Sexology
as a field is both science and social science — it encompasses rigorous
biological studies of reproduction and sexual response, as well as psychology,
sociology, and history. It wasn't until the nineteenth century, however, that
scientists started referring to themselves as "sexologists." From
that time forward, there has been a rich and diverse scientific literature
devoted to sex. Here are eleven works of sexology that changed history, blew
people's minds, or are just plain fascinating.
1. Psychopathia
Sexualis, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing
Published
in 1886, this book was the German psychiatrist Krafft-Ebing's attempt to
categorize every form of "deviant" sexuality he ran across in his
medical practice. It's written as a series of case studies, with ample quotes
from the doctor's patients describing everything from rubber fetishism and
incest, to what today we'd call BDSM and homosexuality. This book helped define
the field of sexology, and ironically made it possible for so-called deviants
(like homosexuals) to find more acceptance in the following decades.
3. Sexual
Behavior in the Human Male, by Alfred Kinsey
Published
in the mid-1940s, Lenz' book is a fascinating memoir of his work in the early
twentieth century as a sexologist, treating
everyone from transsexuals who
wanted sex changes, to prostitutes who followed soldiers' camps during World
War I. His descriptions of early sexual medicine are hair-raising (briefly,
there was a fad for implanting rabbit testicles in human men for "vigor"),
but his descriptions of his patients are compassionate. Unlike Krafft-Ebing,
Lenz never condemns the "deviants," but instead tries to help them
stay healthy and find their way in a world where gay marriage and fetish
fashions were just a futurist dream.
Kinsey
began his career as an entomologist who studied and categorized wasp species,
and when he decided abruptly to turn his eye to sexuality he brought his
phylogenist's sensibility with him. Like Krafft-Ebing, he wanted to categorize
human sexual behavior — except he pledged to study and chronicle all of it,
socially acceptable or not, without judgment. The result was this massive tome
in the 1940s, based on hundreds of anonymous interviews with men. The book was
an insane smash hit, and helped popularize the idea that "1 in 10
men" had homosexual experiences (this was probably selection bias, since
Kinsey interviewed a disproportionate number of men in New York's gay bars).
But it also revealed to the world how common oral sex was, as well as
pre-marital sex.
4. Human
Sexual Response, William Masters and
Virginia Johnson
Published
in the late 1960s, this book explored the physiological aspects of sex, and
popularized the idea of the "sexual response cycle." The researchers
had put countless volunteers into a machine that measured heart rate, galvanic
skin response, and muscle contractions while the people masturbated to orgasm.
As a result, Masters and Johnson were able to characterize the four stages of
arousal and orgasm, which are excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution, each
of which has characteristic physiological symptoms, from a flushed chest in
plateau to involuntary muscle contractions every .8 seconds during orgasm.
Strangely, this book is out of print.
5. My
Secret Garden, by Nancy Friday
Friday
published this work in the early 1980s, the result of hundreds of interviews
with women about their sexual fantasies — which appear basically unedited in
this book. Half-erotica, half-sexology, the book was a celebration of the
female sexual imagination and would have made Krafft-Ebing blush. It also
helped raise mainstream awareness of the fact that sexual fantasies are normal,
and that just because you fantasize about something doesn't mean you want to do
it.
6. The
Mating Mind, by Geoffrey Miller
In the
late twentieth century, some of the most interesting works of sexology are more
properly understood as evolutionary psychology. In this book,
evolutionary
psychologist Miller explores the idea that sexual selection among humans was
driven by our ancestors' desire for people who were smart and innovative. In
other words, humans got smarter by choosing to mate with people who were smart.
Not only is it a provocative and entertaining thesis, but it's basically a
theory of evolution that posits geeks as a natural outcome.
7. The
Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy
Published
in the 1990s, this underground bestseller by therapist Easton and writer Hardy
offered readers helpful psychological advice for having healthy, trusting
romantic and sexual relationships with more than one person at a time. It
helped to popularize the term "polyamory" for multi-partner
relationships, and overturned decades of misconceptions about non-monogamy by
showing that not all of these relationships were destructive
"cheating" arrangements — instead, they could be just as healthy as
monogamous ones, and certainly more honest.
8. The
Myth of Monogamy, by David Barash and Judith
Lipton
In this
book, psychologist Barash and biologist Lipton offer another perspective on the
issues in The Ethical Slut, by exploring how many animals that scientists
dubbed "monogamous" are anything but. They develop the idea that
there is a difference between social monogamy (lifetime partnerships) and
sexual monogamy (sexual exclusivity) and use genetic testing to reveal that
many animals are socially monogamous and almost none are sexually monogamous.
Including humans.
9. The
Science of Orgasm, by Barry Komisaruk, Carlos
Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple
Like
Masters and Johnson, Komisaruk and his colleagues wanted to learn more about
the biological processes underlying orgasm. So they found a unique group of
subjects who could have orgasms inside fMRI imaging machines, and discovered
what orgasm does to the brain. This could go a long way toward helping women
who have difficulty with orgasm, and might one day result in a female version
of viagra.
10. Evolution's
Rainbow, by Joan Roughgarden
Evolutionary
biologist Roughgarden was one of the first scientists to bring together several
studies on sexual diversity in nature — from fish that change their sex, to
hermaphrodites and homosexual animals — and explain why this kind of diversity
might have evolved. She suggests that sexual diversity is completely natural,
and that homosexuality and transsexuality in humans is far from Krafft-Ebing's
idea of "deviant." Indeed, it is part of what makes us and many other
species successful.
11. Sex at
Dawn, by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha
Ryan
and Jetha offer an alternate view on the early history of human culture,
describing how multiple partner relationships and matriarchy are as crucial to
humans' early psychological development as patriarchy and monogamy are. In the
process, they carry on the project of many contemporary sexologists from Easton
and Hardy to Roughgarden, which is to establish that what we think of as
"natural" sexual relationships today are anything but. From its
earliest beginnings, human sexuality was a lot more complicated and fluid than
the standard heterosexual, male-breadwinner marriage would suggest.
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpg)