Foucault, Michel History of Sexuality I

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume I. New York: Vintage Books. 1990.

On telling children (who had no sex) to not discuss or talk about sex.
“These are the characteristic features attributed to repression, which serve to distinguish it from the prohibitions maintained by penal law: repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence, and, by implication, an admission that there was nothing to say about such things, nothing to see, and nothing to know” (4).

“What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all “discursive fact,” the way in which sex is “put into discourse” (11).

“As if in order to gain mastery over it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present” (17).

“A twofold evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself into the stirrings –so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire” (20).

“all those social controls, cropping up at the end of the last century, which screened the sexuality of couples, parents and children, dangerous and endangered adolescents—undertaking to protect, separate, and forewarn, signaling the perils everywhere, awakening people’s attention, calling for diagnoses, piling up reports, organizing therapies. These sites radiated discourses aimed at sex, intensifying people’s awareness of it as a constant danger, and this in turn created a further incentive to talk about it” (31).

“We must not forget that by making sex into that which, above all else, had to be confessed, the Christian pastoral always presented it as the disquieting enigma: not a thing which stubbornly shows itself, but one which always hides, the insidious presence that speaks in a voice so muted and often disguised that one risks remaining deaf to iit” (35).
When something must be confessed then it must be a great sin. That plus the fact that it was especially taboo for women create the perfect atmosphere for guilt rhetoric.

"This much is undeniable: the learned discourse on sex that was pronounced in the nineteenth century was imbued with age-old delusions, but also with systematic blindnesses: a refusal to see and understand” (55).

“On the face of it at least, our civilization possesses no ars erotica. In return, it is undoubtedly the only civilization to practice a scientia sexualis; or rather, the only civilization to have developed over the centuries procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret: I have in mind the confession” (58).
“Let me offer a general and tactical reason that seems self-evident: power is tolerable only on condition that is maks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms” (86).

WHY guilt is so powerful!!!!