Sexology Convention Lecture1999.8.24
Are feminists always at odds with sexologists
on the claims and findings of sexology? This
is not a trick question posed to mark once again
this notorious age of political correctness,
but a challenge for both parties to re-examine
and perhaps re-envision their mutual relationship.
Numerous feminists have contended that one
hundred years of sexological theory and research
has at times facilitated, but more often than
not, remained indifferent to or even tried to
contain women's, and in the modern age especially,
young girls', long struggle for control over
their lives and their sexuality. For example,
in an effort to win legitimacy for the field
of sex research, the early western sexologists'
claims to scientificity and objectivity created
a professional language to that purpose and
opened up intellectual space for the discussion
of sex. Yet as that scientificity and objectivity
expressed itself mainly in terms of instinctivist
and essentialistic notions of sexuality and
gender differentiation, couched in a vocabulary
that predicates the normal/abnormal binary,
sexology also put into place a conceptual framework
that made it quite easy to ostracize all gender/sexual
deviation and diversity to the margins of pathology.
As much as sexology has become increasingly
sensitive toward such issues, the lingering
presence of the objectivist framework is far
from extinct.
Ironically, feminism itself has also proven
to be no less unfriendly toward women outside
gender/sexual norms. Western feminism in the
1970s began from a clear and repeated rejection
of the essentialism and biologism of sexology
by claiming that male sexuality (understood
as mostly sexual harassment and sexual violence
against women) is not biologically determined
but socially constructed. Yet in its place the
feminists substituted an equally essentialistic
idea, albeit in the language of social constructionism,
of male sexual needs now redefined as male power
needs. For those feminists, it is the exercise
of male sexuality that creates and determines
men's power, and yet it is the need to dominate
and exercise power in sexual activity that determines
the nature of male sexuality. Within such a
"feminist" world picture, women are
portrayed mostly as powerless and helpless,
low in sexual drive and most vulnerable in sexual
matters; and the biologism of sexology quietly
re-enters through the back door. Furthermore,
the feminist proposal of social constructionism
was rarely carried to its logical conclusion
of actively creating/constructing possibilities
for social and cultural change. Instead, feminism
provided the discourse of victimology for women
and an image of righteousness for the state
to institute more rigid rules to govern all
forms of sexual expression. The resulting indiscriminate
ban on pornography, whatever its content or
target audience, for example, has devastated
the circulation of erotic literature for lesbians
who are already at a disadvantage in relation
to accessibility to cultural resources. The
sex debates which stretch from the 1980s well
into the 1990s document this critical exchange.
Strangely enough, sometimes feminists and sexologists
work closely with one another. Recently, the
middle-class-oriented, good-woman type of self-proclaimed
"state feminists" in Taiwan have launched
a crusade to clean up the city of Taipei, ridding
the city of all forms of sex-related cultural
production, from TV variety shows to pornographic
CDs to the internet and other traditional or
new forms of sex work. The "state feminists"
believe that pornography and the sex industry
constitute the most serious forms of degradation
for women in our culture and thus work ever
so hard to eradicate such cultural artifacts
and practices, even at the expense of stigmatizing
and criminalizing the sexuality of female sex
workers. The Taiwanese sexologists, made up
of mainly public health specialists and physicians
and thus keen in upholding the normal/abnormal,
healthy/pathological binary, stood aside and
gave their consent to the purity campaign. Such
collaborations between feminists and sexologists
are becoming quite common these days as the
Taiwanese government embarks upon the so-called
"gender equality education" (sex education
being a part of it) in response to the increasingly
active sexual activities among teenagers. The
new sex education is, not surprisingly, oriented
toward abstinence and monogamous marriage, packaged
in a lot of sexological and feminist(!) babble.
Such an account of the complex relations between
feminism and sexology provides a simple answer
to the question I posed at the beginning of
this report. No, feminists and sexologists are
not always at odds with each other. It depends
on how sexologists deal with emerging sexualities
in this rapidly changing culture of desire,
and, more importantly, what kind of feminists
are there to interpret and appropriate the former's
work.
By now, the two grand polarities--that between
man and woman, and between normal and abnormal--have
come to constitute the field of sexological
research, as well as feminism, as the most basic
essential facts of human sexuality and both
are believed to find their most socially desirable
state in the institution of marriage. In fact,
when sex therapy and sexology discuss sexual
harmony, sexual expression, or sexual satisfaction,
the sexual is always framed within monogamous
marital relationships--while messages of danger
worded in medical jargon accompany those sexual
activities and relations outside the marriage
institution. While the good-woman type of mainstream
feminists may bemoan the absence or infrequency
of such blissful states in intimate relationships,
and suggest that the problem would be solved
if only men would apply more tenderness and
patience toward women; feminist sex radicals,
on the other hand, lay open the often troubling,
irrational, or perverse nature of sexual desire
and fantasy, which may bear little relation
to our conscious ideas and commitments. In other
words, what arouses sexual desire rarely obeys
the walk-in-the-sunset type of marital sexual
bliss, nor does it follow the dictate of conscious
feminist pursuit of sexual equity, but often
includes inappropriately submissive, aggressive,
hostile, or deviant impulses. And sexology's
reluctance, if not incompetence, to deal with
these impulses--other than in terms of pathology-will
mostly likely produce conclusions without any
awareness of preexisting prejudices and current
deployments of power. Sexology has yet to affirm
that sexuality can be as much about fear and
anger as love and affection, as much about domination
and subjection as mutuality and respect, and
that sexuality is more than an interpersonal
matter, more than a family affair, and that
it reflects quite specific historical and cultural
meanings. Unfortunately, such thoughts often
lie outside the conceptual categories of sexology
and beyond its explanatory power. In this respect,
feminism, in all its varieties, serves as a
sober reminder that there is much more to sexuality
than sexology, or feminism itself, is ready
to concede.
