At the same time, large numbers of women were
choosing not to marry. Married women were not consid-
ered for most jobs, so if you wanted any kind of career,
you had to stay single. Domestic partnerships between two
women, often lifelong, were so common that they had
their own name—Boston marriages. No doubt some of the
women involved in these relationships were lesbians, but
many liked men. They just didn’t want to deal with the
career suicide that came with marriage.The Interplay of Biology and Society
Where does sexuality come from? We know that orienta-
tion is pretty stable by about the age of 5 (maybe earlier—
we just can’t interview newborns very effectively), and
unchangeable—you like who you like throughout your
life, regardless of how much society approves or disap-
proves. But were you born with a sexual orientation, or did it evolve during those
five years? Because heterosexual identity has so much social prestige, there’s been lit-
tle research on how people “become” heterosexual. Research, instead, typically is
directed to explain the experiences of the “other.” But we can take the research on
gay people and expand it to include other orientations.
Many scientists claim that sexual orientation is the result of biology: chromosomes,
brain chemistry, differences in our pubertal hormones. Some researchers have claimed
they’ve discovered the “gay gene” our the “gay brain,” but these studies are based on
small samples with very large margins for error. Cross-cultural studies seem to indicate
that about 5 percent of every human male population and 3 percent of every human
female population is going to have exclusive same-sex interests, regardless of how much
their culture praises or condemns same-sex activity. (And same-sex behavior is extremely
common in the animal kingdom, which dispels evolutionary arguments.)
Sociologists generally believe that sexual orientation is both biologically based
and socially constructed. One probably has an innate, biologically based interest in
a certain sex, but the way that interest is understood, the ways we learn to act on it,
to feel about it, and to express it are all learned in society.Researching Sexuality
Human beings are curious about sex, and we have been conducting “sex research” since
the beginning of time. In the Middle Ages, adventurous aristocrats collected anecdotes
about sexual activity for their personal gratification, and religious leaders collected them
for a (presumably) more spiritual reason, using confessions about sexual activity as a
window into immorality of all sorts (Foucault, 1979). By the eighteenth century, sex
was seen as draining the body of its energy, and the general belief was that any sexual
behavior that was not procreative (especially masturbation) should be avoided entirely.Early Sex Research
In the late nineteenth century, sex research was gradually taken over by scientists, who
sought to observe sex without moral condemnation. Four of the most famous sex
researchers at the turn of the twentieth century were European.326 CHAPTER 10SEXUALITYJMost scientists now agree
that sexual identity is the
result of the interaction of
biological, cultural, and social
influences. But one thing is
clear: in industrialized coun-
tries, there is increased accep-
tance of all sexual identities.
The founding charter of the
European Union prohibits dis-
crimination based on sexual
identity.