Despite its implicit posture of describing social life from some transcendent elevation, all social science remains inescapably part of the social world it attempts to describe, explain, and understand. The modernization of sex, as suggested above, was itself an aspect of broad-ranging and continuous changes that in recent years affected virtually every sector of social life. In part, the naturalization of sex that followed was part of a more general trend towards the secularization and objectification of social life.
Many scientific theories have, for very long periods of time, stood the test of experience until they had to be discarded owing to man’s decision, not merely to make other experiments, but to have different experiences.
(Erich Heller, cited by Auden 1970:332)
The relationship between discourse (science) and practice (social life) is complex and becomes more so as social life becomes ever more heterogeneous and increasingly prone to change. Heterogeneity and change are not unrelated; change is rarely comprehensive and rarely uniform in its effects. Moreover, to speak of evolving forms of social life implies the necessity to speak of evolving forms of human experience and even the need to speak of the very possibility of evolving forms of human character.
Change, seen from the lofty perspective of macro-history, is of ten that of one form of social order neatly replacing another, with corresponding shifts occurring automatically at the levels of human experience or in the construction of human identities. However, it might be more appropriate to think in terms of shifting distributions of the types of identities constructed and, with such shifts, changes in the ease of accommodation to altered patterns of social life. Not only does the past linger much longer than social theorists would prefer, but invariably the future tends to reside in the midst of the present long before it is recognized as such.
The modernization of the sexual reflected and to some degree influenced the contemporary sexual experience. But such experiences may have really been in place for a relatively long time. A case in point would be the changing conceptions and uses of oral sex (Gagnon and Simon 1987; Simon et al. 1990). In other words, in clinging to a self-congratulatory status of pioneers, we have often neglected to observe how quickly change to the contributions of the new sexology have already become conventional wisdom.
The changes that threaten to erode what was so recently snatched from still older traditions of thinking about human sexuality are not merely changes in thinking about the sexual but may also reflect changes in the qualities and distributions of current sexual experience. The most general form of such changes, as discussed above, is a kind of pluralism born of change and individuation on many levels of human development.
The social order no longer imposes consistent coherence upon individuals as they traverse the relevant segments of social life in the course of their everyday lives; as a result, the changed requirements of self-cohesion expand the domain of psychic reality The metaphors of the personal have a capacity to rival, and sometimes successfully contest with, the social meaning of behavior, which often appears to have lost its singularity.
The social world that once was experienced as compulsively requiring that the several aspects of individual existence make sense. (All doctors are men. Women who would be doctors must become like men.) is experienced increasingly as indifferent. This is the essence of a postparadigmatic society as we have postulated it. The response of a self-conscious postmodernism recognizes that there is a fundamental difference between individuals who live identical or nearly identical lives and who experience that fact and those who live identical or nearly identical lives and do not experience that fact: lives may be patterned and still be experienced as invented.
This is what Barthes was responding to when he noted:
[T]he opposition of the sexes must not be a law of nature. Therefore the confrontations and the paradigms must be dissolved, both the meanings and the sexes pluralized: meaning will tend toward its multiplication, its dispersion… and sex will be taken into no typology. There will be, for example, only homosexualities whose plural will baffle any constituted, centered discourse.
(Barthes 1977:69)
This perhaps is what Stoller (1985a) intended when he suggested that “homosexual”, or presumably any such label, should never be applied to individuals as a noun, but only as an adjective.