In
1970 I was a sophomore in a small-town Midwestern high school.  The only things
to do on weekends were to get into trouble, hang out at the Burger Chef, play
in a band, or read.  As a young nerd I had been reading Psychology Today
for about a year, and had joined the Psychology Today Book Club.  The
Club posted to me first-editions of books from the likes of R.D. Laing and
Abraham Maslow.   Apparently my parents were more progressive than I remember
them today, because I had access to any Club book, and I had ordered a
two-volume set of Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response and
Human Sexual Inadequacy, which I read with complex mix of
adolescent-hormonal prurience, wonderment, and curiosity.  I remember seeing
Masters and Johnson in LIFE magazine and TV in their pristine white-coat
uniforms, but what I remember most was the admiration and praise for their
pioneering work in human sexual physiology.  I said I was naive, didn’t I?

More
recently, the biopic Kinsey and now Janice Irvine’s social history of
sexology has restimulated memories of this time of my life, but in my teen
years I hadn’t a clue about the substantial controversy surrounding the
discipline of ‘sexology’ – the science of sex and sexuality. Reading this book
by Professor Irvine was like revisiting my intellectual adolescence with the
perspective of mature adulthood.   I had the sense of remembering historical
events, but now with an expanded consciousness of the ramifications.  However
substantial, this was a fun book to read.

Irvine
starts her detailed discussion of sexology’s turbulent history with Kinsey,
while mentioning earlier figures like Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard von
Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis.  Through an analysis of Kinsey’s white,
largely heterosexual, upper-middle class research population, she establishes a
major theme, the value-ladenness of sexology, one which persists strongly
throughout the rest of the book.  In the second chapter she discusses Masters
and Johnson’s work in the context of medicalization and market forces, which
she establishes, here and later, as an important aspect of sexology’s impact on
the public at large.  She identifies the split between medical and humanistic
sexology as the key schism in Chapter Three, and situates humanistic sexology
in the broader context of west-coast humanistic psychologies and therapies
(e.g., Rogers, Maslow, Wilhelm Reich, and Esalen), as well as the larger
cultural trends of the sixties and seventies: distrust of establishment
authority, phallocentric sexual experimentation, multiple partners, and the
marginalization of ‘relationship’ values like commitment, emotional intimacy,
and sacrifice.  She intriguingly notes the ‘heteronormativity’ of both the
medical and humanistic sexologies; despite the rise of gay awareness, sexual
politics, and the emergence of transgenderism.  These political themes are
developed more explicitly in Chapter Four, where she describes the tensions
between sexology and the various feminisms, lesbian/gay liberation, and (later)
social or cultural theorists like Foucault.  Three sexology landmarks, the ‘Hite
Reports’, the ‘G-Spot’ research, and the appearance of AIDS, raise Chapter Five’s
question of ‘Who defines sexuality?’.  I remember, even as a youth, the
controversy evoked by Shere Hite’s unconventional surveys of women’s
sexualities, and especially the attacks on her scientific credibility and
feminist responses to these attacks.  What Irvine draws out, here and elsewhere,
is that while sexology provoked people because of its value commitments, what
tended to be attacked, publicly and professionally, was the ‘science,’ however
defined.   Chapter Six opens with a quotation from a sex therapy client that,
to me, sums up sexology’s problems: ‘I know every way is normal.  Tell me which
way is right.’ (p. 140)  Irvine details the debates about ‘what is normal’ in
sexuality and how medical and non-medical sex therapists cloaked their claims
about sexual normality in the rubric of an allegedly value-free science.  This
motif leads naturally into Chapter Seven’s discussions of the development of ‘inhibited
sexual desire’ and ‘sexual addiction’ as mental disorders.  Chapter Eight
considers the emergence of ‘gender’ as a concept in relation to sexuality, and
explores the blossoming of gender research, both scientific and ‘humanities’
oriented, as well as the emergence of gender-related disorders and the contrare
appearance of transgenderism as an identity as well as a movement.  In the
Afterword, (which appears to the most substantive change from the first
edition, though I haven’t read the latter), Irvine considers sexuality-related
phenomena from the 1990’s to the present, from the Viagra revolution to a
careful consideration of the extensive politicization of sexuality in the past
decade. 

Irvine
writes clearly and engagingly – an impressive accomplishment considering the
complexity of the history and the sophistication of her insights.  While I
cannot claim any expertise in sexology or social history, her scholarship
appears even-handed, perhaps even austere– one only gets a clear sense of her
perspective in the Afterword and in a very few single sentences and phrases in
the chapters. Irvine, however, does make a convincing case that medical or
psychological accounts of sexuality and gender reflect powerful social forces,
however unacknowledged they may be by sexologists.  Readers will be left with
the conclusion that sexology needs to gets its value-priorities in order, that
it has an unmade bed.

I
have relatively few criticisms of substance.  I think the issues of Viagra,
gender, and sexual enhancement deserve more extensive attention.  If there is a
significant omission in the intellectual territory described by Irvine, I think
she has neglected the role of the internet and Web in redefining gender
identity, sexualities, and the like.  People today, especially Westerners,
explore sexualities and genders online.  What does this mean for us?

As a
scholar interested in values in psychiatric diagnostic classification, Irvine’s
book left me with stimulating questions.  The book’s story arc, in implication,
dismantles the idea that normalcy emerges from biostatistical averages, and
repeatedly illustrates how value assumptions undergird clinical concepts and
practices.  What remains unanswered by Irvine’s book is the question of what
values sexology should adopt in pursuing its studies.  For example, are
binary divisions of sex (or gender!) the standard for ‘normalcy’?  If there are
few to no standards for sexual normalcy, should standards be developed?  By
whom?  If there is only sexual/gender diversity, then what would be the basis
of a ‘clinical’ practice of sex therapy (or sex surgery)?  What would be the
basis for sexual disorders?  Will sexology ever address its own values, and to
what effect?

© 2006 John Z. Sadler

John
Z. Sadler, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical Sciences at the
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, and the author of Values
and Psychiatric Diagnosis (Oxford University Press).

Categories: Sexuality, MentalHealth