Sexual Scientists Research Articles

'All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex': Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology.

This article explores the relationship between sexual science and evolutionary models of human development and progress. It examines the ways in which late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexual scientists constructed the sexual instinct as an evolutionary force that not only served a reproductive purpose, but was also pivotal to the social, moral, and cultural development of human societies. Sexual scientists challenged the idea that non-reproductive sexualities were necessarily perverse, pathological, or degenerative by linking sexual desire to the evolution of sociality, often focusing on forms of relationality and care that exceeded biological kinship. As a result, non-reproductive sexual expressions, including homosexual and non-reproductive heterosexual behaviours, were interpreted as manifestations of a sexual instinct operating in the service of human development. These claims were reliant on cross-cultural and historical comparisons of sexual values, behaviours, and customs that rehearsed and reinforced imperial narratives of development premised on racialized, gendered, and classed hierarchies. Sexual scientists mapped diverse sexual behaviours in terms of their perceived evolutionary benefits, contributing to colonial narratives that distinguished between different cultures according to imagined trajectories of development. These contestations around the sexual instinct and its developmental functions played a vital role in allowing sexual science to authorize itself as a field of knowledge that promised to provide expertise required to manage sexual life and secure the global development of human civilization.

Toward a Black Vernacular Sexology

By the turn of the twentieth century, race science, ethnology, and sexology had conspired to calcify the racial and sexual limits of the “human.” This article posits that contemporaneous African American novelists responded to the anti-Blackness of American sexual scientific discourse by presenting their own investigations of sexual behavior through literary narrative. This practice, which we might call “Black vernacular sexology,” adapted the language and methods of institutionalized sexual science to refute the claims of scientific racism and to generate sexual knowledge from a Black standpoint. This essay examines Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) as a powerful example of Black vernacular sexology, arguing that the novel performs a case study of a Southern aristocrat to reveal how whiteness is constructed through a perverse and sexualized obsession with Blackness. Placing the novel in dialogue with American racial and sexual scientists, the article demonstrates how Chesnutt adapts the methods and refutes the racist claims of official sexology while also refusing to duplicate that field’s pathologization of individuals. This analysis suggests that the study of American sexual scientific discourse requires an understanding of how turn-of-the-century African American literature provided a Black vernacular sexology to combat anti-Black scientific truth-claims about sex itself.

The Cancer of Cancel Culture: Spreading "Correct" Scientific Ideologies Across North American Academia.

The spread of "cancel culture" related to sex and gender controversies in North America is examined as part of a larger movement to politicize sex research findings and certain sex and gender narratives as "correct" and "incorrect" from a so-called social justice standpoint. This binary is then used by academic administrators and empowered individuals or self-interest groups to reward or punish scholars for their viewpoints. The cases described by Meyer-Bahlburg, Lowrey, and Hooven are concrete examples of a growing "sexual McCarthyism" where empirical results are challenged by offended social justice "warriors" and embellished on social media into ad hominem attacks, to the point that it can damage-or even cancel-the careers of productive sexual scientists. This occurs largely out of fear on the part of academic administrators and lawyers charged with protecting the university from "brand damage" that might occur if the offending scholar is not dealt with. Sexual scientists are being vilified for research on sex differences, sex/gender assignment and subsequent causes for transitioning and/or de-transitioning, research that shows few or no untoward social or psychological effects of viewing pornography, research that debunks the notion of porn or sex "addiction," research showing the efficacy of medications to treat sexual desire disorders in women, research on "minor attracted persons" and even animal research that dares to show homologies to human sexual behavior. The silencing of empirical evidence and alternative viewpoints is contrary to the intellectual mission of universities and destructive to academic and political freedoms.

