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Remember the Sexual Revolution? In the 60s, sex burst forth in the West, like spring's green shoots. The queers rioted at Stonewall. Sex before and outside of marriage became commonplace. Pornographic imagery bloomed like lilies in the field. Varieties of desire previously spoken of only in hushed voices were now shouted in the streets. Burning their bras in public, women demanded sexual equality.

The Sexual Revolution wasn't just brought to you by the post-War demographic bulge or a random change in the Zeitgeist. It was brought about in part by science-- the doctors who gave us the birth-control pill and "magic-bullet" antibiotics against venereal disease, the anatomists who rediscovered the potency of the clitoris, laying to rest Freud's notion of the vaginal orgasm. Most important of all was the ground-breaking social science of Alfred Kinsey, who showed a yawning gap between what Americans said about sexual mores and what they actually did.

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That the Sexual Revolution is now over is old news-- it was done-in by AIDS, the political turn to the right in the 80s, and the very success and institutionalization of the movements that in 60s and 70s were mounting the barricades. Today, the global media is saturated with sex scandal-- Bill Clinton's dalliance with a buxom intern almost cost him the world's most powerful job. Celebrities make the news caught possessing outlaw pornography. And in the US, the Catholic Church has been brought to its knees by the once-secret liaisons of its priests. Tipping their hats to its power, politicians and the media attack sex research that violates current sensibilities. Caught between the demands of science and society, how are sexologists succeeding-- or failing-- to deal with the cultural roots and implications of their work?

A good place to find out was at Montreal's Bonaventure Hilton last November, the site of the annual conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS)-- known as Quad-S-- America's oldest sexological organization, and publisher of the Journal of Sex Research.

Your correspondent could only sample among the 100 or so presentations. He can't report on "Sexual Assistance for Disabled People: How Far Can We Go?" "Vaginal Spasm, Pain, and Behavior: Redefining Vaginismus," or the cryptic "Does PMDD Belong in the DSM?" But he did pick up the following from the conference buzz...

-- that Viagra-- the 924,149,204th pill of which was popped last September 20th-- is changing the face of research by proving there's big money to be had in products that enhance sex-- handy, as state funding dries up for everything except preventing, policing, and punishing it.

-- that it's a bad idea to cut off or cosmetically "reduce" children's genitalia-- which doctors still do when babies are born with small (that is, under one inch) penises or large (over one inch) clitorises-- surgery conducted only to make children appear more "normal"

-- that even in the age of the internet and ubiquitous gay clubs, college tearooms are going strong, despite harassment from campus police and cluck-clucking from lesbigay student groups. Cruisy campus toilets, particularly at rural schools, often serve as regional gay meeting spots

-- that female circumcision may be more complex and benign procedure than received opinion holds-- often involving no more than a snip to the clitoral prepuce, comparable to what boys routinely undergo in American hospitals

-- that the Catholic church in centuries past tolerated abortion, at least in so far as endorsing use of the Herbs of Venus for what was touted as healthful "purges" for women who missed their menses. From one of those herbs derives the active ingredient in the morning-after pill RU-486

-- that women may be as prone to use violence to get sex and as likely to diddle youngsters as men, though they get caught less frequently and suffer fewer consequences

-- that some people with sexual tastes that get them into legal trouble should be given treatments that make them hornier, in order to make them less sexually discriminating, and so able to "get off" in ways less disruptive or taboo.

Margins of the known universe

As befitting a science confab, some of the research presented was "basic"-- advancing the frontiers of knowledge but without obvious practical purpose. At one of the plenaries, University of Washington psychiatry professor Julia Heiman described her inquiries into the plumbing of female sexual arousal. While penises famously get hard, it turns out that aroused females experience a more subtle and hidden array of vascular events, little known to science. To help lift the veil, 25 women agreed to be immobilized in an MRI machine, which can reveal interior organs in real time. Through binoculars, they would peer at porn of their choosing, while enduring the MRI's raucous clankings. Heiman described the experiment, as well as others, in which scientists placed up women's vaginas doppler ultrasound probes, photo-plethysmographs, and heated electrodes-- the better to measure clitoral engorgement and vaginal blood flow. Alas for science, Woman remains mysterious-- the pulsings so far uncovered bear little relation to the self-reported peaks and valleys the of the subjects' arousal.

