Sex and Sexuality Research Paper

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Sexual issues have been central to interactions within and between cultures. Religions and law codes from the earliest days sought to define, regulate, or prohibit sexual conduct, as did conquering peoples and states. Some cultures saw sexual relations in terms of rigid categories— homosexual/heterosexual, active/passive—but many cultures around the world had, and sometimes continue to have, more complex systems of gender and sexual classification.

The word sexuality is quite new, coming into English and most other Western languages in about 1800. Ancient Greek, medieval Latin, and many other early languages did not have specific words for “sex” or “sexual,” so that they did not define or classify ideas or behaviors in this way. Every human culture, however, has developed norms of sexual behavior, and provided positive consequences for following those norms, along with negative consequences for deviating from them. World history is often told as a story of interactions between cultures, along with the creation of traditions within cultures. Sexual issues have been central in both of these processes.

All world religions, and most indigenous belief systems, regulate sexual conduct and regard sexual behavior as part of a moral system. This began with early sacred texts, such as the Vedic hymns or the Hebrew Scriptures, and continues to today, when issues such as the ordination of openly gay clergy or the proper form of veiling for women divide religious groups more than differences of opinion about theological matters. Many religions set up different standards of sexual behavior for clergy and laypeople, with priests, monks, nuns, and other religious personnel adopting permanent or temporary chastity as a sign of their holiness. Lay believers may also follow distinctive sexual rules while on religious pilgrimages or other periods of intense spiritual experience.

The earliest written legal codes, and every legal system since, include laws regarding sexual relationships and actions. Hammurabi’s Code of Laws, for example, promulgated in ancient Babylon in about 1750 BCE, sets out which sexual relationships will be considered marriage (and thus produce children who can inherit property), the definition and consequences of adultery and incest, the steps necessary for a divorce, and the consequences of various types of sexual assault. Contemporary national, state, and local law codes do the same.

Encounters between cultures may have taken the form of military campaigns or voyages of trade, but permanent contact often brought laws regulating sexual relationships between groups. The Manchus who conquered China in the seventeenth century and set up the Qing dynasty (1368–1644) prohibited intermarriage between Manchus and Han Chinese. At about the same time in colonial Virginia, according to a state statute of 1691, “English or other white” people were prohibited from marrying anyone who was “negroe, mulatto, or Indian.” Sexual relationships that ignored or defied those laws, particularly between men from the dominant group and women from the conquered or subordinate group, were common in situations of conquest, colonialism, or occupation, but these were generally not regarded as marriage.

Laws and norms regarding marriage and other sexual contacts work to keep groups distinct from one another, and also to preserve hierarchies within cultures, which depend on those in power marrying people which that society defines as “like themselves.” In Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868), the four legal status groups—samurai, merchant, peasant, burakumin (an outcast minority group who usually did tasks regarded as unclean, such as handling the dead and butchering)—were prohibited from intermarrying, and in many countries of Europe, rulers (at least in theory) lost their claim to the throne if they married commoners. Along with explicit laws, sexual relations between groups have been restricted through the establishment and fostering of traditions and other forms of internalized mechanisms of control. If children are taught very early who is unthinkable as a marriage partner, and unattractive as a sexual partner, the preservation of cultural boundaries will not depend on laws or force alone. Societies sometimes allow elite men to marry or (more often) to have non-marital sexual relationships with non-elite women, though they place various restrictions on the children of those unions. The reverse case is much rarer, because the sexual activities of elite women are the most closely monitored in nearly all societies. Thus socially defined categories of difference such as race, nation, ethnicity, caste, noble status, and social class are maintained by sexual restrictions, for if they are not, those distinctions literally disappear. These restrictions are gendered, with women’s experience different from that of men.

Cultural Variation in Categories and Norms

Sexual issues are thus central to world history, and, like every other facet of human life, sexuality is also historically and culturally variable. Some cultures, including modern Western culture, categorize sexuality primarily in terms of “object choice”—if a person desires or has sexual relations with individuals regarded as of one’s own sex, that person is “homosexual”; if those individuals are of the opposite sex, the person is “heterosexual.” Other cultures categorized sexuality primarily in terms of the role a man took in sexual intercourse. If he inserted something—usually his penis—in another’s bodily orifice, he was taking the superior “active” role, no matter what the gender of the other person, whose role was viewed as “passive,” and thus inferior.

Both sets of categorizations—homosexual and heterosexual, active and passive—are dichotomous, but many cultures around the world had, and sometimes continue to have, more complex systems of gender and sexual classification. In Australia, Siberia, North America, the Amazon region, Oceania, Central and South Asia, Alaska, and the Sudan, certain individuals were regarded as neither men nor women, or as both men and women, or in some other way as transcending dichotomous gender and sexual classifications. In some cases these individuals appear to have been physically hermaphroditic, either from birth or as the result of castration, though in others their distinctiveness or androgyny was purely cultural. In some cultures such individuals engaged in sexual activities or had permanent or temporary sexual relationships, while in others they did not.

The gender and sexuality of such individuals is complicated and highly variable, but they generally had special ceremonial or religious roles, just as celibate priests, monks, and nuns did and do in Christianity and Buddhism. In south Sulawesi (part of Indonesia), individuals termed bissu carried out special rituals thought to enhance and preserve the power and fertility of the rulers, which was conceptualized as “white blood,” a supernatural fluid that flowed in royal bodies. The bissu were linked to the androgynous creator deity; they could be women, but were more often men dressed in women’s clothing and performing women’s tasks. In northern India, divine androgyny is replicated in the human world by religious ascetics termed hijra, impotent or castrated men dedicated to the goddess Bahuchara Mata; they are regarded as having the power to grant fertility and so perform blessings at marriages and the births of male children. In Polynesian societies, mahus perform certain female-identified rituals, do women’s work, and have sex with men, as do the xanith in Oman, though this status is temporary and these men eventually marry women.

The best-known example of third-sex categorization is found among certain Native American groups. Europeans who first encountered them thought they were homosexuals and called them berdaches, from an Arabic word for male prostitute. This term can still be found in older scholarly literature, but the preferred term today is “two-spirit people.” Though Europeans focused on their sexuality, two-spirit people (who were usually, though not always, morphologically male) were distinguished from other men more by their clothing, work, and religious roles than their sexual activities. Among many groups two-spirit people are actually thought of as a third gender, so that sexual relations between a two-spirit person and a man may have not been understood as “same-sex” in any case. Two-spirit people were regarded as having both a male and female spirit, so they could mediate between the male and female, as well as the divine and human worlds.

Europeans’ categorization of two-spirit people as homosexual—the description actually used was “sodomite”—highlights a common issue in cultural encounters. Sexual categories and norms within a culture are often so deeply ingrained that they appear “natural,” the result not of human decisions but of divine mandate or the “laws of nature.” The sexual practices of other cultures are thus made to fit into the existing scheme, and if they cannot, they are judged unnatural or deviant, and may serve as a justification for conquest. “Unnatural” sexual practices became a standard feature of groups other than one’s own, a sign that they were radically “other.” Ancient Athenians told about the Amazons, who lived free of men except for brief encounters for purposes of procreation. Early modern western Europeans saw Turks, especially the sultan and his nobles, as sexually lascivious, lolling around in a harem surrounded by beautiful young women. Nineteenth-century British officials regarded Bengali men, who were thinner and had less body hair than they did, as effeminate.

Premodern Sexuality

Despite the centrality of sexual issues to cultural traditions and encounters between groups, until the 1980s the study of sexuality was often trivialized, and seen as a questionable or marginal area of scholarly inquiry. The history of sexuality has since become a booming academic field, but certain areas and periods have received more attention than others.

One of these is ancient Athens, which has traditionally been regarded as a foundation of Western culture and has left many sources, particularly about attitudes toward sexuality among the educated male elite. Plato and Aristotle, the two most important philosophers of ancient Athens, were both suspicious of the power of sexual passion, warning that it distracted men from reason and the search for knowledge. Both men praised a love that was intellectualized and nonsexual, the type of attachment still termed “platonic.” (Neither Plato nor Aristotle was concerned about what sex does to women except as this affects men.) Plato developed a dualistic view of both humans and the world, arguing that the unseen realm of ideas was far superior to the visible material world, and that the human mind or soul was trapped in a material body. This mind/ body split was a gendered concept, with men associated more with the mind and women with the body. Women’s bodies were also viewed as more influenced by their sexual and reproductive organs than men’s; Plato described the womb as an “animal” that wandered freely around the body, causing physical and mental problems. (This is why the words hysteria and hysterectomy both have the same Greek root.) The mind/body split did not originate with Plato, but his acceptance and elaboration of it helped to make this concept an important part of Western philosophy. In Aristotle the mind/body split is reflected in the process of procreation (what he called “generation”), with the male providing the “active principle” and the female simply the “material.”

In classical Athens, a hierarchical sexual and tutorial relationship with an older man—who was most likely married—was part of the expected training in adulthood for adolescent citizens. (Only men could be citizens in Athens.) The older man was the “active,” or penetrating partner, while the younger took the “passive” role. These relations between adolescent and adult men were celebrated in literature and art, in part because the Athenians regarded perfection as possible only in the male. The perfect body was that of the young male, and perfect love that between an adolescent and an older man, not that between a man and an imperfect woman; this love was supposed to become intellectualized and “platonic” once the adolescent became an adult. How often actual sexual relations approached the ideal in Athens is very difficult to say, as most sources are prescriptive, idealized, or fictional.

In ancient China as well, the idea of a lifelong sexual identity based on the gender of one’s sexual partners was not well established, though at certain times there were male homosexual subcultures in which men participated throughout their lives. The best studied of these is one which developed among imperial officials, intellectuals, and actors in the Song dynasty (960–1279), and male homosexuality was not prohibited until the beginning of the Qing dynasty in 1644.

Sexual activity that could lead to children was clearly a matter of state concern, however. During the Neo-Confucian movement of the Song dynasty, educated officials put great emphasis on the disruptive power of heterosexual attraction, viewing it as so strong that individuals alone could not control it; walls, laws, and strong social sanctions were needed to keep men and women apart and to preserve order within the family. In many parts of China, women of the middle and upper classes were increasingly secluded, and even peasant houses were walled; boys and girls were cheap to hire as servants for tasks that needed to be done outside the walls. Female seclusion was also accomplished through foot-binding, a practice whose origins are obscure and debated, for contemporary official documents rarely discuss it. Foot binding does appear frequently in pornography, however, where the pointed shape that bound feet assumed was compared to lotus blossoms—an erotically charged image—and where the hobbled walk of women with bound feet was described as increasing their sexual prowess by lubricating their genitals. That sexual prowess was to be limited to the men on whom they were dependent, however, for unbound feet were seen as a sign of sexual freedom.

A third well-studied area is early modern colonialism. European accounts of exploration and travel almost always discuss the scanty clothing of indigenous peoples, which was viewed as a sign of their uncontrolled sexuality. Hot climate—which we would probably view as the main influence on clothing choice—was itself regarded as leading to greater sexual drive and lower inhibitions. By the eighteenth century, leading European thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Hume divided the world into three climatic/sexual zones: torrid, temperate, and frigid. (Words that still retain their double climatic/sexual meaning.) They—and many other European writers and statesmen—worried about the effects of tropical climates on the morals as well as the health of soldiers and officials, and devised various schemes to keep Europeans sent to imperial posts from fully “going native,” adopting indigenous dress and mores. They also linked this climatic/sexual schema with the advancement of civilization; in the torrid zones, heat made people lethargic as well as lascivious, whereas a temperate climate (like that of Britain) encouraged productivity and discipline along with sexual restraint and respect for women.

The aspect of “going native” that most concerned colonial authorities was, not surprisingly, engaging in sexual relations with indigenous people; as noted above, colonial powers all regulated such encounters. Indigenous peoples were often feminized, described or portrayed visually as weak and passive in contrast to the virile and masculine conquerors, or they were hypersexualized, regarded as animalistic and voracious (or sometimes both). Racial hierarchies became linked with those of sexual virtue, especially for women, with white women representing purity and nonwhite women lasciviousness. Dispelling such stereotypes was extremely difficult and took great effort; African American women in the early-twentieth-century United States, for example, took great care to hide the sexual and sensual aspects of their lives and emphasize respectability in what the historian Darlene Clark Hine (1998) has called a “culture of dissemblance.”

