Demography, Pleasure, State, and Market in Socialist Sexology: Medical-Sexological and Sexual-Psychological Public Discourse in Socialist Hungary Through Counseling Books From a Social-Political Perspective

Abstract

This paper analyzes medical-sexological and sexual-psychological public discourse in Hungary between the Second World War and the regime change, through counseling and science communication books. It engages with works on the history of Hungarian socialist sexual discourse. It differs from such works in two main respects. One is the method of selection of analyzed content: for this study, I systematically included in the database all of the books of two Budapest libraries. The second one is the framing: compared to previous work, I place more emphasis on the political embeddedness of the discourse and how the changing geopolitical situation of Hungary affected the discourse. I argue that discourse trends, initially responding to negative demographic trends the high number of divorces, evolved due to Hungary's “Westernization” and market logic, and the promotion of female sexual pleasure and socialist romanticism becoming increasingly pornified and technical between the 1970s and the regime change.