Gender has come to mean a great deal in the last three decades of feminist theory and scholarship, yet the sociopolitical realities of gendered lives and gendered sexualities are invisible in most research dictated by the sexological model. It’s not just that men and women are different, and researchers have to document and analyze sex and gender differences in masturbation, jealousy, and so on. It’s that men and women are different in a million ways having to do with the consequences of differences in social power, and that men and women in different sociocultural locations experience and manifest all kinds of variations of this social power differ ence having to do with sexuality. This is a mouthful, but it is the heart of the feminist critique. As feminists such as Jackson (1994) have recognized, the rhetoric of naturalism is the screen behind which hides perpetuation of the social status quo. The silence of the sexological model on the subject of power in sexuality is its major shortcoming from a feminist point of view.
A prime manifestation of this silence, of course, is that too often in the sexological model of sexuality the normative standard has been men’s sexual experience, or perhaps more accurately, stereotypes pertaining to men’s sexual experience. The idea that heterosexual impulses are the norm, that sexuality exists in individuals, that biological factors are the prime source of desire, that the best way to see sex is as a material series of physical changes in specific activities—assumptions in the sexological model—seem more in accordance with men’s experience (or maybe we should say with the phallocentric experience) (see McCormick, 1994, for an overview of feminist writings about women’s sexuality). The way such norms worked themselves into the diagnostic manual (АРА, 1994) is only one example of the far-reaching consequences of the sexological model’s sexism. Others have been noted throughout this chapter.
CONCLUSION
Who conducts sex research? Who publishes and disseminates it, where, and to whom? Sex research, like other contemporary academic areas of research, has been profoundly influenced, and I would say limited, by the pressure and structure of academic demands for publication, and the needs of professional journals (more all the time), generally put out by profit-oriented companies. Also, as I have shown, the sexological model that dominates sex research remains beholden to a specific history of choices made because of the political nature of sexuality in the United States. The quest for respectability and prestige has, ironically, left sexology with a legacy of positivist assumptions, concepts, and methods ill suited to understanding a subject so thoroughly saturated with culture.
However, the explosion of sexual issues and opportunities in mass culture, the new sexual texts,[8] the explosion of media attention to gender and sexuality that has taken place in the last three decades—these offer sex research a new lease on life. If feminists, provoked by the limitations of the reigning sexological model, can seize the opportunity offered by new sexual stories to develop new ways of studying, analyzing, and reporting them, they may yet salvage and transform sex research.
In her 1973 presidential address to the American Psychological As sociation, Leona Tyler drew attention to how the choice of research proj ects had come to depend on “such things as the availability of a new technique or instrument, the recognition of an unanswered question in a report of previous research, a suggestion from a friend or advisor or just the fact that a federal program has made grant funds available” (p. 1025). Perhaps our feminist commitment to research because of its potential contributions to human liberation can direct us toward a new paradigm for sexology.