Editor’s Overview

Editor’s Overview Jim Downs, Editor Volume 68, no. 3 continues with the journal’s commitment to study the Civil War from an interdisciplinary perspective. Among the many outcomes of the Civil War are various narratives that have come to define it. At times, these narratives have taken the shape of explosive debates from the 1990s polemic of “Who Freed the Slaves” to more current debates on the geography of the Civil War—how much did the West matter? There have also been more subtle narrative shifts that have defined the field without announcing their entrance; these narratives no longer appear as ideas in need of interpretation but rather as uncontested facts or uncontrivable frameworks. This issue aims to expose the interpretative ruts that have fostered these narratives. In his deeply insightful essay, “Prisoners with Undaunted Patriotism: Incarcerated Black Soldiers and Battles of Citizenship in Military Prisons during the Civil War,” Jonathan Lande explores the taboo history of incarcerated Black Union soldiers. While the history of Black soldiers’ heroic contributions to the Union’s war effort has been widely documented, Lande turns attention to the Black soldiers who deserted the Union army and were then incarcerated. Refusing to portray these men as cowards, Lande examines their political activism within prisons, adding a new dimension to not only the history of Black soldiers in the military but also the larger narrative of Black political mobilization during the Civil War. Turning attention to Southern regiments, Josh Waddell interrogates the religious narratives that have defined the Civil War era. Waddell expertly uncovers the “spiritual warfare” that was fought “in the hearts and minds of Southern troops.” By excavating many tracts, delivered to Southern regiments, Waddell reveals how Southern ministers argued that “God controlled events on the battlefield.” Since the rise of social history in the middle of the twentieth century—when historians moved away from just studying the “great men” of the past and turned to the lives of ordinary people—the subject of why soldiers enlisted and how they understood the war has been a subject of fascination among generations of scholars. Josh Wad-dell implores us to reckon with how religion played a fundamental, critical role in how so many Southern men understood the war and its discontents. While the aforementioned articles address narratives that are seemingly familiar to Civil War readers, Andrew Donnelly powerfully breaks new ground by exploring the often-neglected history of same-sex sexuality during the Civil War. He shows how “postbellum novelists, sexual scientists, and Civil War historians made meaning of the war by reference to homosexuality and made meaning of [End Page 227] the evolution of homosexuality by reference to the war.” Drawing on a range of sources, Donnelly identifies how narratives of same-sex intimacy and identity unfolded. “Two versions of homosexuality operated together to make meaning of Civil War history,” Donnelly explains: “old, innocent, sentimentalized male– male intimacy and the modern problem of deviant sexuality.” This article is a mind-blowing analysis of how people from the past used sexuality to create narratives about the Civil War. Similar to our previous issues, this one includes an excellent book review section. Khal Schneider reviews Megan Kate Nelson’s Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and pushes the study of the Civil War to the West. Christopher Hager reviews Deborah Willis’s deeply evocative book, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, which will actually be the focus of a roundtable discussion to be published in the next issue. The reviews also include many other notable books that enrich our understanding of the Civil War era. [End Page 228] Jim Downs, Editor Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Civil War Studies and History Gettysburg College Copyright © 2022 The Kent State University Press

Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah to erotology

This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine.

It’s all Greek to me: Explaining, computing, and summarizing traditional and (re)emerging metrics of reliability for seven measures in sexual science

Sexual scientists typically default to appraising the reliability of their self-report measures by calculating one or more α coefficients. Despite the prolific use of α, few researchers understand how to situate and make sense of α within the psychometric theories used to develop the measures used in their research (e.g., latent variable theory) and many unknowingly violate the assumptions of α. In this paper, we describe the disconnect between α and latent variable theory and the subsequent restrictive assumptions α makes. Simultaneously, we introduce an alternative metric of reliability—omega (ɷ)—that is compatible with latent variable theory. Subsequently, we provide a tutorial to walk readers through didactic examples on how to calculate ɷ metrics of reliability using the getOmega() function—a simple open-source function we created to automate the estimation of ɷ. We then introduce the Measurement of Sexuality and Intimacy Constructs (MoSaIC) project to provide insight into the state of reliability in sexuality science. We do this through contrasting α and ɷ estimates of reliability across seven sexuality measures, selected based on their emerging and pre-existing relevance and influence in the field of sexuality, in both a queer (LGBTQ+) sample ( n = 545) and a United States’ representative sample ( n = 548). We finish our paper with pragmatic suggestions for editors, reviewers, and authors. By more deeply understanding one’s options of reliability metrics, sexual scientists may carefully consider how they present and assess their measures’ reliability, and ultimately help improve our science’s replicability.

