Sexual Conduct

The Social Sources of Human Sexuality

William Simon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351491167
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The first edition of Sexual Conduct, published in 1973, swiftly became a landmark text in the sociology of sexuality. It went on to profoundly shape the ideas of several generations of scholars and has become the foundation text of what is now known as the "social constructionist" approach to sexuality. The present edition, revised, updated, and containing new introductory and concluding materials, introduces a classic text to a new generation of students and professionals.Traditional views of human sexuality posit models of man and woman in which biological arrangements are translated into sociocultural imperatives. This is best summarized in the phrase "anatomy is destiny." Consequently, the almost exclusive concern has been with the power of biology and nature in sexual conduct as opposed to understanding the significance and impact of social life. In Sexual Conduct, Gagnon and Simon lucidly argue that sexual activities, of all kinds, may be understood as the outcome of a complex psychosocial process of development. Using the social script theory, the authors trace the ways in which sexuality is learned and fitted into particular moments in the lifecycle and in different modes of behavior.Sexual Conduct is a major attempt to consider sexuality within a non-biological, social psychological framework. It is a valuable addition to the study of human sexuality, and will be of interest to students of sociology, psychology, psychiatry, social work, and medicine.

1

The Social Origins of Sexual Development

Introduction

Underlying all human activity, regardless of the field or its stage of development, there exist metaphors or informing imageries—commonly unnamed until they lose their potency—that shape thought, experiment, and the directions of research. In the earliest days of the development of what is now modern physics, the metaphorical content of Newtonian mechanics could be found not only in the sciences, but in religion, philosophy and the widest range of activities of educated women and men (Turbayne, 1962). The Newtonian (Cartesian) metaphor of the universe as a large clock running its immutable course after having been designed and wound up by the creator was widely and easily accepted far beyond the narrow domain of physics. The content of the mental life of educated women and men, whether in the sciences or not, for that brief moment overlapped and the metaphors of the larger society and the paradigms of the sciences interpenetrated.

Once that central and organizing paradigm had been selected, as Kuhn points out, there began the separation of physics and then the other natural sciences from an immediate accessibility to even the well-educated (Kuhn, 1962). The content of the sciences has become increasingly limited to scientists and the generation of useful metaphors from scientific formulations has declined as the sciences separate from the society at large. Most recently it is argued that with the increased difficulty of translating the mathematical formulations of modern physics into usable social coinage, the field of physics has ceased to have any serious effect on the way most persons think about the world (Arendt, 1958).

Such unrecognized conceptions and metaphors are still characteristic of the modern studies of humanity, however, and these continue to draw upon conventional historical thought and upon folk wisdom to develop their modes of thought. In this important sense the study of humans and society is close to preparadigmatic; that is, there is no organizing scheme that directs our activities. Thus, central to the study of social life is a commonly unspoken belief in the existence of a natural human being; a woman or man who has innate transhistorical and transcultural attributes and needs. A dependence on the constancy of the human seems to be a necessary element in our desire to understand the past and in our belief in our capacity to control the future. A commitment to a fixed psychological (in some cases, physiological) nature of humanity allows us to see all of the actors of history as operating with our motives, concerns, and goals, so that Moses, Luther, and Bernadette of Lourdes, Vermeer, van Gogh and de Kooning, Sappho, Dante and Joyce, are equivalent figures removed from each other only by the exterior accidents of time and culture. At the higher cultural levels this tyranny of the present over the past is represented most vividly in Marxist and Freudian reinterpretations of history which involve profound assumptions not only about the past, but the present as well; in its more vulgar form it is in those cinematic personifications that allow Charlton Heston to be Moses, Michelangelo, and Ben Hur and serve as the crucial condensate of our cultural heritage. Taken together, the high and low cultural responses are variants of two historical fallacies pointed out by David Fischer, the idealist fallacy (resting upon a narrow and exclusive concept of Homo sapiens), and the fallacy of universal “man.” As Fischer argues:

People, in various places and times, have not merely thought different things. They have thought them differently. It is probable that their most fundamental cerebral processes have changed through time. Their deepest emotional drives and desires may themselves have been transformed. Significant elements of continuity cannot be understood without the discontinuities, too. . . . There is accumulating evidence of expressions of thought and feeling that make no sense unless we allow a wide latitude for change in the nature of cerebral activity through space and time. The range of this change is as obscure as its nature. But its existence is, in my opinion a historical fact which is established beyond a reasonable doubt. (Fischer, 1970, 203-4)

This rummaging through the past for useful arguments and ideologies to introduce cultural and social innovation in the present has been a characteristic of modern societies, and the impulse to connect ourselves no matter how tenuously with the past is in part an attempt to cast wider the net of a common humanity. However, it is in quest for (motivational) immortality that the modern impulse to use the past is converted into an attempt to psychologically colonize the future. High culture and low again combine in Committees on the Year 2000, Institutes for the Future, movies such as 2001 A .D., and television shows such as Star Trek.

