Methods, Sex and Madness

Dr Derek Layder, Julia O'Connell Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134860890
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Social research yields knowledge which powerfully affects our daily lives. The 'facts' it generates shape not just how we see ourselves and others, but also whether or not we see the existing status quo as normal, just and legitimate. This book examines and questions the methods used by social researchers to produce such knowledge. It focuses chiefly on research into human sexuality and madness. It introduces and critically assesses everything from survey methods to participant observation. It opens up broader philosophical debates about the nature of knowledge, and highlights issues surrounding the ethics and politics of research.
The book looks at the research community and the research process in detail before moving on to examine the main techniques used in social research:
* the use of official statistics
* the survey method
* interviewing
* laboratory observation
* ethnography
* the use of documentary sources
* textual analysis.
By exploring both technical and conceptual problems in the work of researchers like Freud and Kinsey, and by considering the difficulties faced by researchers concerned with phenomena such as rape, witch hunts and prostitution this book makes methodological issues both interesting and accessible.

Chapter 1

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Social research and everyday life

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Germain Gamier, christened Marie … was a well-built young man with a thick red beard, who, until the age of fifteen … had lived and dressed like a girl, showing ‘no mark of masculinity’. Then once, in the heat of puberty, the girl jumped across a ditch while chasing pigs through a wheatfield: ‘at that very moment the genitalia and the male rod came to be developed in him, having ruptured the ligaments by which they had been held enclosed’. Marie, soon to be Marie no longer, hastened home to her/his mother, who consulted physicians and surgeons, all of whom assured the somewhat shaken woman that her daughter had become her son.

(Laqueur 1990: 127)

This story, told in the sixteenth century, reflected the centuries old belief that ‘women had the same genitals as men except that… “theirs are inside the body and not outside it”’ (Laqueur 1990: 4). If girls were too boisterous, their vagina, uterus and ovaries, which were imagined as an interior penis, scrotum and testicles, might simply fall out, transforming them into males. In Making Sex, Laqueur shows how for thousands of years it was common-sense knowledge that there was but one sex, that the female body was an inverted male body. Since around the eighteenth century, however, common sense has postulated the existence of two ‘opposite’ sexes, female and male, and that the difference between the two is biologically defined, fixed and immutable. Until the eighteenth or nineteenth century, it was also common-sense knowledge that women could not conceive unless they experienced orgasm during sexual intercourse (how else could they release the seed from their inverted testicles?), many people also believed that venereal disease could be cured by sexual contact with an uncontaminated partner – an idea which was sometimes offered as a defence by men who were on trial for the rape of young children (Simpson 1987). Common-sense knowledge about madness has also changed over the centuries. Gods, demons and devils, rather than an unhappy childhood, a disease or a genetic predisposition, were once the assumed ‘cause’ of bizarre or erratic behaviour and moods.

Where does such taken-for-granted, common-sense knowledge come from and what is its relation to ‘scientific’ enquiry? Looking back at the tragic consequences of common-sense beliefs that venereal diseases could be transmitted outwards or that a pregnant woman could not possibly have been raped but must have fully participated and enjoyed the act, it is tempting to see scientific knowledge as quite separate from, and infinitely superior to, everyday thinking. One version of the history of the natural sciences certainly presents the scientist, from Galileo on, as engaged in a heroic struggle against the benighted ignorance of lay people, and there are social scientists who conceive of their profession in much the same way. The twentieth century has seen an ever-expanding trail of ‘experts’ who draw on social science research to explain to the unenlightened how to behave at job interviews, how to be a more effective manager, teacher or social worker; how they should bring up children, make a marriage last, or cope with bereavement; how to recognise, avoid or deal with alcoholism, annorexia nervosa, depression, stress and a myriad of other afflictions. In short, both social scientific and natural science research can be presented as sweeping away ‘old wives tales’ and the prejudiced ‘mumbo jumbo’ that is common sense to reveal the hard, objective truths beneath it. What we aim to show in this chapter is that the relationship between scientific and everyday thinking is rather more complex than this.

