Sex and sexual relations are variously understood by Americans through shifts in the respective stress given to the order of nature and the order of culture (or law). Sex may be posed as animalistic. Equally, “proper” sexual relations entail ritualization, order, and control. Even for groups within the population that accept forms of sexual relations more generally viewed as deviant, sex involves ritualized behavior and technique. Within American society, mainstream understandings of sexual relations as an exclusive intimacy enjoyed between wife and husband seem increasingly to be complemented by alternative notions of what sex is or should be. David Kemnitzer) writes about a new cultural construction of sex among young professional and white-collar workers. In analyzing the fact that there is a crucial stress on sex-as-technique among this group, Kemnitzer notes the wide popularity of Masters’ and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response “despite its turgid prose, outlandish price, and lack of pictures”. Although sexual how-to-do-it books proliferate, the essence of the new sexuality may well be not what it initially appears. Kemnitzer concludes: “For sex to be a matter of technique, a form of work an arena for competence, the partner . . . must be rendered a thing, rather than a person”. Precisely among the very groups which mainstream society sees as most animalistic in their sexual behaviors, “technique” and “competence” commandeer sexual relations.
Such alternative sexual patterns notwithstanding, notions of “proper” sex would seem to be predicated largely upon images of sex within marriage and certainly of sex between two adult partners of different gender. Though this image may be of shifting consequence to constraints imposed by law or enacted in behavior, it is sustained as the one sexual relation which receives legal prescription: non-consummation is grounds for annulment or divorce. Until recently sex within marriage was the only form of sexual relation not explicitly prohibited in at least some states. For the most part, the constraints of law within the United States have restricted legal sexual relations to those between particular sorts of people (related in law but not in blood), to particular (private) places, and to particular forms (genital-to-genital contact). “Indeed it has been said,” writes Schur, “that all unmarried adolescents and adults in our society—male and female, heterosexually inclined as well as homosexually oriented—are forced to choose between abstinence and ‘criminality’ “. Almost every sexual act not contained within the rigid definitions of person, place, and form has been defined as criminal. Criminal sexual activities with the wrong person have included incest with relatives (a category which itself is variously defined from state to state), homosexuality with a member of the same sex, fornication or adultery if the partners are unmarried or are married to others, masturbation if with oneself, and sodomy if with an animal. Sex in the wrong place may constitute the criminal act of public lewdness. Perhaps most surprising, even when the partner and the place do not contravene the bounds of legality, the mode of enactment may open the partners to criminal accusation. Anal sex or oral-genital sex variously defined as sodomy or as the “crime against nature,” offer accused parties long jail terms and heavy fines. (Most convictions for this last crime have not involved married partners; however, sodomy, including anal or oral intercourse, has been formally illegal in the United States even between husband and wife.)
These three sorts of limitations on sexual behavior (with whom, where, and how), though changing over time and in their specific content and application, allow classification of legislative enactments and judicial decisions pertaining to the legality of sex. Each separately and the three together are part of more pervasive cultural contrasts within American society. The category, spouse, as the most appropriate sexual partner, is based on a classification which separates family from non-family and within the family, a particular relation-in-law (that of spouse) from other relations-in-law and from relations-in-blood. In defining the bedroom or other similar place as that appropriate for sex, a domain of private space is distinguished from one of public space. The third limitation on sexual activity—how—is perhaps the most tricky; on the one hand, culture or law (ordered, prescribed, or prohibited activity) is separated from nature (unordered, even animalistic, activity); the first has been considered appropriate, tolerable, or legal; the second has not. This division is complicated precisely because culturally created notions of proper sexual forms frequently have been justified through the admonition that they are natural. The term “crimes against nature” has served as a euphemism for sodomy (itself a term variously referring to any or all of mutual masturbation, oral intercourse, anal intercourse, and sex with animals). The confusion can be put to rest at least minimally in a cross-cultural perspective. One might note simply that the sexual form upheld as most respectable within the West has elsewhere been tagged the “missionary position” (Bullough). To the extent that proper sex has been conceived as natural, the intent has been not to define natural in opposition to cultural or lawlike, but rather has been based on an equation between that which is natural and that which is approved by the Divinity.
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