Historical Silence: How Silence Shaped Sex, Gender, and Power

When we talk about historical silence, the deliberate suppression of sexual voices across cultures and centuries. Also known as sexual repression, it’s not just what didn’t get written down—it’s what was actively buried, punished, or erased. From Victorian doctors calling masturbation a disease to courts refusing to hear rape victims, silence wasn’t accidental. It was policy.

Gendered narratives, the cultural rules that labeled women’s desire as dangerous or unnatural turned pleasure into shame. Bisexual erasure, the refusal to acknowledge attraction to more than one gender made half the LGBTQ+ community invisible—even in their own spaces. And consent history, how permission was never assumed, always controlled shows why "yes" meant different things depending on who you were, where you lived, and what century you lived in. These aren’t footnotes. They’re the foundation of how we understand sex today.

What you’ll find here isn’t a list of old facts. It’s a map of who got to speak, who got silenced, and how those choices still echo. You’ll see how steam-powered vibrators were sold as medical tools to calm "hysterical" women. How medieval marriages were legal contracts, not love stories. How a 16th-century poem got banned for showing a dildo—and why that matters now. These stories don’t just explain the past. They reveal why so many still feel unsafe speaking up about sex, pleasure, or identity today. The silence wasn’t empty. It was full of power.