Visions of masculinity: home-health advice literature, medical discourse, and male sexuality in English-Canada, 1870-1914
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis develops an analysis of the home-health advice literature and medical discourse concerning male sexuality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It reveals that advice authors and physicians responded to increased social fears concerning male sexuality by emphasizing sexual sublimation in favour of muscular Christian values of physical fitness and intellectual development. At the same time, the medical discourse associated male sexual misconduct with a series of disease syndromes which were repeatedly transformed to keep pace with changing medical knowledge and opinion. The first chapter, which provides insight into public perceptions, develops an analysis of the perceptions of male sexuality that were promoted within the home-health advice literature. These works emphasized sexual restraint as the core ideal in reformers' restructured vision of masculinity. Chapters Two, Three, and Four provide an analysis of the medicalization of male sexuality. These chapters explore attitudes toward male sexuality by looking at medical discourse concerning masturbation, spermatorrhoea, sexual neurasthenia and, prostatic disorders. These chapters reveal how physicians' views were restructured to reflect transformations in disease syndromes while maintaining the causative focus on male sexual transgressions. The idea that these conditions were merited diseases is explained in the analysis of reform and medical perceptions of venereal disease in chapter five. The last chapter explores the developing discourse concerning homosexuality during this period. Again, although transferred to the developing field of psychiatry, the discourse continued to emphasize the danger produced by illicit sexuality. Through this analysis, the dissertation contributes to historians' understanding of the influence of home-health advice literature and the medical discourse on perceptions of male sexuality. By paralleling the existing literature concerning the regulation of female sexuality, the dissertation seeks to balance our understanding of social attitudes toward sexuality during this period.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it