To Have or Not to Have Sex? COVID-19 and Sexual Activity Among Chinese-Speaking Gay and Bisexual Men in Hong Kong

BackgroundThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has fundamentally changed daily routine, including sexual activity. However, most research on sexual activity during the COVID-19 pandemic focused on heterosexual individuals. The only study so far on men who have sex with men was conducted in the United States. AimOur study expands the understanding of sexual activity during the COVID-19 pandemic by studying gay and bisexual men in Hong Kong. Although sexual desire and sexual activity continue to be important aspects of one's life during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are COVID-19–related barriers to having sex. This study therefore examined the association between sexual desire, COVID-19–related barriers, and whether to engage in sexual activity or not during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods857 cisgender sexual minority people in Hong Kong participated in an online survey study, and for this article, only male participants were included in the analysis, yielding an analytical sample of 376 gay and bisexual men. OutcomesParticipants were asked to assess their sexual desire (ie, sexual drive and sexual motivation), COVID-19–related barriers (ie, perceived difficulties to have sex with another person during the pandemic and perceived risk of COVID-19 infection), and sexual activity during the COVID-19 pandemic. ResultsIt was found that while sexual desire remained prevalent among the gay and bisexual men, COVID-19–related barriers were also commonly observed. Sexual drive and sexual motivation were positively associated with sexual activity. Perceived difficulties to have sex with another person during the pandemic and perceived risk of COVID-19 infection were negatively predictive of engaging in sexual activity, after controlling for general sexual desire. Clinical ImplicationsUnderstanding the ambivalence and driving and inhibiting factors for having sex during the COVID-19 pandemic can provide a new framework for understanding people's sexual activity during an unprecedented scale of the pandemic. It is likely that abstinence would not work as the respondents expressed strong sexual desire and that the pandemic is going to last for a long time. Governments, policy makers, and sexual scientists need to work together to come up with practicable, feasible, and easy-to-follow guidelines for having sex during the pandemic. Strength & LimitationsThis is one of the first studies to examine the impact of COVID-19 on sexual activity among gay and bisexual men. The results should be interpreted with caution because of the use of cross-sectional design and nonprobability sampling. ConclusionSexual desire and COVID-19–related barriers serve as driving and inhibiting factors in explaining whether or not people have sex during the COVID-19 pandemic.Suen YT, Chan RCH, Wong EMY. To Have or Not to Have Sex? COVID-19 and Sexual Activity Among Chinese-Speaking Gay and Bisexual Men in Hong Kong. J Sex Med 2021;18:29–34.

More than a case of mistaken identity: Adult entertainment and the making of early sexology

Sexology emerged as a discipline during a period of keen concern about the social effects of sexually explicit media. In this context, sex researchers and their allies took pains to establish the respectability of their work, a process that often involved positioning sexual science in opposition to erotic literature and images. This article argues that this presentation of sexual science obfuscated sex researchers’ complex relationship with erotic print culture, which during the late 19th and early 20th centuries provided sexual scientists with access to explicit material that served as evidence for theories about human sexuality, facilitated transnational exchanges of sexual-scientific thought by bringing sex research across borders, and introduced sex research to wider audiences. Erotic print culture can thus be seen as one of several fields that contributed to the interdisciplinary development of sexology and facilitated the diffusion of sexual-scientific theories. Sex researchers’ shifting, often ambivalent relationship with erotic print and its producers emphasizes that while the boundaries of sexology were extremely porous, they were also heavily policed: Working to establish a modern, respectable new branch of science, sexual scientists reframed the output of other fields of enquiry as products of their own, blotted their reliance on these sources from the historical record, and denigrated them in public writing.

