Wooo Victorians!

I cannot speak to the Americans and Japanese with as much authority as I can for the English, so please keep in mind that I endeavour to answer the British part of your question. In the case of the British, the answer is yes, they were far more understanding. But it is rather a complex question and has far more to do with emotions than the physical pleasure of sex and the answer for Britain straddles two very different generations.

It all starts with the Georgians. By all means, both Georgian men and women had by many accounts robust and healthy sexual mores. Notably, the Georgians were permissive (to a point) with a few issues that would become or were in the past huge faux pas and outright crimes. Notably female indiscretions (read premarital sex and cuckolding) and homosexuality enjoyed rather different social pressures than they would in the decades to come in the Victorian era. In many ways, the Georgians were an interlude between two of the most conservative British generations. They were rebelling against the Puritan society that came before them and stand in marked contrast to the Victorian who will follow.

A notable example of female indiscretions being tolerated is a snippet about a rich and powerful landed family, the Gordons. The Gordon's were rich and powerful but they had a well documented streak of mental illness running through their family tree. A match had been arranged for one of their daughters but the fiance had used the Gordon madness as an excuse to walk away from the match. This, of course, became a very public affair because it involved the rich and the powerful, the Duchess Gordon then strode into the melee and tried countering the excuse with these words, "But my Lord, there is not a drop of Gordon blood in her veins.". While it did not change the outcome, it is remarkable that such a public announcement of infidelity came second to the scandal of a noble lord daring to pull out of a marital contract.

The Georgians had a remarkably more humane understanding of emotions than the Puritans or the Victorians. Furthermore, emotions were not the purview of women. Rather, the view of the emotional balance was reversed from what we know today. Women were reputed to be made of sterner material when it came to emotional stresses, in great part because they were often expected to marry men they did not know or love. Their extramarital dalliances were tolerated but it was understood that should they come to be with child, they would certainly not be permitted to keep them.

This could lead to strange situations. The famous Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire, was made to be the godmother to her own child which she had had with Charles Grey, who would later become Prime Minister. But that situation pales in comparison to the complex family web that the extramarital coupling of the Lady Bessborough and the Lord Granville Leveson Goser. The Lord Granville would father two of Lady Bessborough's children but would later come to marry her niece a certain Lady Harriet Cavendish. This had the effect of making the Lady Harriet stepmother to her own cousins.

Georgian society was also far more accepting of the emotional outburst of men. Crying, in particular, wasn't exactly seen as feminine but as a valid expression to emotional turmoil. Both the Whig Party leader, Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger, political titans of their generations had famous emotional, tear filled outburst in parliament and they had negligible impacts on their careers.

By the 1830s, things had begun to change drastically.

The Victorians had very different ideas.

The Victorians were outright prudes. They viewed sex as nothing but a barbaric necessity of propagating the species. Enjoyment of sex was both immoral and wasteful A plethora of diseases were attributed to indulgence in sexual pleasure. Where the Georgians viewed emotions as part of the human experience, the Victorians promoted vigilance against excess in everything, including emotional outbursts. The masculine ideal shifted from one of a man in touch with others to one of a man aware at all times that he shouldn't reveal much about his state of mind.

Men and women were categorized differently by scientific minds of the time as absolutely different in terms of their sexual needs. The myth that men are essentially polygamous while women are essentially monogamous came out of the Victorian era. The thinking at the time was that "the majority of women, happily for them, are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally". Women in Victorian England (and throughout the empire) were believed to have no inherent sexual needs.

This showed in the concern that Victorian society showed to the act of prostitution. The Victorians by the 1860s were in a veritable moral and societal panic about "rampant harlotry". Some historians ascribe to the theory that the Victorians saw daughters and female employees as fitting into their role only if they were subservient to male authority. It was a view that clashed directly with the facts of life for a prostitute as it meant that the women involved had some degree of independence afforded by the fact that they had their own means to acquire money. In turn, every public outlet for morality from church sermons to the newspapers represented prostitutes and women who enjoyed sex as depraved and dangerous. These women were to be chased from society because they were invariably diseased in body and mind.

