Sexuality, Repression, and Power

Sexuality, its repression, and the power responsible for this repression are the central themes in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality. Sexuality, according to Foucault, is a repressed entity in modern society, and has been so for the past two hundred years. The sexual openness once common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became carefully confined and “moved into the home…silence became the rule.” (page 3) Though he believes that we are repressed he advocates that we have been forced into this repression by some form of power – we have been made to believe that we are repressed. Personally, I do not think that Western societies today are repressed in any sense of the word. In all aspects of life – whether it is on TV, in the movies, in the songs we listen to, in the books we read, in the advertisements we see, or just in public – sex and sexuality are prominently displayed. I think it is fair to go as far as to say that nowadays very little sells with...