In the colonial world, both sexual and racial categories were viewed as permanent moral classifications supported by unchanging religious teachings that determined what was “natural” and what was “unnatural.” Thus same-sex relations were defined as a “crime against nature,” and often tried in church courts, along with other sexual crimes such as adultery or fornication. This link between natural and godly began to lessen in intensity during the eighteenth century, but the importance of “nature” in setting boundaries only intensified.

Modern Sexuality

Many scholars see several developments from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century as creating a distinctively different “modern” sexuality, though most of this research has focused on the West. The most important of these was a change in the basic paradigm of sexuality from religion to science. Church courts in Europe and the European colonies heard fewer and fewer morals cases, as aberrant sexual desires and actions were no longer viewed as sin, but as “degeneracy” or “perversion.” They were still “unnatural,” but any correction or prevention was to be done by scientifically trained professionals, not pastors or priests. The most important professionals in this new scientific understanding of sexuality were medical doctors. Sex was increasingly regarded as an aspect of health, with doctors determining what was “normal” and “abnormal” based on their understanding of the natural world, not divine sanction.

Western governments sought to promote a healthy society as a way of building up national strength, and anything that detracted from this became a matter of official and often public concern. Masturbation, prostitution, hysteria, pornography, and venereal disease all came to be viewed as sexual issues and health problems, as did what were regarded as more extreme perversions, such as sadism, fetishism, masochism, exhibitionism, nymphomania, and “inversion,” a common nineteenth-century term for same-sex desire. These various sexual disorders were labeled and identified in the German physician and neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s landmark book Psychopathia sexualis (1886), the first important study in the new medical specialty of sexology.

Masturbation was a matter of concern especially in boys and men; too early or too frequent spilling of sperm might cause them to become weak and feeble, incapable of being good soldiers or workers. A British soldier in Kenya, Robert Baden-Powell, founded the Boy Scouts in 1908 explicitly to teach British boys what he regarded as the right sort of manly virtues and keep them from masturbation, effeminacy, physical weakness, and homosexuality. These were traits he regarded as particularly common among the nonwhite subjects of the British Empire, and also among the residents of British industrial cities. If they were not counteracted with a vigorous program of physical training and outdoor life, Baden-Powell and numerous other writers, physicians, politicians, and church leaders predicted an inevitable “race degeneration” or even “race suicide.”

Viewing pornography might also lead to weakness, for the new scientific view of sexuality was very concerned with sexual thoughts and desires as well as actions. Pornographic literature had made up a significant share of printed works in Europe since the development of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century, but was not legally banned because of its sexual content until the mid-nineteenth century with laws such as the Obscene Publications Act passed by the British Parliament in 1857.

Prostitution was also regarded primarily as a threat to men’s, and thus the nation’s, health. Prostitutes in Europe and the British Empire, or women even suspected of selling sex for money, were required to submit to examinations for venereal disease, though their customers were not, so efforts to control the spread of disease were ineffectual. Prostitution was generally viewed as a necessary evil, a regrettable concession to the strong sexual needs of lower-class men, certainly preferable to masturbation or same-sex relationships. Commentators in this era—the high point of the industrial revolution—often used industrial or mechanical metaphors when talking about sex, describing sexual drives as surging through the body in the same way steam did through engines or water through pipes. This “hydraulic model” of sex led them to worry about what would happen to men who did not have an outlet; would such “repression” cause them to explode the same way that pipes or engines would if they were blocked?

