Sexology and the New Normality

Abstract

The nineteenth-century emergence of the science of sex offered new touchstones for the classification of sexual behavior, which did not, overtly at least, draw upon a moral framework. Like many of the reformers discussed in previous two chapters, the first sexologists were trained in medicine and in many cases were specialists in the relatively new discipline of alienism (or in modern parlance, psychiatry). However, their justification for speaking about sex was quite different. Uninterested in contemporaneous projects of moral reform, their commitments were more intellectually driven and centered on the production of knowledge about a topic that had hitherto only been addressed in relation to disease and pathology—sexual behavior. Unlike social purity and sexual hygiene promoters, early sexologists did not seek out the sexual child within their work. Rather it was in the course of exploring the sexual lives of adults and more specifically their erotic biographies that the sexual child first appeared within this emerging paradigm.

By studying both natural and civilized man, it must find, as it were, the sexual elementary ideas of mankind, i.e. the common biological social phenomena in all peoples and historical periods. They are the firm foundation for the building of the new science. Only this anthropological view (in the widest sense of the word… gives us a scientific basis of the same exactitude and objectivity as that found in natural science.

Iwan Bloch (1910, vii–viii)