This book is about the research methods used by social scientists and aims to equip the reader with a basic knowledge of the most commonly employed research techniques. But it is not simply a ‘how to do it’ manual. The book is also concerned with the methodological and philosophical problems associated with social research techniques, for an appreciation of these problems helps us to take a more critical approach to the knowledge which comes from social research. The book as a whole aims, therefore, to challenge the notion of ‘scientific’ and ‘common-sense’ thinking as two completely separate, even antagonistic, ways of knowing about the world. It suggests that the relationship between the two is far more intimate. Social scientists draw on their stock of everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge to conduct research, and the findings of social scientific research seep back into the pool of common-sense knowledge. Because of this interplay between scientific knowledge and everyday thinking, there is also a strong relationship between social power and social research and this political dimension of research (especially gender politics) is another of the themes addressed throughout this book. Though the same case could be made in relation to any field of sociological or psychological enquiry, whether it be ‘racialisation’, work and industry, health, education or whatever, the remainder of this chapter illustrates these points through a consideration of research into human sexuality.

COMMON-SENSE AND ‘SCIENTIFIC’ CONSTRUCTIONS OF ‘NORMAL’ SEXUALITY

Through a combination of medical, biological, psychological and social research, sexology (the science of sex) appears to have transformed everyday thinking about human sexuality, liberating us from many of the more repressive religious and traditional beliefs about gender roles as well as about how often we should have sex, with whom, when, where and in what position. Sexologists thrust their work upon us through the medium of sex manuals, popular magazines throb with their advice and agony aunts grind their message into the inhibited, the virginal and the guilty. Ever wider audiences now rub’up against their ideas in television programmes like The Good Sex Guide, and the refrain to the sexologists liberation song is to be found in popular books and films, like Madonna’s Sex and Nine and a Half Weeks. Nowadays, it is not only acceptable, but demanded, that women should enjoy sex. Surveys tell us that masturbation, far from being practised solely by a small minority of enfeebled moral degenerates, is an almost universal pleasure. Certain ‘beastly and monstrous’ techniques condemned as mortal sin by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century are now highly recommended as ‘foreplay’. Oral intercourse, we are told ‘cannot fail to … improve the intensity of the orgasm. … It is worth any time and patience making oneself really proficient at it’ (Chartham 1971: 71). A hint of S & M is high fashion. Agony aunts tell wives who have discovered their husbands have a penchant for cross-dressing that there is no reason to worry, a lot of men get thrills this way.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, one could be forgiven for thinking that common-sense thought has taken a passive role in its relationship with sexology – that it has simply lain back and allowed itself to be penetrated by the ideas and research findings of a hard science. If the historical development of Western ideas about human sexuality is considered in a little more depth, however, the interplay between scientific and everyday thinking looks rather different. And, as always, looking at the history of ideas tells us something about the history of power relations. We see who has been in a position to define the research agenda, to conduct the research and to disseminate their ideas, as well as links between society’s prevailing distribution of power and advantage and the way in which research findings are interpreted.

Sex and the Christian moralists

For centuries in Europe, strictures and advice on sexual behaviour were provided primarily by the Church and theologians. In a world created by God, everything had a purpose, and the early Christian moralists held that sexuality was given by God for the purpose of procreation. For theologians like St Thomas Aquinas, it followed from this that natural sex was sex within marriage for the purpose of begetting children. Anything else was not only sinful, but also transgressed natural laws by violating the true purpose of human sexuality (Ruse 1988: 184). From this line of reasoning, a ‘hierarchy of sin’ could be developed. All lust was immoral and, even within marriage, copulation for pleasure alone was a mortal sin. Moreover:

Intercourse between husband and wife was supposed to take place in the ‘natural’ position, the wife stretched out on her back with the man on top. All other positions were considered scandalous and ‘unnatural’. The one known as retro or more canino was unnatural because it was the way animals performed. The position mulier super virum was at variance with male and female characters, the woman being passive ‘by nature’ and the man active.

(Flandrin 1985: 120)

But some vices were worse still. They conflicted ‘with the natural pattern of sexuality for the benefit of the species’ (Aquinas, cited in Ruse 1988). In ascending order of heinousness, these were masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality and, as Aquinas put it, acts where ‘the natural style of intercourse is not observed, as regards the proper organ or according to other rather beastly and monstrous techniques’ (cited in Ruse 1988). Through reference to the scriptures and to the natural world, then, Christianity presented sexuality in terms of a moral dualism. There was good sex, which was natural and sanctified by God, and there was bad sex, which was both unnatural and immoral. There were, of course, dissenters from such views, even a few who defended homosexuality, but until the nineteenth century, everyday thinking about human sexuality was powerfully shaped by the Church’s twin dualisms – moral/immoral, natural/unnatural sex. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, however, there was, as Weeks puts it, a:

sustained effort to put all this on to a new ‘scientific’ footing: to isolate and individualise the specific characteristics of sexuality, to detail its normal paths and morbid variations, to emphasise its power and to speculate on its effects.

