Sexualities and Society Week 5 2013-14

1. Sexualities and SocietyWeek 52013-14 Sexology: Scientia sexualis and the (re)construction of gendered sexualities

2. Video excerpt from • The Truth about Sex, Horizon, BBC2 HORIZON SPECIAL: THE TRUTH ABOUT SEX (1992) director Celia Lowenstein, producer Max Whitby. Programme reported on the conducting of a survey of sexual behaviour in the UK motivated by concerns about the spread of HIV/AIDS (for more about this survey see J. O’Connell Davidson and D. Layder, Methods, Sex and Madness Routledge, 1994. • Excerpts are flashbacks to the history of sexology, unfortunately presented in the programme in incorrect chronological order

3. Outline • Introduction: Critiques of sexology • The knowledge produced by sexology reflects the science of its age --Early years (1880s-1920s) Richard von Krafft-Ebing Havelock Ellis Sigmund Freud --Middle phase (1930s-1950s) Alfred Kinsey -- Third phase (1960s-1970s) Masters and Johnson -- Current phase (1980s-2000s) • Conclusions

4. Sexology= the science of sex • How has sexology shaped-- and continued to shape-- our understanding of sexual pleasures, practices and identities? • Sexology has always been assumed to be progressive– knowledge lifts us out of ignorance, liberates us from repression.

5. Two challenges argue that the benefits of sexology are more illusory than first appears: (1) Foucault’s challenge (and others who analyse sexology in the same way) argues that sexology (a discursive formation) is the most powerful discourse on sex and educates us in how to think about it. Knowledge is always linked to power. Power is negative (repressive) but also has positive forms- puts new understandings into place. Therefore there is not a removal of ignorance but a reorganisation of how we think about sex through the discourse of sexology (Scientia sexualis). The medicalisation of sex represents a form of surveillance over and discipline of unruly bodies and harmless pleasures.

6. The title of the programme we just saw, The Truth about Sex, evokes Foucault’s comments on the rise of sexology in the late nineteenth century. The rise of sexology stimulated discourse on sexuality, not repression: ‘It is not that these men [doctors] shut their eyes to or stopped their ears, or that they were mistaken; it is rather that they constructed around and apropos of sex an immense apparatus for producing truth… The essential point is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law and taboo, but also of truth or falsehood…’ (History of Sexuality, Vol 1 [The Will to Knowledge], p. 56.

7. It may be the case that sexology allows people to talk about sex, where before there was silence and ignorance, but it insists that they talk about sex in particular ways, guided by ‘rationality’. • The categories that sexology developed and the patterns it has ‘discovered’ are normative, distinguishing between normal and abnormal behavior and ‘types’ of people on the basis of sexual predilections, etc. and naturalising these distinctions by locating them in the body.

8. (2) Feminist critiques also problematise the gendering of the knowledges put into place • Feminist- intentionally or unintentionally, historically sexology rationalises and naturalises heterosexuality and men’s sexual pleasures within it. It becomes increasingly difficult for women to say ‘no’ to sex, which is now defined as a sign of ill-health. • It changes our understanding of sex to one that revolves around function and performance rather than sensual pleasure and intimacy. • Standardises expectations and regulates patterns of behaviour. • Sexology now serves mainly the interests of pharmaceutical companies.

9. The historical development of sexology:(1) Early phase (1880s-1920s) From late nineteenth century there develops an apparatus to codify (name) and classify sexual abnormalities or ‘perversions’. This is part of a wider post-Darwinian effort to apply science, or the (pseudo)science of the day, to human life and activities. The new sexology sees what it thinks of as pathologies (deviances from the norm based in the body) and visible in the body’s morphology and on its surface. People who suffer from these pathologies are defined by them (e.g. ‘the homosexual’ is defined by his sexual practices) and often seen as degenerate throwbacks to an earlier, less civilised, less controlled state of humanity.

10. Context is post-Darwinian human sciences, eg. Cesare Lombroso’s criminal types

12. Same attempt to discover (construct?) typologies of sexual ‘perversities’ • Richard Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), German author of Psychopathia Sexualis (Sexual Pathology), I.e. congenital diseases or malfunctions caused by ‘degeneration’ or passed on by heredity. These conditions are no longer ‘sins’, as they would have been seen in the past. Different personalities defined by these bodily malfunctions- new figures on landscape, including inverts, zoophiles, pederasts. Even ‘the prostitute’ now seen as a character type rather than an ordinary, but poverty- stricken, young woman. • Later some of these ’types’ recognise themselves and wrote to him, so he became more interested in their personal narratives.

13. Havelock Ellis • Psychology of Sex defines malfunctions in biomedical terms • Equates the normal with what can be observed in the ‘natural’ animal world ‘The primary part of the female in courtship is the playful, yet serious, assumption of the role of a hunted animal who lures on the pursuer, not with the object of escaping, but with the object of being finally caught…(the male) will display his energy and skill to capture the female or to arouse in her an emotional condition which leads her to surrender herself to him, this process at the same time heightening his own excitement’

14. Jeffreys sees this writing as a male conspiracy. Did naturalising women’s sexual submission to me (attempt to) undermine the nascent feminism of the late nineteenth century? It makes women available to men. • An advance to recognise female sexual responsiveness, but active sexuality is equated with male sexuality (or lesbians).