As they worried about repression and its consequences, sexologists frequently turned their attention to same-sex desire, initially labeling this “inversion,” though eventually the word “homosexuality,” devised in 1869 by the Hungarian jurist K. M. Benkert, became the common term. During the nineteenth century, individuals had often expressed same-sex desire in very passionate terms, but these were generally regarded as “romantic friendships,” expected as a part of growing up and, especially in women, not a sign of deviancy even if they continued throughout an individual’s life. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), for example, began in England in 1848 as a Christian men’s movement in which young unmarried men were expected to strengthen their character and morality through passionate attachments to one another, a union of souls that would lead to greater love for God. Historians debate whether such friendships should be labeled “homosexual” because this was not yet a category in people’s minds, but the medicalization of samesex desire as a form of sexual deviancy changed attitudes toward them, and intimacy between girls or between boys was increasingly regarded with distrust. By the 1920s, the YMCA’s official statements condemned same-sex attraction and espoused a “muscular Christianity,” centered on basketball (invented at a YMCA), swimming, and other sports, and on “normal” heterosexual relationships.

In the early twentieth century, same-sex desire may have been expressed less openly in Europe and North America than it had been earlier, but it also became something that more frequently linked individuals in homosexual subcultures, a matter of identity rather than simply actions. Historians have discovered homosexual subcultures and communities— with special styles of dress, behavior, slang terms, and meeting places—developing among men in European cities as early as the seventeenth century, but these became more common in the twentieth century, and more often involved women as well as men.

Heterosexuality also became a matter of identity in the early twentieth century, of a permanent “sexual orientation” that eventually became a legal as well as medical term and a central part of modern Western notions of the self. The word “heterosexual” was originally used by sexologists to describe individuals of different sexes who regularly engaged in nonprocreative sex simply for fun; it was thus a type of perversion, though a mild one. Increasingly the term came to be used for those who were sexually attracted to the “opposite” sex, with the proper development of this attraction a matter of physical and psychological health. “Normal” heterosexual development was also determined by gender, most famously in the ideas of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Freud developed the notion that human behavior is shaped to a great extent by unresolved sexual conflicts which begin in infancy; girls suffered primarily from penis envy (the recognition that they are lacking something their brothers have) and boys from an Oedipus complex (the desire to kill their fathers so that they can possess their mothers). Freud’s ideas were vigorously attacked, sometimes by his former associates, but they had a wide impact in fields far beyond psychology such as literature, art, and education.

These scientific and medical studies of sexual attitudes and behavior led to two somewhat contradictory ideas about sexuality. On the one hand, one’s choice of sexual partners or sexual behavior was increasingly regarded as a reflection of a permanent orientation, a “sexual identity” as a homosexual or heterosexual. On the other hand, homosexuality and other types of “deviant” sexuality were defined as physical or psychological illnesses, curable through drugs, surgery, or psychoanalytical analysis. Popular and learned books advised readers about how to achieve a “healthy” sex life, and efforts were made to prevent sexual deviance as well as cure it.

Contradictory ideas and differences of opinion about sexuality and its relation to gender continued throughout the twentieth century. The first two editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) listed homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder, but in the 1970s it was removed from this list. Some medical researchers investigated a “gay” gene and variations in brain structure, while others criticized their findings as logically and methodologically flawed, shaped by notions of gender that continued to view homosexual men as in some ways feminized. (Most research on homosexuality in the twentieth century, like most medical research in general, focused on men.) At the same time that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was prohibited in many areas—largely as a result of the gay rights movement that began in the 1970s—many people (including some gay rights activists) argued that sexual orientation, sexual identity, and perhaps even gender identity were completely socially constructed and could or should be changed, adapted, and blended at will. They asserted that “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” had indeed been part of “modern” ideas about sexuality, but in a postmodern world such concepts were just as outmoded as Plato’s “wandering womb.” They celebrated both historical and contemporary examples of two-spirit people and other forms of nondichotomous gender and sexual categories.

Both “modern” and what might be called “postmodern” sexuality are often seen as Western developments, with groups in other parts of the world regarding these as yet another example of cultural imperialism. In some areas, however, individuals and groups have blended traditional indigenous third-gender categories and more recent forms of homosexual or transsexual identity, asserting that toleration or even celebration of those with distinctive sexuality has roots in their own cultures and is not simply a Western import. At the same time, fundamentalists in many religious traditions, including Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam, oppose alternatives to heterosexual marriage, and support the expansion of existing laws regulating sexual relationships. It is clear that sexual issues have not lost their power as points of conflict both within and among cultures.

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