We found that over five decades, the most popular words in sexology evolved to reflect cultural ideas about what’s normal bedroom behavior. Broadly, these changes reflect major social events over time, including the sexual revolution, the AIDS epidemic, and the civil rights and LGBTQ movements. As sexual norms in the public eye evolved, so did the science studying it.
Early on, sex researchers—and scientists in general—tended to talk about people they worked with as objects of study, rather than fellow human beings. The language was stiff and clinical, formalizing sexual behaviors in a way that made them sound like medical conditions. Over time, sexologists adopted more humanizing terms, reflecting a shift toward thinking of volunteers for their work as equals who deserve to benefit from the research. By substituting terms that sound less clinical, researchers indirectly acknowledge that different traits, like sexual orientation, are all normal. Ideally, this attitude would reach health care settings and eventually the greater public. [...]
Men—particularly gay men—have been studied a lot more than women in the field of sex research because of the HIV epidemic. At the start of the crises, in the 1980s, the virus mostly affected men who had sex with men. In the following decade, there’s a striking shift in usage of “man” compared to “woman” in the literature, which reflects the surge of papers related to HIV related to public health. [...]
Americans don’t live and interact with each other the way they used to. Marriage rates in the US have declined since the 1970s, and families are a lot more diverse today than the post-war picture of a wife and husband raising kids. There was a dramatic shift in public perceptions of sex beginning in the late 1960s, with growing acceptance of sex outside heteronormative marriages, and in the 1970s, feminists pushed the public conversation to start addressing rape and sexual assault. Sex research evolved alongside these social changes.
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