Where Do I Put It? James Joyce’s Buck Mulligan, Bisexuality, and Contemporary Legislative Practice

This article argues that Buck Mulligan’s bisexuality in James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses reveals Joyce’s less-discussed interest in the figure of the bisexual at a time when bisexuality was beginning to be theorised by various sexual scientists (sexologists) in the early twentieth-century. In this article, I examine Buck Mulligan as a bisexual character who evidences Joyce’s engagement with contemporary sexological attempts to define bisexuality in psychological terms, rather than the previous century’s investigations into bisexuality as physical hermaphroditism. I explore how Mulligan, in embodying and enacting a model of bisexual subjectivity, also elicits both homosexual and heterosexual impulses from other characters. This article addresses not only Joyce’s treatment of bisexuality, but also his views towards what bisexual scholars describe as ‘mononormativity’: the cultural assumptions that a person is sexually and romantically attracted to exclusively one gender (Monro, 2015: 12). Through this, the article reflects critically on those Buck-like victims of bi-erasure within the legal landscape of ‘compulsory monosexuality’ at the-turn-of-this-century (James, 1996: 321).

Are Sex and Pornography Addiction Valid Disorders? Adding a Leisure Science Perspective to the Sexological Critique

Over the last 30 years, there has been a growing trend among both professionals and nonprofessionals in applying an addiction framework to understand frequent sexual behavior and pornography viewing. However, sexual scientists have identified serious methodological problems in applying an addiction model to such behavior and have noted that this movement appears to be largely morally, ideologically, and politically motivated. The scientific establishment of a valid mental health condition requires a thorough process of attempting (and subsequently failing) to disprove a condition, rather than primarily focusing on generating support for it. While there remains fierce professional contention surrounding how to interpret frequent sexual behavior and pornography viewing, perhaps surprisingly, the possibility that sexual behavior and pornography viewing may function as leisure has received little scholarly consideration to date. This article summarizes the current scientific critique of sex and pornography addiction before critically applying a leisure perspective to the issue.

The evolution of the questionnaire in German sexual science: A methodological narrative

The sexological research questionnaire, which became a central research tool in twentieth-century sexology, has a methodological-developmental history stretching back into mid-nineteenth century Germany. It was the product of a prolonged, disruptive encounter between sexual scientists constructing sexual case studies along with newly assertive homosexual men supplying self-penned sexual autobiographies. Homosexual autobiographies were intensely interesting to these men of science but lacked the brevity, structure, and discipline of a formal clinical case study. In the closing decades of the century, efforts to harness and regularize this self-penned material resulted in a series of methodological adaptations. By the turn of the century this process had resulted in the first use of a formal sexual research questionnaire.

Measurement memo I: Updated practices in psychological measurement for sexual scientists

The validity of psychological measurement is a crucial auxiliary theory underlying many sexual science studies. Although many sexuality researchers are familiar with certain elements of psychological measurement, the field of psychological measurement is a developing and evolving literature, with concepts, applications, and techniques that do not always trickle down quickly into interdisciplinary fields like sexual science. The purpose of this Measurement Memo, therefore, is to connect sexual scientists to measurement-related issues, explanations, and resources that they may not otherwise encounter in their scholarly reading. Our review focuses on those carrying out psychological measurement using theories and methods of latent variable modeling, and we identify and summarize key ideas and references that serve as good launching points for sexual scientists to begin to improve their psychological measurement practices, for beginners and seasoned users alike.

The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality.