(1985: 66)

Sex and nineteenth-century science

The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1976) holds that the scientific world-view which emerged during the eighteenth century is distinguished from pre-scientific thought by its demand that statements of fact be based on observation, not on unsupported authority (such as the Bible); by its insistence that the physical world is a self-acting, self-perpetuating system, not one driven by gods or men; and by the dethronement of the idea that everything in the world has a God-given ‘purpose’. Science thus answers epistemological questions (philosophical questions about how claims to knowledge can be proved or grounded, what will count as ‘facts’) in a very different way to religious or magical thought, and it might therefore be expected that a scientific approach to the study of sexuality would signal dramatic change. Scientific claims about human sexuality would now have to be based upon observation and rigorous empirical studies, not upon readings from the scriptures. From the mid-nineteenth century on, human sexuality became part of the field of study first of biological and medical science and then of psychoanalysis. But though the new scientists of sex would all have wished to make a sharp distinction between their own ‘scientific’ approach and traditional, superstitious or religious thinking on the matter, what is most striking is the way in which they invariably reproduced the basic dichotomy between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sex that existed in theological and religious thought, and how similar their views were on which sexual activities fell on which side of this great divide.

In his second book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, Darwin argued that for a species to survive, it needed not only to adapt to its environment, but also to reproduce effectively. Biological scientists went on to explore the dynamics of sexual selection in the animal kingdom, and applied their findings to the human world. What these scientists discovered in the animal kingdom was ‘evidence’ that existing social norms and gender roles were perfectly suited to the survival of the species, while sexual activities that society frowned upon were dysfunctional and unnatural. Was this a fortuitous coincidence, or did these men’s existing moral and normative values affect their research agenda, shape their observations and the way in which they interpreted them? This tradition has recently enjoyed something of a revival in the work of sociobiologists who use similar methods to produce equally conservative claims about human sexuality. Ethological studies of animals in their natural habitats are used to support assertions about the ‘natural’ order of the sexes. We are told that human males are ‘naturally’ promiscuous, dominant and territorial because male baboons have ‘harems’ of female baboons, male lions ‘dominate’ female lions, sticklebacks ‘aggressively’ defend space. There is little to add to Weeks’ comment on such analyses:

What is happening here is the attribution of highly coloured social explanations to animal behaviour. Why should groupings of female animals be seen as harems? They could equally well be seen, for all the counter-evidence available, as prototypes of women’s consciousness-raising groups. To say that perhaps evokes a smile. But so should the circular argument by which explanations drawn from human experience are attributed to animals and then used to justify social divisions in the present.

(Weeks 1986: 51)

As well as biological scientists, those working in the field of medicine applied new and rigorous methods of enquiry to contribute to the growing body of scientific knowledge about human sexuality. Again, what now seems most conspicuous is the way in which ‘science’ merely embellished common-sense knowledge, especially in so far as the essential ‘nature’ of man and woman was concerned. Laqueur notes that ‘Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented’ (1990: 149). The ovaries and the uterus were ‘discovered’ and a model of male and female as biologically and incommensurably different was developed. These organs, in particular the ovaries, were seen to be the controlling organs of the female body:

the ovaries … are the most powerful agents in all the commotions of her system … on them rest her intellectual standing in society, her physical perfection … all that is great, noble and beautiful, all that is voluptuous, tender and endearing … her devotedness, her perpetual vigilance, forecast, and all those qualities of mind and disposition which inspire respect and love and fit her as the safest counsellor and friend of man, spring from the ovaries.

