Women and men were seen as serving distinctly different roles. While men were expected to be aggressive, competitive, and suited for work in the public world, women were expected to be gently, chaste homemakers who provided stable moral guidance for their families. Women were considered to be virtuous, and sexually passionless, and thus were held to a different moral standard than men. Because of this presumption, most middle-class Americans saw women as the moral guardians of the home, charged with controlling the lustful natures of male family members. In general, sexual passion was seen as a potentially destabilizing force that needed to be controlled. In other words, a new ideology of sexual restraint became prevalent among middle-class Americans. .
Moreover, in the nineteenth century America, physicians began to take the place of both church and state as the authoritative source of sexual norms and urged men to avoid all sexual stimulation before marriage and to practice sexual control within marriage. Victorian-era doctors and much of the public understood sex by analogy to the second law of thermodynamics, believing that excessive sex led to mental and physical degeneration, thus undermined his ability to rule his family and compete successfully in the business world. With this in mind, entrepreneurial inventors developed such devices as a genital cage that would ring an alarm when a boy wearing it had an erection, to prevent masturbation. Some advice manuals recommended that married couples limit coitus to once a month and then only for the purposes of procreation. .
Although so-called sexual impropriety including non-procreative sex and non-marital sex was publicly condemned, it was quietly tolerated among men, who were assumed to have relatively strong sex drives. While prostitutes were criticized for their lack of respectability and for their immorality, their customers rarely received such censure.