Although societal taboos are increasingly becoming fewer and fewer in contemporary culture, it is a common facet of human nature to observe that when something ‘obscene’ is expressed publicly in popular culture, it immediately will become a widespread sensation. One example that comes immediately to mind is the recent New York Times best selling novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” which although contains dubious literary merit – or so I’ve been told – also vividly depicts human sexuality in a way not often brought up in polite conversation, so inevitably everyone felt the necessity to read it.  This idea that what is considered ‘wrong’ or ‘inappropriate’ is also exactly what society craves obsessively and will go to any lengths to get a glimpse of is a focal point in Michel Foucault’s discourse in “The History of Sexuality,” and goes farther to say that by defining these harmless notions as wrong in the first place we are in fact creating our own taboos which we will then feel the necessity to obsess over and crave. In the text Foucault states that in censoring and “putting boundaries [around] what one could say about sex…installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity of discourse about sex” (1506).  It is because these limitations pertaining to acceptability in society are so rigidly fixed that make taboos so desirable to us.

Foucault portrays this repressed state of society by ways of Europe in the Victorian era 17th century. He states the origins of this form of thought rests in this age primarily through the mode of the teachings of the Catholic Church, “whose greatest reserve was counseled when dealing with sins against purity” (1503).  The Catholic Church is still notoriously uptight about sexuality and one’s ability to overtly express it, and as seen with the various scandals concerning Catholic priests and small children throughout the years, perhaps they are not taking the right approach to this ideation of sexuality. It is an interesting notion that we in fact are the perpetuators of the very ideas we as a society claim to abhor by identifying these ‘wrong’ concepts in the first place, and is a concept which brings me back to Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying” in which he states that the fact we are able to use language so readily is because we as a society forgot that we were the ones who created it in the first place. There is a forgetting period which is pertinent for any established ideology to continue existing as supposed ‘fact’ and this is seen in the Victorian era’s view, and in a sense still of our own contemporary capacity to discuss taboos such as explicit sexuality in popular society today.