Episode 89. Sexual Heresies
SYNOPSIS
In 1920 Marie Stopes, author of the guide to sex Married Love, privately sent the bishops of the Church of England a 26-page booklet which she had transcribed as an important message from God: the sexual union of a man and woman was to be regarded as a divine act, separate from the purpose of procreation. Later that year she sent 2,000 randomly selected Anglican clergymen a questionnaire about their sex lives, an early, if unsolicited, example of such a survey.
Answering the questions about sex (and sexuality) that everyone had always wanted to ask, and answering them in a dry, restrained scientific manner, had emerged as a late-Victorian discipline. Hampered by the dangers of official censorship, men like Edward Carpenter (1844-1929) and Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) had trod carefully, just as Darwin had done in his revelations about natural selection. Sexologists used the techniques of anthropological survey and psychology in their work, drawing together anthologies to advance their case, not unlike the Freudian Ernest Jones (1879-1958) and author of The Golden Bough James Frazer (1854-1941).
Yet, as Professor Joy Dixon points out, the relationship of sex to religion was much more complicated than a simple process of secularisation. In his 1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience William James warned of the danger of reinterpreting religion as a form of “perverted sexuality”. Like Havelock Ellis, many popular writers as diverse as W. T. Stead and Radclyffe Hall held the secular and the sacred in complex union, and the episode provides a survey of some of the most important figures.
GUESTS
Professor Joy Dixon is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Her principal research interest is the relationship of science, religion and sexuality. In 2001 Joy published Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. In May 2026 Sexual Heresies was published by Stanford University Press.
Copies of Sexual Heresies can be purchased at a discount using the code DIXON20 in North America at www.sup.org and in the UK at https://mngbookshop.co.uk.
Simon’s interview with Joy Dixon was recorded online on 20 August 2026.