You won’t find a lot of sex in the sociological canon. Most of the founding fathers found sex theoretically discomfiting. Well into the 20th century, sociologists left sex to the anthropologists, with their seemingly voyeuristic interests in archaic bodily taboos and practices, and to the biologists, with their claims about animals, essences, and evolutionary adaptations.
If sociology’s project was to chart the rationalizing trajectory of modern society, sex—what Max Weber called “the greatest irrational force of life”—was instinctual and embodied, anarchic and anachronistic, premodern and (Weber again) “externally inaccessible to any rational endeavor.” Weber’s contemporary, Sigmund Freud, sealed sex’s fate in the social sciences for a generation, declaring sexual desire a primal, indeed foundational, urge, and its sublimation and redirection the basis of civilization.
Discussions of sexual behavior, homosexuality, prostitution, pornography, and sexual variations were typically subsumed into the study of crime and deviance—those vestiges of irrationality, those instances of resistance. While experts had been pronouncing upon and denouncing sexual expression for millennia, the modern social-scientific study of sex began with Alfred Kinsey’s massive studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1954). Based on nearly 20,000 of the most intricate and intimate sexual histories imaginable, then or now,
Kinsey’s major findings rippled through American culture: the ubiquity and centrality of sexual behavior; the near-universality of masturbation among men (without deleterious effects); the apparently high incidence of homosexual acts among men, and of infidelity among both men (50 percent) and women (26 percent); and the significant presence of desire and sexual agency among women. Kinsey also found that sexual behavior varied widely, especially by social class. In his effort to normalize sex and legitimate its scientific study, Kinsey mapped sexuality by eschewing moral judgment and studying only behavior, which he characterized in strictly physiological terms: the satisfaction of a biologically based urge, orgasm as a reflex response.
Kinsey’s strictly behavioral approach—he counted the number of orgasms experienced in each of a variety of situations—separated homosexual acts from homosexual identity. This upended Freudian notions that homosexuality was a gender disorder, a problem of inversion. Nonsense, said Kinsey: In studies of human behavior, the term inversion is applied to sexual situations in which males play female roles and females play male roles in sex relations.
[But] there are a great many males who remain as masculine, and a great many females who remain as feminine, in their attitudes and approaches in homosexual relations, as the males and females who have nothing but heterosexual relations. Inversion and homosexuality are two distinct and not always correlated types of behavior.
Sex is both more and less than a biological drive—it is a primary mechanism by which we constitute our identities, and it is also just another arena of social interaction (and thus becomes “sexuality” or even “sexualities”: something bigger and more comprehensive than “sex”). It fell to the next generation of sex researchers, including John Gagnon and William Simon, to carve out a distinctly sociological approach to the study of sex and sexuality.
In Sexual Conduct (1973), they proposed for the first time that sexual behavior was less about animal desires and more about shared social meanings, and that those meanings were the material through which we built a “self.” Their intent, Gagnon later wrote, was “to bring the field of sexuality under the control of a sociological orientation, to lay a sociological claim to an aspect of social life that seemed determined by biology or psychology.” Sexuality is socially constructed, built from and by cultures, eras, and institutions.
Whereas Freud had seen a sexual component in all manner of nonsexual activities—he discerned libidinous motives in art, music, political movements, literature—Gagnon and Simon argued that one could find political, economic, cultural, even moral motives in sexual conduct itself. One could “do” sex for social mobility, economic gain, or spiritual transcendence.
Sex could become a means to ends much larger than any particular acts— a way to solidify or destroy connections, or to express one’s gender role or identity. Second, contra Kinsey, Gagnon and Simon distinguished behavior from identity.