Looking back at the historical development
of sexology and its exchanges with feminists
both in the west and the east, sexology seems
to be the most enlightening and progressive
when it carries to its logical conclusion a
self-portrayal of scientificity and objectivity
phrased not in terms of heteronormativity but
in terms of non-prejudicial openness. British
historian of sexuality studies Jeffrey Weeks
has described sexology as aspiring to building
"a science of desire." And sexologists
since the hayday of this profession have often
seen themselves as in the vanguard of "the
struggle for modernity," with their commitment
to the protocols of science and their devotion
to sexual enlightenment (Weeks 69). Yet Weeks
also points out that sexology often ends up
contributing "to the shaping and maintenance
of an elaborate technology of control"
(63). The founders of sexology from Krafft-Ebing
to Havelock Ellis may have hoped that the vocabulary
they created to describe human sexuality could
capture and perhaps tame the complexities and
diversity of sexual behavior and sexual desires,
yet as queer sociologist Gayle Rubin puts it,
"Sexualities keep marching out of the diagnostic
and Statistical Manual and onto the pages of
social history" (22). As the new field
of "sexuality studies" emerges upon
the translation of Michel Foucault's work on
sexuality, sexology faces its greatest challenge
ever: would it remain circumscribed in its seemingly
objective and empirical bent, thus remaining
oblivious to sexual oppression and inequality,
or will it strive for the sexual freedom and
sexual equality that make up the modernist project?
The Taiwanese example is that many sexologists
may have sexual enlightenment as their pronounced
goal of social reform, yet they often align
with the most conservative ethics of authoritarian
Confusianism or Christianity in promoting a
sex education that takes abstinence as its main
thrust.
Here the work of Foucault and his followers
proves to be useful and insightful for a feminist
reinvention of sexology. The talk of sexual
health and pathology, of sexual diseases and
reproduction, of normality and perversion within
the discourse of sexology leads it easily into
a role of social control and a power tool for
state administration. In particular, sexological
discourses have had a wide range of power effects
in the area of sexual morality, gender roles,
child-rearing, discipline of adolescence, body
regime, self-formation, education, social hygiene
and national welfare. If we are going to have
a new sex-positive sexology, it needs to be
self-critical of such discursive power effects.
Furthermore, feminist philosopher of science
Sandra Harding has shown that radical social
movements such as feminism and the gay rights
movement are actually good for science, good
for the pursuit of truth. For these types of
politics help us eliminate the pervasive cultural
bias that could affect scientific data as well
as hypotheses. Hence, in the name of the pursuit
of truth, sexologists would do well to welcome
more sex minorites, such as transgenders, bisexuals,
sex workers, SMers, and many others, to come
out and come forward to challenge the discrimination
and pathologization that pervades most sexology.
In addition, Foucault has said that "truth
is drawn form pleasure itself, understood as
a practice and accumulated as experience"
(57). This observation on erotic art as heuristic
for contemporary sexology may prove to be most
enlightening, for there is no reason why sexology
cannot incorporate the goal of erotic art and
reorient itself to the promotion of pleasure.
In other words, faced with sexual diversity
and variance, sexology could become a "pleasure-centered
sexology" rather than a juridical sexology
absorbed in the search for etiology and cure.
Early sexology had to win its legitimacy as
a field of research and academic pursuit by
relying upon its association with the more acceptable
institutions of power, especially medicine and
law (two fields too well-known for their extreme
lack of reflection and self-critique). Now as
we become more and more aware of the plurality,
plasticity, and diversity in human sexual desire
and expression, sexology's bid for legitimation
could be reinvented as being linked to other
socio-cultural institutions such as the human
rights and equality discourse--the true spirit
of modernization according to sociologist Anthony
Giddens; and perhaps also to our abundant erotic
culture and even aesthetics--which Giddens has
so aptly renamed as the core of "life politics."
Work is already under way in feminist studies
and the new field of sexuality studies. Whether
sexology itself would catch on or not will be
up to all of us here. Thank you.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality.
Vol. 1. An Introduction. New York: Random House,
1978.
Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity:
Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1991.
Rubin, Gayle S. "Thinking Sex: Notes for
a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality."
American Feminist Thought at Century's End:
A Reader. Ed. By Linda S. Kauffman. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1993. 3-64.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sexuality and Its Discontents:
Meanings, Myths & Modern Sexualities. New
York: Routledge, 1985.
