The paper examines two aspects of coitus interruptus as a sexual practice: (1) how, in the age of fertility decline in Western Europe, its meaning was reinterpreted from an earlier theological view that condemned it as licentious to a nineteenth century view that emphasized restraint, and (2) how it was actually experienced by a socially stratified birth-controlling population in rural Sicily, ca 1900-1970. The sequential experiences of gentry, artisans, and peasants in the Sicilian case study of transition from high to low fertility are consistent with late twentieth-century interpretations of coitus interruptus by Foucault and others as sexually restraining yet empowering. In each group, adoption of the practice enhanced access to respectability in a context of cultural and economic change. Moreover, those who adopted the practice increasingly stigmatized married couples with high birth parities as overly dominated by their sexual instincts and unworthy of respect.