3.2 Sexuality and the Sociological Imagination
Sex and sexuality have long been a subject of scientific inquiry. Beginning in the early 1800s, research about human sexuality was conducted by physicians, psychiatrists, and criminologists concerned with questions of public health and deviance from social norms (Kinsey Institute 2022). Binary, biologically determined gender was an unquestioned assumption in early sexual research. Feminine sexual autonomy, same-sex attraction, and transgender and non-binary gender expression, once considered moral problems, were pathologized as mental illness.
Beginning in the mid-1900s, and coinciding with a “sexual revolution” that challenged dominant gender norms, social research began to challenge the idea that deviation from socially constructed sexual norms is neither a moral failing nor a mental illness. Recall from Chapter One that C. Wright Mills (he/him) described the sociological imagination as a way of understanding that behavior, which seems like an individual choice or problem, can be understood as the result of social and cultural influences. As you work through this section, use your sociological imagination to think about how sexual norms are socially constructed and understood.
Early Research: What is Normal?
In the 1930s, the zoologist Alfred Kinsey (he/him) began teaching an interdisciplinary course for married students about human sexuality. His students frequently confided in him about details about their own sexual experiences and then asked a common question, “Am I normal?” This lecture, along with his students’ earnest disclosures, inspired research that documented the actual lived sexual experiences of research participants. Kinsey’s findings were published in two books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), known collectively as the Kinsey Reports (Kinsey Institute 2022).
Kinsey shed new light on the sexual behavior and the physical sexual characteristics of the respondents. For example, Kinsey found that married women in their late teens reported having sex an average of 2.8 times per week; for women at age 30, frequency fell to 2.2; and by age 50, married women reported only having sex once a week. He also found between 10% and 16% of married women aged 26 to 50 were engaged in extramarital sex. Based on his research, Kinsey also estimated that about half of all married men had some extramarital sexual experience at some point in their married lives. Kinsey contributed to and documented changes in sexual norms from the 1930s to the 1980s, including the increased acceptance of sex outside of marriage and increased acceptance of homosexuality. Today, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University continues to produce research on sex and sexuality.
Clelia Duel Mosher (she/her), a medical doctor and professor at Stanford, studied women’s sexual health and advocated for a better understanding of menstrual hygiene and against corsets. Decades befo