But Heiman's was one of the more technical presentations. Sex being a vast subject, Quad-S is an interdisciplinary affair. Together at the conference were sociologists, public-health specialists, educators, hawkers of sex curricula and therapy tapes, representatives of various advocacy groups, and the odd philosopher or historian. Bearded, tweed-clad professors whose political consciousness seems to have coalesced in 1968 mingled with prim therapists from the America's sex prisons who give off an antiseptic air of 1984. In the cramped hotel conference room set aside for coffee and displays, the six-foot-plus transvestite representative of Tri-Ess-- Society for the Second Self (SSS), a group for heterosexual cross-dressers (no relation to Quad-S)-- towered in her pink dress over the somber-suited textbook salesmen from McGraw Hill at the next table. "It's a little bit different than from when I was doing the engineering and computer-science books," the textbook man related with a wink. Sometimes the conference felt like a watering hole on the African savanna, where thirst brings together giraffes, lions, and hippos otherwise rarely seen in each others' company.

An outsider soon realized this was no ordinary academic confab. At an interminable awards luncheon it seemed no Quad-S recording secretary or subcommittee chair remained ungarlanded. When a professor at Indiana University received a prize for career service, he burst into tears. "I will not be intimidated or silenced," he declared, his composure steadying, "and I hope you won't be either." Just add "Praise Jesus!" and it could have seemed like a convention of Baptist missionaries working under peril to save souls in Red China.

But sex research is indeed under the gun. In 1991, funding for a large-scale survey of US sex practices-- vital for strategizing against AIDS-- was cut by Congress, afraid results would show how common was queer sex. Playing Vatican to Galileo, the US Congress in condemned a 1998 study by Temple University psychologist Bruce Rind that suggested that college students reporting sexual abuse suffered no statistically significant harmful effects.

Direct attacks on scholars and research aside, the study of sex is low on the academic pecking order. Nanotech, breast cancer, and gene sequencing are sexy research subjects; sex is not. As Freud imagined little girls dreaming wistfully about having penises, so Quad-S seems to suffer an institutional envy of, say, physics-- a science that is hard. Not only would having the status of physicists mean enjoying better funding-- for, say, Kinsey-style sex surveys, sexology's version of super-expensive cyclotrons. But it would also mint sexologists' scientific credentials in tarnish-proof gold.

Quad-S's name itself hints at defensiveness-- there's no Society for the Scientific Study of Chemistry, implicitly setting itself apart from quacks who fool with Bunsen burners and gas-chromatography. Science may be the fig leaf that justifies academic attention to sex. But inevitably, those who study sex are participant-observers. Sexology's "lab rats" are fellow humans, and the voice of research subjects is key-- the inter- or homo- sexed, for example, are authorities on their own being, and doctors got it wrong until they took them seriously. What made Kinsey a great sexologist weren't his creds as the entomologist who knew more than anybody else about gall wasps. It was that he had a keen human intelligence about sex, and how to get people to talk to strangers about things they rarely admitted to lovers. As with good psychology or anthropology generally, studying sex requires that researchers be wholly comfortable in their own skins, aware of the workings of their own characters or culture, yet be simultaneously open to modes of life radically alien. Like being a good politician or novelist, such skills are not reducible to method. Perhaps physics isn't either. But for cultural self-awareness, Quad-S and academic sexology generally gets only a middling grade.

The John/Joan case

The most dramatic event at the conference followed from an experiment that failed, underscoring the importance of correctly teasing out sex's weave of biology and culture. David Reimer was seven months old in 1966 when his penis was burned off in a botched circumcision. His parents were at a loss about what to do when John Money-- professor at Johns Hopkins University and a leading sexologist-- proposed that the boy be surgically "reassigned" as a girl. Money had asserted that the strong human sense of being male or female was wholly culturally constructed, and only became fixed around age two. Reimer's parents went along, and the infant was castrated, with labia fashioned from his scrotum. While the boy's identity remained secret, over the years the case was reported as a resounding success and confirmation of Money's thesis.

Milton Diamond, then a graduate student and now Quad-S's president, had doubts about Money's theory, noting the role of prenatal sex hormones in shaping the brain. He had published an article questioning Money's claims about gender identity. For years afterward, Diamond tried to track down the boy who'd been made a girl.