(Dr W. W. Bliss, 1870, cited in Ehrenreich and English 1976: 33)

Reproduction was woman’s central purpose in life and the reproductive organs dominated her entire physical, emotional and psychological being, so much so that almost all ill health (mental or physical) could be traced to the womb or ovaries, and any kind of ‘unfeminine’ behaviour, whether excessive work or exercise, masturbation, reading or voting, threatened to seriously damage those organs (see Ehrenreich and English 1976). To preserve her health, a woman needed to conserve her energies. She should not develop other bodily organs (particularly not her brain) or engage in any vigorous activity, she should be passive in the sexual act itself, otherwise her energies would be sapped and her reproductive organs would atrophy. Thus a scientific justification was provided for the passive role that had previously been ordained by God. Of course, this ‘conservation of energy’ theory was hardly liberating for men either. Medicine taught that masturbation and excessive sexual activity depleted the body’s energies and thus provided ‘scientific’ backing for religious strictures on the subject, but men did not suffer the grotesque fate that befell thousands of women as a consequence of the new ‘scientific’ knowledge. The surgical removal of the clitoris as a treatment for ‘nymphomania’ was recommended by some doctors (Ehrenreich and English 1976: 39) and:

Bilateral ovariotomy – the removal of healthy ovaries – made its appearance in the early 1870s and became an instant success to cure a wide variety of ‘behavioural pathologies’: hysteria, excessive sexual desires, and more mundane aches and pains whose origins could not be shown to lie elsewhere.

(Laqueur 1990: 176)

But where women were constructed as passive and passionless, man’s ‘natural’ state was one of activity, and his sexual life was no exception. Too much restraint, as well as too little, could be harmful. The work of the early sexologists (scientists of sex) drew on and reinforced this notion of innate and incontravertible differences between male and female sexuality. Havelock Ellis’s contribution in Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897) was to show how women were not only naturally passive, but also masochistic. Again, their ‘nature’ had biological roots. After describing some extremely vicious attacks on young children and claiming that it is easy ‘to trace in women a delight in experiencing physical pain when inflicted by a lover, and an eagerness to accept subjection to his will’, Havelock Ellis explains that ‘The psychological satisfaction which women tend to feel in a certain degree of pain in love is strictly co-ordinated with a physical fact. Women possess a minor degree of sensibility in the sexual region’ (Ellis 1987: 523).

In the last half of the nineteenth century the sexologists also began to define, list and classify sexual ‘abnormalities’ and the pathologies that give rise to them. They concentrated primarily upon ‘venereal disease, sexual psycho-pathology (the major “abberations” and their connection with “degeneracy”) and eugenics’ (Bejin 1985a: 181). Best known of these early pioneers is Krafft-Ebing whose 1886 study, Psychopathia Sexualis, provides a catalogue of sexual ‘perversities’ illustrated with real life case studies. Once again, the congruence between medical and traditional thought was striking. Homosexuality, condemned as immoral and unnatural by religious thinkers, was identified by medicine as a ‘mental disease’. Men and women who failed to find sexual bliss in ‘normal’ coitus and engaged in other practices, such as oral sex, were ‘masochistic’ and masochism was found to be ‘a pathological overgrowth of specifically feminine elements’ (Krafft-Ebing 1914: 152). To conceive of such sexual activities as a manifestation of ‘ill health’ rather than as ‘sin’ is often held to be a more liberal approach. People are not, after all, generally seen as personally or morally responsible for their sicknesses. But one has only to consider some of the ‘treatments’ and ‘cures’ that have been imposed upon homosexual men this century (from electric shock aversion therapy to castration) to see that the practical consequences of being judged ‘sick’ instead of ‘sinful’ are not always so very different.

Disseminating scientific knowledge about sex

If science draws on society’s stock of taken-for-granted knowledge about the world to define its research agenda and to classify and interpret its observations, how does scientific knowledge feed back into everyday thinking? So far as sex is concerned, the general public appears to have an almost unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Today, as in the past, those who research or write about sex claim to be immediately inundated with requests for help with sexual problems, letters asking whether given sexual practices are normal or not, even unsolicited videotapes of couples in coitus (all such contributions from readers of this book should be sent to the authors). The amount of printed matter devoted to sex further indicates that people’s appetite for advice on how to have ‘good’ sex is insatiable. Until the early years of this century, such advice was largely reserved for men (being passive recepticles, of course, women needed only moral, not practical guidance), but increasingly, ‘scientific’ knowledge about human sexuality has been fed to wider audiences.

In 1918, Beatrice Webb, the renowned liberal ‘socialist’ and feminist, insisted that evil came from ignorance...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1. Social research and everyday life
• 2. Dimensions of social research
• 3. Official statistics and social research
• 4. The survey method
• 5. Interviewing
• 6. Observation in laboratories and other structured settings
• 7. Ethnography and qualitative analysis
• 8. Documentary sources and textual analysis
• 9. The practice of research
• References
• Index