At no point in human history has the historical-cultural specificity of the human personality and the concept of what is human been more evident, and at the same time there are extraordinary pressures against such a changed conception of the human. Committing the ethological fallacy, wherein we are warned that our hunting-gathering natures are the central themes around which modern men and women must organize their marriages and reproductive lives or in which we are instructed to consider our common attributes with other primates, is an example of an unwillingness to live with the existential and changing nature of men and women at an individual and collective level. Continuity is sought with all living things until one has an urge to plead for the theory of special creation (Tiger, 1969).

At no point is the belief in the natural and universal human more entrenched than in the study of sexuality. The critical significance of reproduction in species survival is made central to a model of man and woman in which biological arrangements are translated into sociocultural imperatives. In consequence it is not surprising that it is in the study of the sexual that there exists a prepotent concern with the power of biology and nature as opposed to an understanding of the capacities of social life.

Naturalness and the Body

In an important sense our concern with the natural in sexual conduct is ambiguous. At one level our view of sex insists that it is a natural function, growing out of biological or evolutionary or species needs or imperatives. It is this view that supplies us a belief in cultural, historical, and transspecies comparisons. At another level, however, the natural also exists in opposition to the unnatural; of the wide variety of sexual expressions there are those that are natural (i.e., contribute to species survival, virtuous in the eyes of God, or mental-health enhancing) and those that are unnatural (i.e., reduce species survival, are sinful or vicious, or involve mental pathologies). There is a linkage between these two levels, but more often we move from one to the other confusing our ideological inheritances about the sexual (as well as our ideologies about evolution, species survival, virtue, and mental health) in order to conserve one or another of our cultural-historical values.

In large measure our distinctions between the natural and the unnatural in sex behavior are directly based on the physical activities in which people engage when they are doing what are conventionally described as sexual acts. For most persons (even the most liberated of the post-Freudians) most of the time, it is the assembly of bodies in time and space that is the primary defining characteristic of normalcy or perversion, health or sickness, virtue or vice, conformity or deviance. Our laws embody our felt margin between those acts that are natural and those that are crimes against nature, delineating a narrow domain of de jure legitimacy by constraining the age, gender, legal and kin relationships between sexual actors, as well as setting limits on the sites of behavior and the connections between organs. Even if one leaves aside the legal allowances for the married, a status that clearly normalizes many aspects of sexual activity, coitus in the “missionary position” (the man above prone, the woman below supine) is the physical arrangement of bodies that calls forth our greatest sense of comfort in thinking about the physical aspects of sex. To move beyond this arrangement of bodies either in fantasy or fact is to move into a more shadowy realm where anxiety, guilt, and eroticism await. Indeed, to think about sex in terms of what bodies do is to begin to perform a sexual act— an act with its own norms and constraints, but at the same time an act that provokes the physiological beginnings of what Masters and Johnson have classified as sexual excitement.

It is perhaps startling to consider that when we think about the sexual, nearly our entire imagery is drawn from the physical activities of bodies. Our sense of normalcy derives from organs being placed in legitimate orifices. We have allowed the organs, the orifices, and the gender of the actors to personify or embody or exhaust nearly all of the meanings that exist in the sexual situation. Rarely do we turn from a consideration of the organs themselves to the sources of the meanings that are attached to them, the ways in which the physical activities of sex are learned, and the ways in which these activities are integrated into larger social scripts and social arrangements where meaning and sexual behavior come together to create sexual conduct (Burgess, 1949).

