Beginning in the early part of the century and increasingly by midcentury, the pioneers of sexual research were beginning to make scientific advances into the understanding of sexuality. Rejecting the religious and moral teachings about how people “should” behave, researchers brought sex out into the open as a subject worthy of medical, scientific, and philosophical debate. We discuss these researchers at length in the following chapter, but here we should note that they had a profound impact on the way people began to talk and think about sexuality.
For example, by midcentury Kinsey’s large-scale surveys of American sexual behavior were promising to settle some of the debates and confusion about sexuality by providing scientific solutions to questions about how people behaved. Masters and Johnson were trying to do the same for the physiology of the sexual response. The work of these sexologists helped to demystify sex and to make it more respectable to publicly discuss the sexual behaviors and problems of real people. Much of this work was condemned by moral crusaders, who criticized its lack of connection to traditional standards of morality (Irvine, 1990).