Permanence and change INTRODUCTION Scripts are essentially a metaphor for conceptualizing the production of behavior within social life. Most of social life most of the time operates under the guidance of an operating syntax, much as language, as a shared code, becomes a precondition for speech. The construction of human behavior potentially involves scripting on […]

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 […]

The initial task involved in the denaturalization of the sexual is a critical examination of the categories of the sexual that reinforce the illusion of compelling homogeneities. By far the most important of the categorizations must be and continue to be those based on object choice. The notion of object choice, however rich with meaning […]

A hallmark of the sexual in contemporary society is the frequency with which it is accompanied by the problematic at virtually every stage, from anticipation to activity to retrospective contemplation. A second hallmark is the frequency with which the problematic accompanies our attempts to understand the sexuality of others. This is not to suggest that […]

The denaturalization of the sexual does not require an abandonment of all we have learned about the stabilities and varieties of the biological substratum, but it does require the effort of going beyond that and examining what can only be understood in terms of individuals situated in specific points of time and social space: individuals […]

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 […]

For the puritan tradition, the sexual represented an oppressive presence by the self-consciousness with which its presence was excluded from public life and most of private life as well. In contrast, in less than three decades we have moved to practices that allow for images of the sexual to permeate our entire culture. The current […]

What threatens the recently established, and still disputed, naturalization of the sexual is a growing awareness that not only do the meanings of the sexual change as the sociohistorical context within which it is experienced changes, but also that the very nature of the sexual may change as well. In other words, the possible need […]

The issues setting the agenda of postmodernism, simultaneously observable within many contexts, tend to share several elements or perhaps several ways of describing the same fundamental phenomena. The most common of these is an emergent consensus about a seeming absence of consensus. And perhaps this is not so much an absence of consensus as a […]

In Paul Robinson’s (1976) view, the modernization of sex was associated with the works of Havelock Ellis, Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson. To which I would add the path-breaking work of John Money for having enlarged our attentions to the fullest implications of gender. These are people we associate with works and traditions of work […]