It turned out that Reimer never took to his new status, despite his family's full cooperation. He would spend his allowance on toy guns, get into fist fights, and urinate standing up, whatever the mess. At school he faced general ostracism from girls and boys alike. When adolescence hit, he began and then refused to take the prescribed estrogen pills, rejecting the budding breasts and widening hips. Finally, when his parents told him what had happened, Reimer chose to live as a male. He had surgery to construct a rudimentary penis. Today he's married, and father to his wife's children from other relationships.

Reimer's case has been widely discussed in recent years, and is the subject of John Colapinto's book As Nature Made Him. At the Montreal Quad-S meeting, Reimer made his first public appearance. Perhaps because of lowered testosterone at key periods, he cuts a youthful and handsome figure (while the hormone helps make the man, it also recesses hairlines, clogs arteries, and ages him). Reimer is angry if long-resigned about what happened. To his credit, he's extended an olive branch to Money, and has sought to meet with him. But Money, now retired, has refused contact with his former patient and won't discuss the case. Quad-S member roundly criticized Money for both failing to "do no harm" and then covering up his mistake. Still, one conference-goer stood up and said, this matter notwithstanding, Money remained an important sexologist, a comment that won applause.

Diamond summed up the current state-of-the-art, which he has helped define: genetic sex and genitals predispose a person strongly to the corresponding sense of sexual identity. In cases of physical ambiguity or injury, surgery or reassignment can wait until the person makes up his or her own mind-- or may simply be unnecessary.

Clerical sex

Another plenary session at the conference also seemed to jump from the newspaper headlines. Jay Feierman, professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, asked why men with other options would forfeit sex and a shot at reproduction to take a vow of celibacy and become Catholic priests. His answer was that to men of certain sexual persuasions, a life spent in male company isn't a sacrifice at all.

"Through its history, the church as provide homosexually oriented men a safe haven," Feierman said. "Gay people would hardly have needed a spiritual motivation to join a same-sex community of equals."

Data on priests' sexuality is scattershot-- but Feierman was well-positioned to survey the landscape, working for years at a Church-run treatment center for troubled clergy. Feierman cited surveys suggesting that maybe 25 to 75 percent of American priests are homoerotically inclined. From his work ascertaining the sexuality of priests referred to him, he found large percentages attracted to men and adolescent boys, though very few to younger ones.

Over the millennia, Feierman contended, Catholicism became the transmission line into the present of the homoerotic power-plant that was Ancient Greece. An archetype he found among homoerotically-inclined priests were those attracted to adolescent boys 13 to 16-- after pubic hair, before facial hair-- the same standard upheld in ancient Athens. Socrates and Plato notwithstanding, Feierman attributed such desire to "immaturity," "arrested development," and "fixation." But he granted that the sexual liaisons-- typically involving adolescents getting sucked off or engaging mutual masturbation-- usually went on with the youths' complicity. Teenage boys are sexually charged but often lack sexual outlets, Feierman said, and so find genital manipulation pleasurable. Sex in the church, on his account, was an aspect of young male sexual opportunism-- in which a donkey, a cantaloupe, or a cleric's mouth can all be ports of call in puberty's sexual storm.

Feierman painted a fairly benign average picture of these encounters-- which corresponds with the typical leniency these relationships were treated in the Church over the centuries-- among participant, parishioners, and clergy. During questions and answers following his speech, America's sexperts hardly quibbled with Feierman's benign analysis, but offered many anecdotes illustrating what conference-goers considered the extraordinary sexual ignorance and hypocrisy they'd encountered in the Church.

Liberal pieties

After Feierman's lecture, for more almost two hours a handful of people joined him to chat. A young man sat in the group, but never spoke. Later I sought him out. He turned out to be an ex-seminarian, now openly gay and attending college. He agreed with parts of Feierman's picture-- he found the priests who were to lead him into the calling immature, prone to cracking boobs jokes. That is part of what prompted him to leave the seminary. But at the same time he rejected what he felt was Feierman's reduction of the clerical vocation to sexual motivation. Not that sex didn't have a lot to do with Catholic spirituality, he said, or his own reasons for seeking to join its brotherhood. By rejecting sexual attachment, Catholicism sustained ecstatic traditions of communion-- with God, Jesus, Mary-- or merely among nuns, monks, or brothers. That was part of what he had sought in going to seminary, but did not find.

