Most people think they know the story of modern sexuality. Victorians were repressed, prudish, and terrified of desire. Then came the twentieth century—Freud, the sexual revolution, liberation. We threw off our shackles and finally learned to speak freely about what had always been forbidden.

Michel Foucault thought this narrative was almost entirely wrong. Not because Victorians were secretly liberated, but because the very framework of repression-then-freedom misunderstands how power operates. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues that modern society didn't silence sexuality—it produced it. It created an explosion of discourse, classification, and knowledge about sex that had never existed before.

This counter-intuitive thesis challenges our most basic assumptions about freedom, power, and what it means to be a sexual being. Understanding what Foucault actually argued requires setting aside comfortable narratives about progress and liberation.

Foucault opens by questioning what he calls the repressive hypothesis—the widespread belief that sexuality was systematically silenced from the seventeenth century onward, only to be liberated in recent decades. This story feels true to us. It flatters our sense of historical progress and positions us as enlightened inheritors of hard-won freedoms.

But Foucault asks a deceptively simple question: if sexuality was really repressed, why did people talk about it constantly? Victorian society didn't push sex into silence. It created institutions, disciplines, and vocabularies specifically designed to discuss, categorize, and analyze sexual behavior. Confession, psychiatry, sexology, pedagogy, criminal law—all developed elaborate frameworks for extracting and producing truth about sex.

The repressive hypothesis also serves a particular function. When we believe that speaking about sex is inherently transgressive, we feel courageous for doing so. We imagine ourselves as rebels against prudish authority. This makes us less likely to notice how our own discourse about sexuality might serve power rather than challenge it.

Foucault isn't claiming no one was ever punished for sexual acts. Rather, he's arguing that the overall mechanism of modern power regarding sexuality has been productive rather than merely restrictive. Power doesn't just say no—it creates desires, identities, and ways of being.

Takeaway

The narrative of repression-then-liberation may itself be a mechanism of power, making us feel free while keeping us within established frameworks for thinking about sexuality.

If sexuality wasn't repressed, what was actually happening? Foucault's answer: an unprecedented proliferation of discourse. The modern era witnessed an explosion of institutions dedicated to making people speak about sex—and not just speak, but confess, classify, and produce knowledge.

Consider the invention of the homosexual as a category. Before the nineteenth century, there were forbidden acts—sodomy was a crime anyone might commit. But psychiatry and sexology created a new kind of person: someone whose entire being was defined by their sexual orientation. The homosexual became a species, with a particular psychology, physiology, and life history. This wasn't liberation—it was a new form of capture.

The same process created the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, the perverse adult. Each became an object of study, surveillance, and intervention. Doctors, teachers, parents, and priests were all enlisted in a vast apparatus for producing truth about sexuality. The confession—once a religious practice—became secularized and scientized.

This isn't simply negative. Foucault acknowledges that this proliferation enabled new forms of resistance and identity. But he wants us to notice that speaking about sexuality isn't automatically freeing. It depends entirely on how we speak, within what institutional frameworks, and toward what ends. The incitement to discourse can be as controlling as silence.

Takeaway

Creating categories and demanding confession isn't liberation—it's a different mode of control, one that works by producing identities rather than simply forbidding acts.

Foucault's analysis connects sexuality to his broader theory of modern power. He distinguishes between older forms of sovereign power—the king's right to kill or let live—and a distinctly modern form he calls biopower: power that administers life rather than threatening death.

Biopower operates on two levels. At the individual level, it disciplines bodies—making them productive, docile, and self-regulating through schools, prisons, hospitals, and other institutions. At the population level, it manages birth rates, mortality, public health, and heredity. Sexuality sits precisely at the intersection of these two registers: it concerns individual bodies and their pleasures, but also reproduction and the biological future of populations.

This explains why sexuality became such an obsessive concern for modern states and institutions. It wasn't Victorian prudishness driving the endless discussions of masturbation, birth control, prostitution, and perversion. It was a governmental rationality that saw population management as essential to national strength. Sex became political because bodies became calculable resources.

The implications extend to our present. When we debate reproductive rights, sex education, or sexual identity, we're operating within frameworks Foucault identified. These aren't simply private matters that governments intrude upon—they're sites where the modern state has always asserted its interest in managing life itself.

Takeaway

Sexuality became politically central not because authorities wanted to forbid pleasure, but because managing reproduction and bodily conduct became essential to modern governance.

Foucault doesn't offer a program for sexual liberation. His analysis is diagnostic rather than prescriptive. He wants us to recognize how deeply our ways of thinking about sexuality—even our sense of rebellion against repression—operate within power relations we don't fully see.

This can feel disorienting. If speaking freely about sex isn't automatically liberating, what is? Foucault suggests we need to question the very framework that makes sexuality the privileged site of our deepest truth. Perhaps freedom lies not in confessing more, but in refusing the demand for confession altogether.

The point isn't cynicism but critical vigilance. Understanding how power produces rather than merely represses opens new possibilities for thinking differently about bodies, pleasures, and identities.