The sexological model is distinctively Western and 20th century, and we have already seen many of its seeds in the political realities of the decades of animal sex research. The emphasis on evolution is a modernism marker, as is the importance of sexual and gender identity issues, and the relationship between sexuality and such modem concerns as maturity and mental health. The claim that sexuality is an extremely important part of an individual’s life and personality is recognizably post-Freudian. More subtly, perhaps, the implication that sexuality is an individual quality or factor of personality is a hallmark of modem psychological thinking.
We have seen how the development of sex research methods was influenced by the stigma associated with public talk about sexuality, and the need for compensatory scientific orthodoxy. Tracking specific stages in the development of the sexological model is difficult because histories of sex research are themselves so selective. Historians of sexology have generally ignored animal sex research and neglected its implications for human studies. Histories of sex research have usually emphasized how 20th-century political reformers, eager to challenge authoritarian sexual norms, joined forces with Freudians, biologists, and students of human instinct to inaugurate a professional literature on human sexuality (Weeks, 1981). Such histories have sometimes recognized how sex research contributes to the construction of sexuality—but just as often histories have adopted a na — tivist view of sexuality as really being out there, just waiting for researchers to come and uncover the facts.
Robinson (1976) provides one of the few analyses of how sex research helped construct a particular model of sexuality. He argues that 20th — century sex research, from Havelock Ellis through Alfred Kinsey and William Masters and Virginia Johnson, created a modem sexuality: positive, physical, healthy, and ambivalent about romanticism, in reaction to the sexual repressions of Anglo-American Victorianism. Robinson’s history, appearing before the advent of self-conscious social constructionism, exemplifies that approach in a brief text that has withstood the test of time.
Brecher’s (1969) history, written earlier, provided a larger view of sex research, highlighting Robinson’s foursome while also describing the research contribution of Europeans (Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, and Theodor H. van de Velde), women, students of gender and gender-identity, and researchers of love. Brecher, however, offered little theoretical analysis, suggesting that most of the contributors were drawn by the ideals of science (truth, objectivity, etc.) and the desire to counteract the lies and repressions of the Victorian era. Brecher’s text describes events (and people) in a chronological fashion, ignoring reasons behind the success or failure of particular lines of thought or research. This type of uncritical history, written largely to praise the courage and usefulness of sex researchers, disguises its own role in promoting a nativist view of sexuality.
We can illustrate nativistic versus socially constructed histories with an example from Brecher (1969) and feminist Margaret Jackson (1994). Brecher (1969) describes Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) as having made a limited contribution to sexology, and furthermore suggests that she was a somewhat misguided feminist (she was the first woman physician to be licensed to practice in England or the United States—she practiced both places). While praising her recognition of women’s orgasm and her defense of a single standard, Brecher felt Blackwell wrongly overemphasized the mental and spiritual elements of sex, and did not differ from her time in condemning the evils and abuses of masturbation, prostitution, and fornication (defined as “the attempt to divorce the moral and physical elements of human nature,” (Brecher, 1969, quoting Blackwell, 1969, p. 149).
Jackson (1994), by contrast, writes explicitly to identify the destructive impact of sexology on women’s lives. Although Jackson acknowledges that Blackwell had limited impact on sexuality theory or public attitudes, she revives Blackwell’s ideas and condemns those who call her a sexual Puritan. Jackson sees Blackwell’s model of sexuality as feminist and antipatriarchal in its challenge to naturalism as well as to the double standard, and because of its claim that physical passion can become “either an ennobling or a degrading force for both individual and society” (p. 65). Making naturalism central in the sexological model is considered by Jackson to be antifeminist, a theme we will return to later. Throughout several British books and articles in Womens Studies International Forum, Jackson argued that “sexology represented the appropriation of the sexual by male scientific ‘experts,’ who overturned more than half a century of feminist struggle to politicize sexuality and promote female sexual autonomy” (p. 183). Her feminist history specifically asserts that sexuality is malleable, and that experts contribute to its social construction.
In his history of 20th century American sex research, Bullough (1994b) discusses theoretical and clinical work deriving from Freudian themes, university-based laboratory studies of animal endocrinology and mating behavior supported by Rockefeller research money, survey research, contraceptive research, and anthropological studies in non-Western cultures. He also describes the beginnings of sex research with nonheterosexual populations, and how that stream of studies challenged traditional psychiatric positions. But, as with other traditional histories, Bullough (1994b) doesn’t acknowledge the political role or aim of sex research, arguing that in line with societal sexuality in general, sex research expanded and sexuality was viewed more positively as the century wore on. He doesn’t discern a particular line taken in the research, and he may disagree that there was a particular sexological model of sexuality promoted in these works or that sexuality is socially constructed. Bullough’s point of view is most visible when he explicitly disapproves of sex researcher “members of special — interest groups” who “were more interested in propagandizing than in research findings” and bemoans how “the interested public found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate research and wishful thinking” (Bullough, 1994b, p. 274). I will return to the question of how to evaluate sex research quality, and the complications of special interests and propaganda.
By constrast, a history of British sex research begins with a blunt embrace of constructionism:
There has been deep and animated debate of late regarding the constitution of the sexual and its history. … We entirely accept… that sex is not a natural datum awaiting discovery by doctors, scientists, and others.. . Rather, . .. the sexual is such a complex and contested domain, mightily charged with associations and emotions, norms and values, that the terms in which it is posited determine the entity itself. (Porter & Hall, 1995, pp. 7-8)
Although Porter and Hall (1995) do not describe a specific sexological model emerging in 20th century texts, they propose the larger thesis that throughout the past several hundred years, “sexual discourse has aimed to limit and create closures in sexual identity” (p. 11) by demarcating good from bad in terms of gender and erotics.
Irvine (1990) presents the most complete feminist and critical analysis of American sexology after the 1940s. She traces the preoccupation of sex researchers with biological variables and positivist research strategies to their quest for professional legitimacy and their naive political belief that these tactics will best aid sexual progress for women and homosexuals. She sympathizes with feminists like Margaret Jackson who argue that sexologists’ focus on women’s sexual pleasure was ultimately directed toward promoting heterosexual conformism, and that sexologists deliberately neglected (political) topics of interest to feminists such as sexual violence, rape, sexual abuse, negative impact of pornography, sexual harassment, and the negative aspects of prostitution. Although some of Irvine’s points are overstated, her text is essential for feminists interested in the sexological model, and stands together with Robinson’s (1976) as an example of social constructionist history of sex research written in the United States.