Laboratory sex research with animals affected sex research methods later used with people in important ways. Carolyn Wood Sherif (1979) described how specialty areas with lower prestige seek to improve their status “by adopting the perspectives, theories, and methodologies as high on the [status] hierarchy as possible” (p. 98). Prevented by public opinion, practical obstacles, and professional peer pressure from studying human sexuality, prior to the 1960s many sex researchers focused on animal mating behavior but insisted that they were studying principles applicable to the human situation. Moreover, they were at pains to use the most prestigious methods as they pursued their otherwise lurid subject matter, and they went to great lengths to justify how animal models permitted helpful simplification and better control of variables. Although animal studies could not address the human situation precisely (this caveat was always present in one form or another), they presumably permitted insight into relevant concepts, mechanisms, and patterns (e. g., Beach, 1977).
Whether or not animal sex research has taught us anything of value in understanding human sexuality, decades of studying mechanisms and patterns of animal mating have left their mark on the sexological model of human sexuality. It is easy, now, to assume without reflection that sexuality is something animals and people have in common, and that concepts like sexual attraction or inhibition, categories like heterosexual or male, or physiological mechanisms such as hormones or brain sites mean something similar in the sex lives of animals and human beings, even if the details vary widely. Most sex research meetings and journals contain reports both on animals and on people, and it’s all called sexuality without reflection or analysis. This is a very important legacy of the sexological model of sexuality.
To point out these traditions is not to say that sex research is the only category in psychology in which animal studies have provided foundational input. However, the unique stigma associated with human sex research may have resulted in greater reliance on animal models than in other fields. Moreover, feminists may want to argue that particularly little insight has been provided by animal models toward understanding women’s sociosexual situations and the relationships between gender and sexuality.
The need for legitimacy encouraged the scientism of animal sex research, the fact-finding focus of the taxonomic approach, and continues to affect contemporary human sex research. Of all subfields in psychology, sex research may be among the most fanatic in insisting its methods are above reproach. In terms of the constant stress on methodological objectivity and in terms also of the conceptual legacies of decades of animal research, contemporary sex research is thus still partly hostage to the moralistic heritage of sexuality in American culture that seems so long gone from other segments of society.