The government of Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston would eventually pass the Contagious Diseases Acts which forced women that were "susceptible of contracting venereal diseases" to be examined by medical professionals. The prevailing conservatism in the medical professions often meant that any woman who was seen as independent could be forced to detention by a willing medical profession with the view that this was for their own good.

Men with few children were to be admired, they were considered to be of a stronger moral fortitude because they did not impose the horrors of sexual congress on their wives. So, even between husband and wife, society injected a certain measure of sexual control. I couldn't write a blurb about Victorian sexual mores without including a particularly telling quote about a mother dealing with a soon-to-be-married daughter who had confided her socially appropriate nervousness about the demands of her bridegroom, her answer to her own daughter regarding sex is particularly telling her advice was to "shut one's eyes and think of England.".

The Victorians didn't like to have sex.

HEAVILY sourced from Victorian Values: An Introduction by Bayley and Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England by Norton.

Additional source by Daily Life in Victorian England by Mitchell.

If this isn't scholarly enough, feel free to delete it - but in Liza Dalby's "Geisha", she discusses the process by which the geisha gradually replaced the oiran (courtesans) in popularity. She mentions an expression: "the caged bird that sings in the night will sell well", and then follows it up with a comment to the effect that courtesans enjoyed (or pretended to enjoy) sex as part of their job/role in society, whereas wives were not expected to behave that way. If they did, it would most likely have been seen as inappropriate.

All this in the context of the concepts of honne versus tatamae - or what you truly think versus what you show to the world. Based on my readings (which, admittedly, are more or less limited to women's studies topics when it comes to Japanese history and culture) I would say that in some ways, as long as you kept what you were doing in its proper place and time, just about anything would have been acceptable.

Another thing to mention, which I first read in Dalby's book but have seen mentioned in other books with similar subject matter, is that when the Japanese government realized that their system of legalized prostitution was considered shocking by the outside world, they attempted to abolish it. In the mid-1800s, a series of reforms to the sumptuary laws closed most of the official licensed quarters and later, an attempt was made to reduce the influence of the demimonde on popular culture by a ban on plays about courtesans and outlaws. These laws were by no means effective in the long term because some of these quarters are still in operation today, although with geisha practicing their art instead of licensed prostitutes.

A lot of the attitudes and behaviors surrounding sex in the Edo period were determined by both gender and class, so the answer also breaks down into what was expected of someone based on their position in society. Firstly, while Japan was more sexually "open" than many of the Western nations at the time, that sexuality was consumed by a specific portion of society-- men with enough money to buy sex and entertainment. Secondly, adult male sexuality was different than what we might define as the norm in the modern west-- buying sex with both women and boys was commonplace. Adult males in Edo period Japan held all the sexual cards, so to speak. Males were sexual actors (or as Gregory Pflugfelder puts in his book Cartographies of Desire, "inserters"), women and young men were acted upon ("insertees"). The submissive person in a sexual liason was not supposed to show too much desire for the sexual act, because that might make them seem dominant, which could be seen as a threat both to the masculinity of the man and to his position as the hierarchically superior person in a relationship. This is where we get a lot of the semi-non-consensual sounding phrases that we often hear from sexual accounts-- the women had to feign disinterest or fear, only to be "won over" by the strength and masculinity of their client. Further, since love was not something that was commonly found in politically-motivated marriages, sex in the marriage bed versus in the pleasure houses was very different. A wife might not be expected to enjoy sex at all, and even to play up her discomfort with the act as a sign of her chastity and moral uprightness, while a prostitute or courtesan would play more to the "oh, you're so much better than all my other clients, only you make me feel this way" narrative. This of course could also help her find a patron that would buy her out of the pleasure house, and in some cases marry her, thus freeing her from spending the rest of her life as a sex worker. Sadly, I don't know too much about sexuality in the lower classes, as many of the historical documents of the time don't discuss it at all. I would assume, as with many cultures, that sexual mores were a bit more relaxed among the lower classes.