In 1902, founder of the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, Magnus Hirschfeld, developed a ‘psychobiological questionnaire’ to investigate human sexuality.1 The section labelled ‘sexual instinct’ [Geschlechtstrieb] asked: ‘What approximately are the highest and lowest limits in age of the people to whom you feel drawn, or is age of no importance to you?’2 Hirschfeld's interest in age as a driver of sexual attraction reflects broader sexual scientific attempts to map an erotics of age.3 This article explores how and why the relative age of sexual subjects was theorised by British and German sexual scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It demonstrates that questions around age preoccupied sexual science and argues, more specifically, that constructions of male homosexuality were driven by anxieties about interactions between children or adolescents and older men.4 In so doing, the article reveals the interrelationship between sexological debates about homosexuality and scientific explorations of childhood sexuality and adolescent development. It shows that age needs to be acknowledged as a crucial category shaping sexual scientific debate and structuring understandings of modern homosexuality.5 As is well known, the erotic charge provided by age difference was central to many culturally prominent eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century understandings of same‐sex desire.6 European and American elites interpreted classical (predominately Ancient Greek) cultures as providing affirmative models of youthful male beauty and intimate attachment between older and younger men or boys.7 While precise differences in age were rarely specified, partners were separated on the basis of maturity into active (the erastes) and passive roles (the eromenos). Moreover, attraction to younger same‐sex partners was not seen to exclude opposite‐sex relationships: men who desired male youths could also be married to women. The influence of this material on individual identities can be found, for example, in sexological case studies or letters received by prominent Hellenic writers.8 At the same time, this idealisation of age‐differentiated erotics reinforced existing associations between same‐sex activity and the sexual misuse of younger people by older men.9 In response, some sexual scientists sought to tease apart age‐structured and same‐sex relationships. These authors defined the male homosexual through his exclusive inborn attraction to other consenting adults. This article shows that this influential construction of the modern homosexual as a discrete congenital type emerged in direct response to considerations around age.10 It also demonstrates that, notwithstanding the emergence of this model, questions about the impact of sexual encounters with older men on a younger person's sexual development continued to be debated within sexual science, creating dialogue between theorisations of homosexuality and concurrent studies of childhood sexuality.11 As such, investigations of male homosexuality continued to revolve around urgent questions about how and when same‐sex desire emerged and what impact sexual experiences in youth had on later desires. These debates remained at the centre of early twentieth‐century sexual science in Britain and Germany, complicating the inborn model and securing the centrality of age as a key category in modern articulations of sexuality.

Sex is not a problem: The erasure of pleasure in sexual science research

Guided by feminist and a queer intersectional framework, this article explores the discursive production of sexuality in contemporary sexual science research. Specifically, this article examines the absence of pleasure as a topic in research on human sexuality in the sexual sciences. Articles from 2010 to 2015 were sampled from The Journal of Sex Research (JSR) N = 300 and discourse analysis was performed. Contemporary research on sexuality in this journal focuses on risk, disease, and dysfunction and reinforces heteronormativity. This focus examines sexuality from a limited and negative vantage point and, as a result, does not provide us with a holistic portrait of human sexuality. Researchers must discuss pleasure and should make greater efforts to ensure more inclusivity and diversity around issues of gender, race, nationality, age, and sexual identity. Importantly, I show how the three main focal points of this article (the erasure of sexual pleasure, the reproduction of heteronormativity, and the erasure of marginalized racial, gendered, classed, and sexual identities) are mutually reinforcing. Scholars in the sexual sciences can avoid these issues by using feminist and queer intersectional frameworks. Finally, because the empirical findings of scientific research often inform political policy, healthcare policies, workplace policies, and larger societal understandings of human life and experience, we must appreciate that the limited frameworks used by sexual scientists will have an impact on people’s lives and their access to the resources and services they need to survive, and to lead pleasurable—not just healthy—lives.

Illustrating phallic worship: uses of material objects and the production of sexual knowledge in eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science

This article reveals previously overlooked connections between eighteenth-century antiquarianism and early twentieth-century sexual science by presenting a comparative reading of two illustrated books: An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus, by British antiquarian scholar Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), and Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (The World Journey of a Sexologist), by German sexual scientist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935). A close analysis of these publications demonstrates the special status of material artefacts and the strategic engagement with visual evidence in antiquarian and scientific writings about sex. Through its exploration of the similarities between antiquarian and sexual scientific thought, the article demonstrates the centrality of material culture to the production of sexual knowledge in the Western world. It also opens up new perspectives on Western intellectual history and on the intellectual origins of sexual science. While previous scholarship has traced the beginnings of sexual science back to nineteenth-century medical disciplines, this article shows that sexual scientists drew upon different forms of evidence and varied methodologies to produce sexual knowledge and secure scientific authority. As such, sexual science needs to be understood as a field with diverse intellectual roots that can be traced back (at least) to the eighteenth century.

Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male-to-Female Transsexualism

Abstract. Sexual scientists have recognized for over a century that biologic males who seek sex reassignment – male-to-female (MtF) transsexuals – are not a homogeneous clinical population but comprise two or more distinct subtypes with different symptoms and developmental trajectories. The most widely used typologies of MtF transsexualism have been based on sexual orientation and have distinguished between persons who are androphilic (exclusively sexually attracted to males) and those who are nonandrophilic (sexually attracted to females, both males and females, or neither gender). In 1989, psychologist Ray Blanchard proposed that most nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals display a paraphilic sexual orientation called autogynephilia, defined as the propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of oneself as a woman. Studies conducted by Blanchard and colleagues provided empirical support for this proposal, leading to the hypothesis that almost all nonandrophilic MtF transsexuals are autogynephilic, whereas almost all androphilic MtF transsexuals are not. Blanchard’s ideas received increased attention in 2003 after they were discussed in a book by psychologist J. Michael Bailey. The concept of autogynephilia subsequently became intensely controversial among researchers, clinicians, and MtF transsexuals themselves, causing widespread repercussions. This article reviews the theory of autogynephilia, the evidence supporting it, the objections raised by its critics, and the implications of the resulting controversy for research and clinical care.

Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860-c. 1900.

This article investigates how a loose network of Victorian book collectors, bibliographers, self-styled sexual scientists, and pornographers represented the obscene as a multifarious category of print, encompassing a generically, historically, and linguistically varied range of works about (or associated in the public imagination with) sex. By examining this elite network's reading, writing, collection, publishing, and advertising practices, this article demonstrates how diversely arrayed publications can, as a result of interacting historical, ideological, and commercial factors, become imaginatively linked, structuring the ways in which they are published, disseminated, and interpreted by their readers.

‘Simulando assim a cópula normal’ – sapphists, tribades, fricatrixes and lesbians: Between biomedical taxonomical categories and identity in Portugal (1895–1930)

Abstract This co-authored article analyses the work of a number of sexual scientists and legal experts in Portugal at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century with respect to their attempts to classify and investigate female homosexuality in Portugal. Building on work already published by the two authors on the subject of Egas Moniz’s ideas on male homosexuality, this article considers the sexological discourse on lesbians and their presence in Portuguese society in the first half of the twentieth century through a close textual analysis of the work of Moniz and that of other authors. The differences and similarities between Portuguese specia lists’ work and their European counterparts form a key aspect of this work. In this way, a contribution is made to the history of sexuality in Portugal and the framing of Portuguese discourses on lesbianism within broader European expert fields.

Promoting replicable sexual science: A methodological review and call for metascience

Concerns have increased within the medical and social science communities about the replicability of scientific findings, and subsequently, assessments of replicability and proposals for how it may be increased have become more common. Sexual scientists, however, with few exceptions, have yet to formally participate in the published discourses about replicability. In this commentary, I begin by highlighting how replicability is important for science in general, and then arguing that sexual science could be uniquely and negatively impacted without more direct involvement in the replicability movement from those within our field. I then briefly review several mechanisms through which replicability can be undermined in research, and some of the proposals for addressing these issues. I conclude by offering some ideas for how sexual scientists might begin to evaluate and improve the replicability of our field, and stress the need for sexual scientists to add their voices to the ongoing discussions about the problem of replicability of scientific findings.

Exploring the Relation of Values, Power, and Advocacy in American Sexual Science

ABSTRACT There is widespread acceptance by American sexual scientists of the need to be aware of our values and control their potential biasing effect. Despite this belief, there is a lack of consensus among sexual scientists concerning whether we should advocate for or against policy issues that come before Congress and impact our field. Also, even though in the United States we are dealing with a society of 316 million people, sexual scientists have often failed to propose solutions that are pluralistic and that work in groups with unconventional sexual values. In addition, sexual scientists have conflicting views on just how much we should reveal about our personal values concerning a sexual problem area that we are studying. In these and other ways many sexual scientists have not integrated into their research and theory their verbal support for avoiding bias. Above all, the containment of bias requires the exploration of the interface of values, power, and advocacy with the work we do in sexual science. I spell out my value-aware approach as a way to cope with the complexities of our sexual science field. I illustrate the tenets in that approach by discussing the way the current debate on public school sex education has been handled by sexual scientists and also by reference to the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision on gay marriage.