nection between classsociety and sexual repression and advocated relentlessly
for the individual’sright to sexual happiness,including through the separation
of sexuality from procreation.Accordingto Reich, the denial of infantile sexual-
ity and the suppression of adolescent sexuality hadadetrimental impact on the
development of healthygenitality.However,his subsequent calls for sexual lib-
eration in the spirit of heterosexualgenitality werepredicated onadouble exclu-
sion in the sexual and political realm. On one side, the exultation of communist
potencyrequired the denial of those oral and anal desires thatFreud and others
call polymorphous perverse and the pathologization of thosesexual variants
that for MagnusHirschfeld, founder of theWissenschaftlich-humanitäresKom-
mittee(Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), include homosexuality.Onthe
other side, the affirmation of masculinity as the normative model ofahealthy
sexualityreduced the problem of femininityto acondition of lack.Within this
logic, women had access to sexual and politicalagency onlywithin the terms
of masculinity,anargument that had profound consequences for their assigned
role in the workers’movement.
Reich’sscenarios of sexual and politicalrevolution werebased on timeworn
clichésabout the greater sexual prowess and healthier sexual appetites of the
lower classes that had fueled the literary imagination since theFrench Revolu-
tion. These fantasies translated deep-seated fears about the power of the masses
into highlysexualizedterms.With proletarians thus castasmodern primitives,
Reich, partlyunder the influenceofthe anthropologist BronislawMalinowski,
freelyspeculated about“that part of natural sexuality that distinguishesthe
members of the exploited class from those of the ruling class and that has grad-
uallybeen destroyed in the process of‘democratization’without ever disappear-
ing altogether.”²²Lacking the economicgoals and opportunities of the middle
class, the workers presumablyhad no need to control theirsexual urgesand
to complywith bourgeois conventions of marriageand familylife. Despite the
very real problems causedbypoverty and hardship, proletarians presumably
wereless neurotic overall, with Reich concluding that“genitality is all the
more unrestrained, the worse the material living conditions are.”²³Accordingly,
the ideal-typical revolutionary distinguished himself through aspecific sociosex-
ual habitus (i.e., open,direct,simple) against which everything and everyone
Reich,Die Massenpsychologie desFaschismus,144.Reich drawsonananthropological per-
spective (indebtedto Malinowski) on sexuality in primitive communist societies to buttress his
argument for sexual liberation inDer Einbruch der Sexualmoral. Zur Geschichte der sexuellen
Ökonomie,sec. ed.(Copenhagen: Verlag für Sexualpolitik, 1935).
Wilhelm Reich,Die Funktion des Orgasmus. Zur Psychopathologieund zurSoziologiedes Ges-
chlechtslebens(Leipzig: InternationalerPsychoanalytischerVerlag,1927), 169.
296 Chapter 16