Yes, I agree SilverTrees and the previous posters make some good points too.

I don't have the whole answer but apparently it was during the Victorian era that sex and sexuality suddenly took on the 'dirty' 'forbidden' 'wash your mouth out with soap for even speaking about it', air. But prior to then, sex wasn't thought of in that way at all. It was thought of in the same way people might talk about what they had for dinner the previous night. There was no stigma. So the Victorians had hangups which changed the way people viewed sex. Perhaps not coincidentally either, it was during the prudish sexually repressed Victorian era that the rise of the sex killer, the serial killer began as well with the Jack The Ripper murders of 1888.

So those are some of my thoughts.