diversity of voices and experiences. This is why we at HARD COPY give a damn about highlighting sex stories that do more than merely expose scandal and highlight harm.
