Studying Sexuality: Bodies,
Behaviors, and Identities
As you will recall from the gender chapter, scientists draw a distinction between sex,
referring to one’s physiology (typically, but not always, male or female), and gender,
which refers to the social and cultural meanings associated with being male, female,
or something else. Sex is biological, standard across the human species, but gender
is a social construction that differs from culture to culture and across time.
When discussing sexuality, we usually try distinguishing desire (physical attrac-
tion), behavior (sex), and identity (sexuality). When we discuss “sex” in the context
of sexuality, we are not referring to one’s biological sex but rather sexual behavior,
or “sexual conduct”—the things people do from which they derive sexual meanings.
Think of sex as whatever people do to experience sexual pleasure.
The term sexualityalso refers to the identities we construct that are often based
on our sexual conduct. Our identities may derive from the biological sex of the per-
son whom we desire or with whom we have sex; that is, we may consider ourselves
heterosexual, gay, bisexual. Or our identities may derive from some particular prac-
tice such as group sex or sex only with members of a different race. Sexual identity
often intersects with other sources of identity—race, class, ethnicity, age, gender—
and these together may form a coherent unit, or they may collide and different parts
may become salient at different times.
Because sexual desire, sexual behavior, and sexual identity are so social, they are
subject to values about their “correctness” and norms governing their enactment and
even their expression. Some behaviors and identities are pronounced proper and oth-
ers immoral or unnatural. There is therefore significant inequality based on sexual
identity and sexual behavior; in many cultures, having the “wrong” desires, doing
the “wrong” things, or “being” the wrong sexuality can threaten where you live and
work and even threaten your life.
Sexual behavior is, in this sense, no different from all the other behaviors in our
lives. We learn it from the people and institutions and ideas around us, and assemble
it into a coherent narrative that comes to be our sexuality. Sexual conduct is learned
in the same ways and through the same processes as every other facet of our identity;
“it is acquired and assembled in human interaction, judged and performed in specific
cultural and historical worlds,” writes sociologist John Gagnon (1977, p. 2).
Every culture develops a sexual script, a set of ideas and practices that answer
the basic questions about sex: With whom do we have sex? What do we do? How
often? Why? These scripts form the basic social blueprint
for our sexual behaviors and identities (Gagnon and
Simon, 1967). Over the course of our childhood and ado-
lescence, even through adulthood, our understanding of
our culture’s sexual scripts begins to cohere into a prefer-
ence. This is your sexual socialization.
There are four ways in which sexuality can be seen as
socially constructed:1.Sexuality varies enormously from one culture to the
next. Anthropologists have catalogued a wide variety
of sexual attitudes and behaviors around the world.2.Sexuality varies within any one culture over time.
Historians have pointed out the ways in which Victorian316 CHAPTER 10SEXUALITYWe experience socialization
around sexuality as we do any
other set of behaviors and
identities. And socialization
by our peers teaches us
what sorts of behaviors
are approved—and which
are not. n