2.2: History of Sexuality Research and Some Early Sex Researchers
As important as any other aspect of physical and mental health, our sexuality, how it operates biologically, and how we as social emotional creatures, approach sex, has been a topic of interest to various thinkers throughout time and location. As the scientific method became the way of knowing across academic fields, sexuality, which fell under multiple disciplines, was no exception. Let’s turn our attention to some (certainly not all) notable contributors to the field.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Sigmund Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia on May 6, 1856. At a young age, Sigmund was considered to be very brilliant, and was given the best education his parents could afford. He eventually graduated from the University of Vienna in 1881. With a degree in medicine, he would find his interest in the realm of the mind, and would be greatly influenced by Charles Darwin and his work on the theory of evolution. He worked for a local psychiatric clinic, and from there he started up his research on human behavior. He then received a scholarship to study in France in order to solve the mystery behind the condition of hysteria in women (conversion disorder). He hypothesized that many of the women he treated were merely sexually frustrated, and later, postulated that most mental illnesses were caused by an underlying sexual problem (Haeberle, 1983). Today such notions have been proved wrong and Freud’s legacy is a complicated one. There are many other causes of mental instability. Despite his narrow focus on sexuality as the root of all mental illness, his work in the field does begin the conversation of human sexuality in the academic world. Because of this, Freud is considered a pioneer in the study of human sexuality. Society is more open to the study of sexuality and sexuality itself due in part to Freud’s work (Garcia, 1995).
Freud was the first to theorize that sexuality existed throughout a person’s life beginning at infancy. In 1905, Freud published his work, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Freud’s psychosexual development theory was the greatest major advancement in the study of sexuality of his time, and present day psychologists still consider Freud’s theory when studying human sexuality. According to Freud, humans have libido, which is the notion of organically generated instinctual energy (Haeberle, 1983). Freud identified developmental stages of sexuality: the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency, and genital stage. The oral stage begins during infancy, and each stage is experienced until the child reaches adolescence, ending with the genital stage.
Not all Freud‘s theories were widely accepted during his life. Freud found that his theories on the sexuality of children caused some controversy and he became an outcast among other scientists. Freud wrote 4 major books: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Totem and Taboo (1913), and Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1919). These books based on the theories of Freud have earned him the title “the founder of psychoanalysis”(Haeberle, 1983).
Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
An American Social activist who fought for the right of women to learn about and practice contraception. During her time, women were mostly relegated to a cycle of pregnancy and childbirth, and yet, the use of contraception was highly stigmatized. Women of color, poor women and otherwise marginalized women were most at risk of suffering under a system that made it hard to access legal and safe contraception. While not a sex researcher, she introduced U.S. women to the diaphragm and went on to advocate for and promote research that aided in the development of the oral contraceptive known as “the pill”. Sanger was jailed for her activism and even taught her fellow incarcerated women about contraception. The organization she founded in pursuit of women’s rights later became Planned Parenthood.
While Margaret Sanger was a successful American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse, the difficult truth is that the activist had alliances with Eugenicists (a debunked, discriminatory, evolutionary theory that seeks to eradicate “genetic defects” to improve the genetic makeup of a person through human breeding). Sanger’s beliefs caused irreparable damage to Black, Indigenous, People of color, (BIPOC), people with disabilities, immigrants, and many others through her beliefs that were rooted in white supremacy. While Sanger is the founder of Planned Parenthood, the organization publicly acknowledges the legacy of anti-Blackness and racism as it relates to reproductive health as well as gynecology. Planned Parenthood is a well-known medical organization that specializes in reproductive health while also emphasizing the importance of people controlling their bodies, lives, self-determination and dignity. Planned Parenthood acknowledges Sanger’s problematic beliefs and sees it as an opportunity to address the systemic issues within the organization and redefine its mission to uphold its values that strive to provide a variety of medical services to the communities that they exist in. For more on this, please watch Alexis McGill Johnson Remarks on Margaret Sanger | Planned Parenthood Video
Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956)
Alfred Kinsey was an American researcher, who was most known for his research on sexual behavior. In particular, Kinsey’s study and later book entitled, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male examined the sexual proclivities of males which led to his creation of the Kinsey Scale (Kinsey, 1948 p 636-649). This scale introduced the idea that sexuality is a spectrum rather than a binary set of categories, either or. Kinsey states that there are “patterns of sexual behavior and that the two types (homosexual and heterosexual) are represented in the sexual world, and that there is only a small number of "bisexuals" who occupy an intermediate position between the other groups”(More on this in Chapter 4). Kinsey made the assertion that most individuals were “exclusively either homosexual or heterosexual both in experience and in psychic reactions” by looking back to documented history (Kinsey, 1948 p 636-649). He also found that there were a very small group of individuals who experienced both types of behaviors, which led Kinsey to state that, “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual” (Kinsey, 1948 p 636-649). Kinsey’s work indicates that while an individual can be either homosexual or heterosexual, there are more than just two types of sexuality represented by the population.
Nettie Maria Stevens (1861-1912)
Often overlooked in the literature, Nettie Stevens was one of the first female scientists to make a name for herself in the biological sciences. She was born in Cavendish, Vermont. Her family settled in Westford, Massachusetts. Stevens' father was a carpenter and handyman. He did well enough to own quite a bit of Westford property, and could afford to send his children to school.