It is this assembly of the reality of the body and the social and cultural sources of attributed meaning that is missing in the two greatest modern students of sexuality in the West. In Freud we find a world dominated by the search for motivation, a world in which the body never seems to be very problematic since it is both the source of naturalness (anatomy becomes destiny) and the passive recipient of meanings attributed to it. At no point in psychoanalytic theory is there an extended consideration of the physical activities of sexual behavior and the ways in which these physical activities themselves require systematic linkage to social roles and social meanings. Sexual arousal lies in nature; the social world responds and shapes but does not initiate. In Freud sex itself seems disembodied and we are left with a world full of ideas and psychic structures only tangentially related to the bodies that are performing the acts (Freud, 1953).

In the work of Kinsey we see the opposite thrust. Here we have sexual women and men in the decorticated state; the bodies arrange themselves, orgasm occurs, one counts it seeking a continuum of rates where normalcy is a function of location on a distribution scale. Once again in our search for the natural sources of behavior, the meanings that actors attribute to their own behavior and that the society collectively organizes are left out. In the Kinsey reports sexual activity among primates and primitive societies, in the historical past and the present, are functional equivalents because the arrangement of organs and orifices appears similar. Thus, each instance of the presence or absence of homosexuality in various cultures is counted as an identical manifestation of evolutionary principles rather than being examined within the complex of meanings that a physical sexual relationship between persons of the same gender may have in various circumstances, at various moments in history, and in various subgroupings in a society. The physical sexual activity of two men when one of them is defined as berdache among the Western Plains Indians is identical with the sexual activity of two men in ancient Greece or in a modern Western society; but the meanings attached to the behavior and its functions for the society are so disparate in these cases that seeing them as aspects of the same phenomena except in the most superficial way is to vitiate all we know about social analysis.

Of the two figures, Freud has surely been of greater influence in shaping theoretical models of development and in the penetration of his ideas into the cultural ambiance. It is in the work of Kinsey, however, that we find the largest body of empirical data about sexual behavior. Despite the predominance of these two men in the discussion of the sexual, there is, from the point of view of the history of science, a curiously nonconsequential quality about their work. While the status of their ideas as cultural events has been substantial, there has been a painful lack of scientific follow-up of either their concepts or their data. This is not to say that there is not a substantial literature that has developed out of the psychoanalytic tradition, but in the largest part it has been narrowly concerned with the Talmudic imposition of Freud’s original models on clinical case histories or the reading of collective and sociocultural events.¹

Kinsey’s scientific fate has perhaps been ruder than Freud’s, since very little research of any sort has followed upon the publication of his two major works, perhaps no more than two to three papers of merit each year. His two large volumes continue to be for the most part undigested lumps in the craw of the research community. While Kinsey’s work had serious consequences in changing and creating cultural attitude, in bringing the language of sex into general public discussion (as Freud had done among intellectuals a generation before), there has been only a minimal increase in activity at the level of science, most of that preoccupied with the burdens of social bookkeeping, at the most significant points providing a context of cultural journalism.²

To some degree this failure to develop a research concern for sexual matters in the conventional disciplines can be laid at the door of scientific and cultural prudery, but it is equally a function of two other forces: the historical (and perhaps reactive) self-insulation of “sexological” researches and researchers from the main-stream disciplines, and the continued commitment—shared by both Freud and Kinsey—to a belief in “biological knowingness” or to the wisdom of nature in the explanation of sexual behavior and development.

The very idea of “sexology” tends to insulate those interested in sexual behavior from theoretical and methodological developments that occur on a broad front within the human sciences. Because sex is culturally isolated in general, researchers often claim exemption from normal methodological strictures and become deeply and defensively invested in the substantive content of sexuality while remaining indifferent to the rest of social life. The very specialness of sex makes its students special, both to themselves and others, and their possession of secret cultural knowledge is in itself sometimes intellectually disabling, since it often is used as a device to disarm criticism.

It is the most suspect of the expository literature about sex that attempts in a limited way to bring together feelings about sex with descriptions of sexual activity. Though most written pornography may appear to be (in the words of Steven Marcus) “organ grinding,” it does indicate a crude psychology and set of motivations for those who are performing the sexual acts (Marcus, 1966, pp. 292 ff). As we argue elsewhere (see Chapter 9), there is more social life in literary pornography than those who wish to contrast it to “literature” are wont to notice. In order for the sexual activity described or observed to have erotic stimulus value for the reader, the actors involved must be playing out some socio-sexual script that has significance for the reader. The capacity for arousal itself (including physical tumescence) depends on the presence of culturally appropriate eliciting stimuli composed of persons, motives, and activities combined to produce significant sexual actors in sexual situations. For all practical purposes, until the 1960s it was only pornography that made available descriptions of some of the physical aspects of sexual behavior. While limited in complexity and with a limited sensibility, the characters in pornography actually felt skin, smelled each other’s odors, tasted bodily fluids, and did sexual things.