It's not a peculiarly Catholic idea to put homoerotic desire-- with its chance for freedom from family obligation-- to cultural use. Many premodern societies had a role for the berdache-- an often sexually variant male invested with sacred function. There are parallels in Hindu and Sufi traditions. The ganglike promiscuity of homoerotic ties-- as distinct from romantic heterosexual ones-- has sustained group morale in military contexts throughout history. More peaceably, Walt Whitman's poetry suggests the male's exuberant wide-ranging sexuality-- the quality of finding everyone desirable-- can lead to a rampant rutting in the bushes, but may also sustain a sense of bonding with all humanity. Freud argued that the general social connectivity on which civilization depends is at heart libidinal.

But despite the minute attention given at the Quad-S conference to the pulse and push of sexual response-- there was a curious obliviousness to these cultural uses of sexuality. The sex professionals of Quad-S aspire to nothing if not a "rational" view of sex, within whose categories is worked out an entire morality-- with ideals of sexual health grounded in freely chosen, sex-educated, justly policed, committed relationships among consenting adults.

This commitment to rational sex is why Feierman-- and no one in his audience-- posed an obvious question. If the relationships now being exposed in the Church were generally banal and rooted in verities of history and biology-- if not exactly Papal bull-- then how to judge the sudden shocked outrage? Is the furor driven only by money, the $10 billion dollars Feierman said has been paid out by the Church in sex settlements in the US? Or is the panic a manifestation of something strange going on in the larger culture? And is the destruction of the Church only to be welcomed as an end to irrationality and hypocrisy?

Sexual dysfunction

If sexology can't grasp forms of eroticism that don't meet its standards of transparency and reason, then its attempt to understand sex fails. A pity, because greater understanding is desperately needed as the program of liberalizing, rationalizing, and categorizing sex, has run its course, and is ceasing to serve the integrity of individuals in whose name it is invoked.

The West is now deeply troubled over sex, not from the failure of liberalizing project, but its realization. There is greater freedom and openness in some ways than ever before-- from Tokyo to Tbilisi, porn on tap from every screen, sexy scenarios in every ad, rights protections for designated sexual minorities. But beneath that crust churns a magma of hatred and repugnance toward sex, and a readiness to ascribe to it every imaginable evil. A continuing series of manufactured but explosive scandals-- from the claims of satanic day-care center sex abuse cases of the 80s to the claims about hundreds of thousands of missing children-- have poured lava over the political landscape. With the priest panic, these seismic events seem continuous.

Every advance of the last generation has come to cast a shadow. There is a massive legal apparatus in place to protect people from sexual coercion, but it means that every man is vulnerable to a charge-- impossible to disprove-- that he touched someone 25 years ago, the line between "touch" and "rape" now erased. There is official recognition of homosexual and transgenderism, but other sexual identities-- once they are ascribed to you by the state-- can mean that you are civilly committed-- or, soon, in Canada and Britain, have chips implanted in you monitoring your every move. Gone is the old regime of censorship and silence, but click on the wrong web link, and you can go to prison for decades. Along with drugs and terror, sex hysteria propels the moves toward universal surveillance.

Around the time of the French Revolution-- another period in which both democracy and terror spread-- the claim that masturbation was destroying bodies, minds, and the fabric of civilization suddenly struck a chord. These ideas flourished throughout the West for more than century. These claims are renewed today-- only sexual "self abuse" has morphed into the category "sexual abuse"-- with the symptomatology claimed by experts virtually identical. This secularized, medicalized picture of sex as degenerating has so far proven more intractable than the old religious proscriptions, which the Church proved so adept at wriggling around.

John Money, fond of bold claims, may this time be right when he says that "graham crackers and corn flakes [foods invented to stop masturbation] have a great deal to say not only about our past but also about our future, and whether our children and grandchildren will live in a political democracy or a dictatorship."

"Degeneracy theory," Money goes on, "not only affects the sexual health of the individual person, it impinges on the political health of the body politic as well."

At a time when the West's liberal program of sexual reform has reached its breaking point, sexology must grasp the potentialities of sexuality that lie beyond its current understanding. At a time when getting it wrong about sex is helping push the West into tyranny, getting it right about sex couldn't be more vital.

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com