Lecture Notes

The diversity of sexual behaviors across cultures and times immediately calls into question the appropriateness of labeling these behaviors as inherently natural or unnatural, normal or abnormal. Often these labels are value judgments and evaluations of what we feel is right or wrong. To decide if a sexual behavior is natural or unnatural, we must have some standard of nature against which we compare the behavior to. If a behavior is labeled as natural or unnatural, we typically are indicating whether the behavior conforms to our culture's sexual norms. Our sexual norms appear natural because we have internalized them since birth. Additionally, sexual behavior is also described as either normal or abnormal. However, more often than not, describing a behavior as normal or abnormal is merely another way of making a value judgment. Social scientists use the word strictly as a statistical term. For them, normal sexual behavior is behavior that conforms to a group's average, or the statistical norm of behavior. Ironically, although we feel pressure to behave like the average person, or the statistical norm, most of us don't actually know how others behave sexually. People don't ordinarily reveal much about their sexual activities, and if they do, it's often their most conformist sexual behaviors. Are there behaviors, however, that are considered essential to sexual functioning and, consequently, universally labeled as normal? Yes, there is. Reproduction, or the biological process by which individuals are produced, is probably the one shared view of normal sexual behavior that most cultures would agree upon. All other beliefs about sexual expression and behavior develop from social context.