Only recently in the scientific literature and only now in “higher” art is a significant component of physicality present in the descriptions of sexual activity. Because we possess theories of sexual behavior based on the immediate connection between explicit sexual descriptions and overt behavior, our analysis of the erotic does not come to terms with the fact that these descriptions are received into already existing complex cognitive and emotional structures. As a result of our commitment to nature and to the sexual organs as the primary sources of meaning we fail to observe that the doing of sex (even when alone) requires elaborated and sequential learning that is largely taken from other domains of life and a resultant etiquette that allows for the coordination of bodies and meanings in a wide variety of circumstances.

The complex outcome that is marital coitus, the most common form of sexual conduct in our society, involves a vast array of human learning and the coordination of physiological, psychological, and social elements, practically none of which can be attributed to nature writ large as evolution or nature writ small as a morality play based on glandular secretions. Our concern here is to understand sexual activities of all kinds (however defined, good or evil, deviant or conforming, normal or pathological, criminal or noncriminal) as the outcome of a complex psychosocial process of development, and it is only because they are embedded in social scripts that the physical acts themselves become possible. This combination of various periods of development into the articulate behavioral sequence that leads to orgasm is not fated or ordained at any level; it is neither fixed by nature nor by the organs themselves. The very experience of sexual excitement that seems to originate from hidden internal sources is in fact a learned process and it is only our insistence on the myth of naturalness that hides these social components from us.

The Sexual Tradition

The most important set of images for sex or eroticism in the modern West, either for scientists or in conventional educated speech, derives from the language of psychoanalysis. It would be difficult to overstate the coercive power of Freud’s innovative verbal reformulations of a whole range of early conceptualizations about the role of sexuality in its biological, personal, and societal contexts. In an important sense Freud remains the superego of nearly all researchers into the sexual, since we must in some measure either conform to or rebel against his body of ideas. As with most great innovators, Freud began with the available set of contemporary ideas that were part of the heritage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is difficult for those in the 1970s, for whom Freud is received wisdom and whose conservative postures are now most evident and emphasized, to recognize his role as a radical theorist of sexuality as well as representing a force for sociopolitical liberalism. The emphasis on the instinctual basis for the experience of the sexual and the universality of sexual experience, though possibly wrong in fact and theory, served to introduce a great change in sexual values at the turn of the century. Perhaps more important, by asserting the universality of the human experience, Freud significantly helped erode the dubious anthropology that imperial Europe used to describe its colonial subjects.

The Freudian codification provided for modern and educated women and men a set of verbal categories through which they might describe their internal states, explain the origins of their sexual proclivities, describe their own and others’ motives, and ultimately reanalyze literature, histories, and societies as well as individual lives. The cultural assimilation of much of psychoanalytic theory, especially on a popular level, resides in its essential continuity with popular wisdom about the instinctive nature of sexuality. This version of sexuality as an innate and dangerous instinct is shared not only by the general populace, but also by psychological theorists deeply opposed to Freudian thought, as well as by sociologists whose rejection of analytic theory is nearly total. Hence the language of Kingsley Davis:

The development and maintenance of a stable competitive order with respect to sex is extremely difficult because sexual desire itself is inherently unstable and anarchic. Erotic relations are subject to constant danger—a change of whim, a loss of interest, a third party, a misunderstanding. Competition for the same sexual object inflames passions, and stirs conflicts; failure injures one’s self-esteem. The intert...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword Permanence and Change:
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgments to the First Edition
• 1 The Social Origins of Sexual Development
• 2 Childhood and Adolescence
• 3 Postadolescent Sexual Development
• 4 The Pedagogy of Sex
• 5 Homosexuality Among Men
• 6 A Conformity Greater than Deviance: The Lesbian
• 7 The Prostitution of Women
• 8 Homosexual Conduct in Prison
• 9 Pornography: Social Scripts and Legal Dilemmas
• 10 Social Change and Sexual Conduct
• Afterword: The Struggle Over Sexual Change Since 1970
• The Writing of Sexual Conduct: Two Recollections
• The Never-Ending Conversation: Two Interviews
• References
• Index