A business card for adult sex is hidden among the papers. It reads: “Adult sex file, adult sex monitored on suspicion of prostitution.” Adult sex workers are required by law to register and undergo mandatory medical examinations. They are only allowed to work in “accepted enterprises.” France was the proponent of the regulatory model, which quickly spread throughout France. By all reports, adult sex acts are not recorded. She charged a sliding scale fee for sex acts with adults, depending on the customer’s height. She avoided prosecution because police could not prove that her acts were sexual. The notes said she was “strong” and that her genitals were “very unique, so she took advantage of that.” It is unclear whether Adult Sex provided sexual services to customers, but she did make home visits.
Adult Sex Male Behavior living in a brothel
A few lines further down is another entry describing a person who worked there as an adult. The report says that his/her/their marriage was annulled due to “adult sex, referring to a “wrong” sex assignment at birth. The words intersex and transsexual were not used at the time. The body in question is.”
The story I am looking for is hidden among many medical reports written by doctors who tried to answer two questions they considered crucial to scientific inquiry: Do bodies exist that are neither male nor female? Do bodies exist that are still female? If not, what is the adult sex of the body in question? The search was initiated by a legal requirement in France that the sex of newborns must be determined as an adult within three days. Doctors treating patients in childbirth considered themselves responsible for making decisions crucial to the child’s future, a life course that differed greatly depending on gender.
The investigations were followed by reports, publications, papers, conferences,
And increasingly public exchange of opinions about this or that group the medical world flowed into the cultural and legal realities of the time. “Adult sex” went from a source of fascination to a sign of a society in decline. Wars and economic hardships caused a sharp decrease in population growth rates in European countries, partly because somehow, “adult sex is now not only a physical but also a mental category.” Although the medical community disagreed about whether hermaphrodites were “real” or “pseudo-hermaphrodites,” the dualistic understanding of gender was enshrined in law in most countries in the early 20th century.
Eventually, there were thousands of case studies detailing the subjects’ physical characteristics
The productive researcher collects and classifies more than 1,000 case studies. He carefully sorted each report into categories and assigned each case a number—books – Sex. The librarian told me that I was only allowed to read it under the neon lights of the National Library. The pages are yellowed and fragile, so I must carefully turn them with gloved hands. What I see are hidden faces: blindfolded, faces covered with hands, scraps of cloth used as masks, heads just outside the frame, backs turned, alongside exposed adult genitalia being torn apart by hands, sometimes with hooks, sometimes by the camera lens failing to satisfy the viewer’s desire for intimacy.