The Biggest Sexology Breakthroughs of the Past 130 Years
Annalee Newitz, io9.com: Sexology, or the study of human sexuality, is a science at the nexus of biology, neurology, psychology and sociology. And like any science, sexology has its eureka moments. Here are some of the biggest. These breakthroughs are roughly in chronological order.
Non-procreative sexual behavior is common
In 1886, a psychiatrist named Richard von Krafft-Ebing revolutionized the discipline of sexology by publishing his exhaustively researched tome Psychopathia Sexualis. He’d documented every case he could find of what he called “sexual perversity,” including those he’d encountered first-hand among his patients.
He defined sexual perversity as pretty much anything that deviated from procreative, heterosexual sex, and put each perversion into its own special category. Though he intended to document perversity, the book had the opposite effect: Many doctors and ordinary people read it and realized that many kinds of “perversity” were so common that they were almost normal.
