Another way to describe the search for universals is that the social — cultural-historical contexts of both researcher and research participant are ignored by the sexological model. The fact that a questionnaire is completed in a classroom, a home, or a bar is not considered relevant to the facts that are produced. Sexual laws and social norms of the research location are ignored. The fact that people who may be sexually interested in one another (or sexually fearful or sexually threatened) are together during a research study is ignored. The fact that people of different backgrounds completing identical questionnaires may have very unequal experience openly discussing the questionnaire topics is ignored. These contextual details are considered matters of minor, endless detail, and not interesting to study.
Assumptions about researchers’ objectivity mask any impact of researchers’ social specificity, except, as with Bullough’s (1994a) comments about moralistic vs. fact-finding research in the pre-Kinsey era, researcher attitude is related to overall approval or disapproval. A current example of this debate occurs over the work of feminist social science researcher Shere Hite (Tiefer, 1995). Her sampling, questionnaire, interview, and selective — quotes publication methods have been loudly and strongly criticized as biased and therefore not objective or scientific in much the same way as Bullough and Kinsey drew lines between ways of knowing they regarded as more and less worthy in the past. Because Hite has written from a feminist point of view, phrasing questions and recruiting research participants to bring out neglected aspects of women’s sexual and romantic experiences, it is easier to see the political nature of her work and thus the political nature of the criticism.
In fact, knowing Hite’s politics (i. e., Hite’s context) makes it easier to comprehend her particular methods and results. It requires historical excavation (e. g., Robinson, 1976) to detect the political goals of less candid sexologists. In recent decades, there have been widespread criticisms of the rhetoric of scientific objectivity (Guba, 1990), yet sexological research is still held to that standard. Much writing about sexuality is now in gender studies, cultural studies, and gay and lesbian studies. These multidisciplines, influenced by humanities’ standards, are clearly affecting social science researchers (like me). But the rhetoric of objectivity still pervades mainstream social science and the science and health media, where much sexological material appears.
I have written elsewhere about the extraordinarily selective and intrusive nature of Masters and Johnson’s 1966 research on the physiology of sexual response, identifying how the researchers selected participants who would comply with a predefined type of sexual response, and then
actually coached participants when their performance didn’t comply completely (Tiefer, 1991). Both researchers and research-consumers ignored the evidence and influence of such selection and coaching because they believed Masters and Johnson were studying universal patterns of behavior in which context was largely irrelevant. This is a very significant consequence of the focus on basic and universal mechanisms—whom you study or how or where all become invisible because they’re unimportant to universal generalizations.
There are many ways in which sex researchers deliberately (although apparently without realizing the meaning of their actions) strip away the particularities of context by getting research participants to regard sexuality the same way they do. In questionnaire research, for example, researchers either define terms in the questionnaires for participants, or just assume the meanings of the terms are self-evident. Only as a result of debriefing or explicit interviews do they occasionally find out, for example, that questions about “frequency of intercourse” or “frequency of masturbation” are interpreted differently by people who count acts as intercourse or masturbation only if orgasm is involved versus those whose definition of the act doesn’t require orgasm (Wellings, 1994). The assumptions researchers make in interpreting the results of their questionnaires is an important example of context-stripping in the service of looking for generalizations.
The meaning and significance of sexual acts is generally ignored in contemporary sex surveys, since such information is very difficult if not impossible to gather in questionnaire form. For example, some people have reasons and feelings about whether they define an act as masturbation if their partner is present. The researcher providing a technical definition (“masturbation means self-stimulation of the genitals whether a partner is present or not”) avoids and neglects such differences of meaning. Thus, the largest amount of sexuality information we have is quantitative information about frequencies of different forms of genital activity. The almost complete reliance on counting implies that the context of such acts is at best of secondary importance, and that behavioral sex acts are comparable or identical.
Thus the belief in universal mechanisms produces methods that render individual differences invisible, which in turn results in conclusions and interpretations supporting the assumptions about universal mechanisms. How this cycle may actually become self-fulfilling in terms of its impact on real people’s sexual lives will be discussed below in the section on the social impact of the sexological model.