The persistence of these trends, or at the least the unlikelihood of a return to the status quo of an earlier period, is assured not merely by the significance of these changes within the sexual realm alone, but by a number of changes that occurred, and continue to occur, in many other sectors of social life; changes that occurred simultaneously and interactively with these and other changes in the sexual realm; changes that make the use of such terms as postindustrial and postmodern convenient. There have been and continue to be shifts in labor force composition, the structure of our communities, patterns of family formation and maintenance, and many more interrelated aspects of social life.
What is at issue is not only that the distribution of behaviors, meanings, and institutional responses has changed but also that, with these and related changes, the very character of the human experience may be in the process of changing as well. Thus, even were a most unlikely return to the sexual patterns of a pre — Kinsey era to occur, the sexual experience, in all but its physical details, would be profoundly different. And while it might appear that the biological substructure and its attendant chemistries would remain constant, it is unlikely that our interpretations of their meanings could remain equally constant.
In relatively stable, largely homogeneous social settings (paradigmatic social orders) the continuity of the self is assured, indeed, mandated, by the continuities of social life. In such settings remarkably few conceive of being anything but what they are. There are abundant exemplars of the individual’s past and future in her or his immediate company, and the “community of memory” is experienced as a living presence, one that in being constantly re-enacted is constantly reconfirmed.
In contrast, in large, heterogeneous, complex, and change-prone settings (postparadigmatic social orders), the self, its integration and cohesiveness, becomes as problematic as the meaning of a past that is constantly subject to being viewed from different contexts of experience and, thus, constantly subject to revision. At the same time, the future is called into question, if only by the discontinuity between the present and the past; history ceases to be the legend of origins and becomes instead a chronicle of transformations. In such settings, the self must achieve its continuity by recourse to the reflexive, as even shared experiences often can only be preserved as personal history. The ensuing growth of the responsibilities of the psyche increases the power and claims of psychic realities.
As the behavior styles of different settings evolve different characteristics, the individual increasingly must question who she or he is by remembering where and with whom she or he is. And in contexts where vacations replace community festivals, the community of memory relies more upon the standardized idioms of a personal narration than upon collective myth. The increasing diversity of personal histories has made the sexual an increasingly unstable chemistry of social and personal meanings, making most forms of sexual conduct problematic to some degree.
The major legacy of the naturalization of the sexual can be seen as something analogous to Barthes’s view of the deceptions of the photographic image (1977). The sexual, like the photographic image, is often viewed as being just what it appears to be: a fact derived from life, the purest instance of naturalism. However, this is a deception: it is really a complex text that must be coded; a text selectively assembled to affirm, deny, and persuade; a text embroidered with metonymic “micro-dots” of meaning and history (Stoller 1979).
What has been neglected in the naturalization of the sexual is its capacity for and reliance upon a complex text, a script of the erotic. The erotic is of ten viewed as the expression of sexual desire, when more appropriately it might be seen as the sexualized representation of desire—the costuming and posturing of desire often, but not always, in the culturally available idioms of the sexual.
It is in confronting the distinction between the sexual and the erotic that the limitations of a naturalistic behaviorism become apparent. Even within the context of overtly sexual acts, outside of the visible but indeterminate capacities of orgasm, pleasure or satisfaction is determined in critical ways by sociocultural meanings that occasion the sexual event and by the personal meanings occasioned by that event. The pleasuring capacities of the sexual event are the result of effective performance of the actor’s interpersonal script and its embodiment of elements of the actor’s intrapsychic script. In the necessary interplay between these two levels of scripting, the derived pleasure most often proves to be complex rather than pure.
A capacity to revise one’s own history, including sexual history, is too often required by unexpected destinies; histories change even when the “facts” do not. Further, the meaning of any sexual episode, as anticipation, as an enactment with its own immediate past and future, and as a memory, is subject to multiple uses and revisions. This raises the question, for which of these aspects of sexual behavior is a theory of sexuality responsible? Most typically, concerns have been myopically focused on the overt act itself, as if in itself it contained the explanation of all that is relevant. Such consideration, in turn, raises crucial questions of the validity or value of universal models or theories of sexual behavior, which flourish with such conceptual isolation.