15. Sigmund Freud (Foucault’s main target) • Develops a method of producing the truth about sex, psychoanalysis. Human behaviour is seen to be guided by the unconscious, driven by repressed sexual desires. Sexuality implanted through a new form of the confessional (patient lies on couch, tells all about herself, without compulsion, gives his/her private thoughts up to the psychoanalyst to interpret and feed back to him (or more usually her). In a sense forced to give up her repressions in the name of health. • Breaks with the emerging tradition by associating sexual behavior with psychological rather than physical aberrations; begins to break down divisions between the normal and pathological and male and female sexuality.

16. (2) Middle phase (1930s- 1950s) Alfred Kinsey: • Empiricist approach, with links to behaviourism in social science (science can study only what is observable and measurable—people’s ideas are too subjective to be an appropriate subject for science) • His team interviewed about 12,000 men and 10,000 women in the US to find out how often they had sex, when they first masturbated, what different sexual acts they had engaged in, etc. • Catalogue and enumerate sexual events, not interested in explaining them or their meaning to actors.

19. (3)Third phase (1960s-1970s) • William Masters and Virginia Johnson- laboratory experiments seeking to ‘discover’ physiology of sexual ‘response’. Produce a picture in which sexual response is seen to be organised around a ‘normal’ four-stage model of the ‘Human Sexual Response Cycle’. But according to Lenore Tiefer (in Nye, and in Kaschak and Tiefer, eds) this four stage cycle is imposed on a much more confusing and varied pattern. The human subjects chosen had organised their sexual activities around gaining excitement and orgasm ‘efficiently’. Masters and Johnson’s work was guided by and led to an ‘orgasmic imperative’- the point of sex is to have orgasms, and therefore trained to do what leads to that.

21. Leonore Teifer’s critique • ‘The cycle metaphor indicates that Masters and Johnson envisioned sexual response from the start as a built-in, orderly sequence of events that would tend to repeat itself. The idea of a four-stage cycle brings to mind examples such as the four seasons of the annual calendar or the four-stroke internal combustion engine’ (Tiefer 1995: 41)

22. (4) Current phase- two opposing arguments • (1) From the 1980s sex research is now at least partly emancipated from the assumptions that dominated sexology. John Gagnon (Introduction to Conceiving Sexuality). New models in social science represent a fundamental shift. People who would once have only been the subjects of study now conduct research themselves (e.g. gay doctors and gay sociologists produce studies on HIVAIDS). No longer only in the hands of doctors. Less likely to take heterosexuality or male sexuality as the norm. (Some) sex researchers now study sexual cultures rather than individual behaviour, and therefore challenge the view that sexuality is rooted in the body.

23. (2) Second argument- there is a continuity in the ways that scientists and doctors study sex. ‘Sexual chemistry’- e.g. the invention of and treatment with Viagra assumes that sex is a matter of function and dysfunction, insists that problems about sex are physical, based in the body, rather than about relationships. In women absence of sexual desire now an illness or syndrome. Sexology continues to implant new abilities and desires. Technological apparatus now in place which deems bodies in need of treatment to normalise or fix them. Tiefer asks: should we understand sexuality in terms mainly of functioning of sexual organs (parallel to how the heart works, or pancreas) or as something akin to dancing? No one would talk about treatment for dancing, or that someone is not dancing ‘normally’-- the fact that people talk about sex in such ways shows how far the medical view of sex has been normalised.

24. See articles by Cacchioni and by Kaler- therapy is oriented towards enabling women to have heterosexual intercourse with male partners rather than finding alternatives. Other articles- male bodies are now also subject to surveillance. • Power does not operate in only one direction (resistance) Viagra medicalises sex but people take Viagra into their own hands, use it in ‘wrong’ ways, access it independently and so on. • But…. is sexuality really best conceptualised in terms of health/ sexual health? These are normative concepts.

25. Conclusions • Medicine (and now the pharmaceutical companies) take control of sex. ‘Each age gets the sexology that it needs’. (Sander Gilman in The Truth about Sex video) The science of the age shapes/ constructs male and female sexuality and sexual behaviour. Feminists have pointed to the role that sexology has played in regulating women’s sexuality in particular. • Medicine and those who studied sex did not oppress people or their patients, nor did they see themselves as exercising power. In fact some were political radicals in their day. None the less, the consequences of the knowledges they produce shape our view of sexuality in problematic ways (for a different view see especially Lesley Hall, including her website). • Can we use findings to increase agency or choice? (See especially Gerhardt, on reading list, also Lesley Hall.) Or are these studies too deeply embedded in the power relations of knowledge production?