“She had come to know cupid before she met the registrar.”

Slovene and Italian Authors Dealing with Problems of Sexuality in the Bourgeois Era

Abstract

The article deals with the differences in the treatment of sexual practices that existed between works that were published in central Slovenian regions and works that were published in Trieste, Koper, Gorizia and Reka during the bourgeois era. These were mostly written by Italian-speaking authors, who wrote about topics such as women sexuality, masturbation, sex education and sexual diseases with no major constraint. They were able to do so because they had come to realize that ignorance did not help protect morality and that it was no longer possible to keep quiet, given the alarming rate with which sexual diseases spread. While Italian writers openly supported birth control, the use of condoms, education of the young and strict hygiene in brothels, their Slovene counterparts adhered to moral teachings and complicated terminology that referred to the subject matter only indirectly. Slovene and Italian writers shared only the similarly uncompromising attitude towards masturbation; however, even here the two sides differed in their approach: Italian authors talked openly about the phenomenon and threatened every possible and impossible consequence that might deter individuals from performing it, while Slovene authors preferred simply to avoid this problem.