Stevens was a brilliant student, consistently scoring the highest in her classes. In 1896, Stevens went to California to attend Leland Stanford University . She graduated with a Masters in Biology. Her thesis involved a lot of microscopic work and precise, careful detailing of new species of marine life. This training was a factor in her success with later investigations of chromosomal behavior.
After Stanford, Stevens went to Bryn Mawr College for more graduate work. Thomas Hunt Morgan was still teaching at Bryn Mawr, and was one of her professors. Stevens again did so well that she was awarded a fellowship to study abroad. She traveled to Europe and spent time in Theodor Boveri's lab at the Zoological Institute at Würzburg, Germany. Boveri was working on the problem of the role of chromosomes in heredity. Stevens likely developed an interest in the subject from her stay.
In 1903, Stevens got her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr, and started looking for a research position. She was eventually given an assistantship by the Carnegie Institute after glowing recommendations from Thomas Hunt Morgan, Edmund Wilson and M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr. Her work on sex determination was published as a Carnegie Institute report in 1905. In this first study she looked at sex determination in meal worms. Later, she studied sex determination in many different species of insects.
Stevens' assistantship at Bryn Mawr still meant that she had to teach. She wanted a pure research position, and wrote to Charles Davenport to see if it was possible for her to work at his Station for Experimental Biology. Unfortunately, Stevens died of breast cancer in 1912 before she could occupy the research professorship created for her at Bryn Mawr, or work with Davenport at Cold Spring Harbor (Nettie Mae Stevens, 2011).
Margaret Mead (1901-1978)
Mead, an American Anthropologist, sought to study sexuality outside of the Western lens. She traveled extensively abroad in pursuit of this. Her work in Samoa led her to observe uninhibited sex that youth in Samoa engaged in. Sex among the youth was both condoned and encouraged by adult members of the community. Her work challenged the restrictive sexual ethics of her time. Beyond sexual practices differing relative to culture, she also wrote about gender roles differing from what were normative practices in the U.S. She spoke to the concept of sexuality as a social construction in terms of how culture was the shaping force in sexual attitudes and behaviors (Mead, 1928 p 61-76).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902)
Richard von Krafft-Ebing was a German sexologist who wrote the book Psychopathia Sexualis. According to the book, various forms of sexual behavior and arousal were considered disgusting. He believed that there existed numerous sexual behaviors and sexual practices which he called 'natural variations' and that all of them aroused the same cultural phenomenon of stigma. These sexual deviations were classified into four different groups: sadism, masochism, fetishism, and homosexuality. Krafft-Ebing emphasizes that the hand is one the most common fetishes and often joined by masochistic and sadistic behaviors (Bauer, 2003). He wrote that homosexuality was a natural occurrence and that it is not a chosen vice. Krafft-Ebing essentially brought to light the fact that homosexuality exists as part of the spectrum of human sexuality rather than pathologizing it (Bauer, 2003).
William Masters (1915-2001) and Virginia Johnson (1925-2013)
William Howell Masters and Virginia Eshelman Johnson pioneered research on human sexual behavior in the 1950s and 1960s. They worked together to disprove many of the long standing misconceptions about sexual behavior. In 1966 They released their most important, groundbreaking study, a four-stage model of human sexual response based on approximately 10,000 recordings of changes in participants' physiology during climax. From these data, they identified four successive stages: (1) excitement, (2) plateau, (3) orgasm, and (4) resolution. These findings would change how people viewed sexual responses and will be discussed further in Chapter 4. (Fuhrmann, & Buhi, 2009).
In 1995 a study was done on 1200 students at a Northern California University. Students were surveyed about their at home sex education. The hypothesis was that male students got vastly different messages about sexuality than female students did (note: the study demographics look only at gender asking only either male or female. If this study were to be replicated today, the gender question would be modified to include other gender options). The data gathered and resultant Master’s Thesis obtained by this textbook’s author gave support to the hypothesis that sex education falls down gendered lines. The sexual double standard is something we know exists, men are praised for being sexually experienced and women are taught to remain pure. This double standard in the United States dates back centuries and is rooted in Christianity, primarily White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP) religion and puritanical culture. The data suggested that this double standard was alive in well the sex education these students received at home. Overall parents were not teaching their children about sex much at all and when they were it was very different depending on the gender of the child. Students assigned male are told to go out, explore and become sexually experienced.
The philosophies that my father portrayed were: 1) Use a women to satisfy sexual desire, 2) Cast the woman aside when the sex act is finished, 3) Use any means possible, except for physical force, to have sex with any woman. To formally introduce me to manhood, my dad gave me a brief description of sexual intercourse which was followed by taking me to a hooker 2 months later. I reluctantly had sex with the hooker to save my pride F8401M
On the contrary, assigned females were taught to keep their bodies safe and not to have casual sex.
I am now very sad. Maybe I can ask my mom about sex. No! No way! They will kick me out of the family if they know I am not a virgin. I won’t even tell them anything. I don’t want my family to treat me like a monster. F9307F
The overall findings were that parents view their child’s sexual rights very differently depending on whether they are assigned male or assigned female (Rahman, 1995). So what this results in is two very different sexual scripts. How does this double standard play out in terms of coupling? If a significant number of people in society end up coupling with another person whose gender is not the same as theirs, how do we navigate sexuality, communication and consent when we have been given radically different messages?