Sexuality
In Gagnon’s book Human Sexualities the interactionist approach to sexuality is put simply:
In any given society, at any given moment in its history, people become sexual in the same way they become everything else. Without much reflection, they pick up directions from their social environment. They acquire and assemble meanings, skills and values from the people around them. Their critical choices are often made by going along and drifting. People learn when they are quite young a few of the things they are expected to be, and continue slowly to accumulate a belief in who they are and ought to be throughout the rest of their childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Sexual conduct is learned in the same ways and through the same processes; it is acquired and assembled in human interaction, judged and performed in specific cultural and historical worlds.
(Gagnon 1977, p. 2)
In this and other works the idea of a sexual script is advanced. Viewing conduct as scripted is a way of organising our thinking about behaviour. Scripts are the plans people may have in their heads for what they are doing and what they are going to do as well as devices for remembering what they have done in the past. Scripts specify like blue prints the whos, whats, wheres, whens and whys for given types of activity.
According to this perspective all social behaviour is scripted.
What are the components of a sexual script:
Who - an individual- has sexual relations with is defined. Most people do sexual things with a restricted number and kinds of people usually members of the opposite sex who are of the same age. There are limits set by blood relation, by marital status by race ethnicity, religion and social class.
What one does sexually is also important. Of the whole range of sexual acts one can perform most are classified as right or wrong, appropriate or in appropriate.
When is sex appropriate? Usually in private and in the absence of children. When can be constituted in a number of ways – the day, the week, the year, a person’s age. Most societies tend to see sex as more or less appropriate at one age, one phase of the human life cycle (reproductive). It comes ass a shock to many young people that people over sixty continue to have sexual relations leading to a reaction ‘How can they… they are old’ . This reaction implies that sex is only good between young people and that older people cannot be sexually attractive to others. That judgement has no basis in biological fact but emerges for social definitions of when it is appropriate to be or not to be sexual.
Where does society approve of doing sexual things? This related up to the notion of privacy. For Freud it is important that children do not see parents having sexual intercourse. This notion of separate bedroom is a Victorian middle class idea and in the past children would have slept in the parent’s bedroom.
What do people do when they have sex? This is not why do human beings have the ability to reproduce but what are the culturally appropriate explanations for doing sexual things that people learn? How do individuals explain, both to themselves and to others why they do approved and disapproved sexual things?
The why of sex is rhetoric. Sex is for: having children, pleasure, lust, fun, and passion, love, and rebellion exploitation…
Who, what, when, where, why under these headings they sexual scripts of any society can be organised. Learning a sexual script is part of growing up in any society. The scripts we accumulate and our ability to apply and manipulate them are rarely the outcome of a systematic and conscious leaning process but rather an accumulation of responses to the multiplicity of cues and hints that are provided by the social world around us.
How does this relate to Darwinian evolutionary theory and biological arguments?
There are arguments that biology sets everything. Gagnon argues that while it is possible to study and learn from primates that it is not possible to make predictions from their behaviour to that of humans.
The second strand of this argument relates to the ‘man the hunter thesis’ It states that humans lived as hunters and gathers for thousands of years and had a division of labour between males and females and it assumes that as a result of evolutionary forces (natural selection) that the male/female division of labour and the sexual scripts associated with them must be natural to all humans. The fact that women have cared for children is not necessarily connected with the nature of female sexual interest.
One of the dangers of biological evolutionary views is that they are often used for justifying contemporary gender role differences between men and women which are related to differences in power, status, opportunities and resources.
The social and psychological aspects of masculinity and femininity are seen to be rooted in some basic biological difference – evolution, hormones, the organisation of the brain – that is assumes that there is something about human female biology that makes women more passive, more receptive and more interested in raising children and more likely to possess the whole range of traits included in out lexicon of female gender roles.
The argument provided in Gagnon’ book is that the social psychological conduct of human beings is rarely explainable through the use of ideas derived from biology or through direct appeal to biological processes. Alone among species human beings can create their own purposes and these may be anti biological, anti survival, anti evolutionary. There were two groups the Shakers and the Cathars. In both the Shakers and Cathar religions the flesh is deemed as evil and having children is seen as evil because it creates more spirits embedded in the flesh. Neither sect believed in redemption - the only choice was to stop having children and die out.
Ken Plummer in his book Sexual Stigma argues: that men (and women) live in two very different worlds. In the first place he is a mammal of quite ordinary properties and at the same time he lives in a symbolic universe.
At one level man is a creature with needs, drives, physiological responses and capacities bound into an environment by geography, history and political groups and confronting objects that exist independently of him – these are worlds studied by the biologist and psychologist.
At the second level men and women are creators and inhibitors of symbolic worlds. It is this ability to make modify and manipulate symbols, which is the distinctive feature that makes men and women truly human.
For interactions meanings arise out of interaction and not the other way around. Objects may vary in their meanings according to the definitional processes of persons. A pornographic book is not the same object in the worlds of schoolboys, priests, moral crusaders, sex fiends, anxious parents, printers and newsagents.
The world as process
The world now becomes to be seen in a state of change or flux. Human beings act toward others and objects on the basis of the meanings that such things have for them but meanings are being continually constructed and modified through interaction.
Rather that viewing behaviour as simple release from a pre existing psychological structure such as drives, personalities, emotions or attitudes or as a consequence of external coercion by social facts – cultures, structures, organisational roles, power – the interactionist focuses on emergence and negotiation – the processes by which social action is constantly being constructed, modified, checked, selected, suspended, terminated and recommenced in everyday life.
The world as interaction
The basic insight is that the human being is capable of becoming an object to himself/herself. In Meadian terms:
The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘Me’ is the organised set of attitudes of others which one assumes. The attitudes constitute the organised ‘Me’ and then one reacts toward that as an ‘I’.
The nature of sexual meanings:
The fundamental axiom of the interactionist approach is simply put that nothing is sexual but naming makes it so. Sexuality is a social construct learnt in interaction with others. This is not to deny biological facts it is simply to assert that things do not have sex meanings in their own right - these have to be bestowed upon them through sexual encounters. The mind has to define something as sexual before it is sexual in its consequence.
Plummer stated that one of Freud’s errors was to equate sexual meanings constructed by adult men with those of children.
The social sources of sexual meaning:
Rather than sexually determining our social being as Freudian writers suggests it is the other way around – social meanings determine and affect our sexuality. Sexuality has no meaning other than that given to it in social situations.
The most general biological explanation of sexuality resides in the notion of instinct this reduces men and woman to the level of an animal and these explanations stress the instincts as the basis for social action. In contrast the interactionists argue that sexual feelings have to be constantly placed of the context of the individuals interpretation of them and action is not on the basis of biological forces pushing from within to behave in certain ways rather individuals constantly set about interpreting inner feelings and making sense of the world around. Many biologists do not simply talk of instinct rather they perceive it as a high pressure drive constituting a closed energy system subject to the laws of conservation of energy. This is the situation with Freud’s conception of the personality as a complex, intricate but closed energy system, which if not channelled into sexual energy will be, channelled elsewhere.
The scepticism which interactions pour upon this theory of instincts becomes less pronounced when applied to specific biological mechanisms such as hormones and nervous systems. These must be viewed in relationship with interpretative processes - a hormone may provide a sensation but it cannot provide a meaning.
Reference:
J. H. Gagnon (1977) Human Sexualities. New York: Scot Foresman.
Gagnon, J. H. and W, Simon (1974) Sexual Conduct. London: Hutchinson
K, Plummer (1975) Sexual Scripts. London: Routledge, Kegan Paul.
P, Robinson (1976) The Modernisation of Sex. London: Harper Row