Early Sex manuals have existed for centuries, such as
Ovid's , the
Kama Sutra of
Vatsyayana, the
Ananga Ranga, and ''
The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation. (Prostitution in the City of Paris''), an early 1830s study on 3,558 registered prostitutes in
Paris, written by Alexander Jean Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet (published in 1837, a year after he died), has been called the first work of modern sex research. In England,
James Graham was an early sexologist who lectured on topics such as the process of sex and conception. The scientific study of sexual behavior in human beings began in the 19th century with
Heinrich Kaan, whose book
Psychopathia Sexualis (1844)
Michel Foucault describes as marking "the date of birth, or in any case the date of the emergence of sexuality and sexual aberrations in the psychiatric field." The term
sexology was coined for the first time in the United States by Elizabeth Osgood Goodrich Willard in 1867. Roughly simultaneously a group of homophile activists, not yet identifying themselves as sexologists, were responding to shifts in
Europe's national borders, a crisis that brought into conflict laws that were sexually liberal and laws that criminalized behaviors such as homosexual activity.
Victorian era to WWII , a pioneering figure in the movement towards sexual emancipation in the late 19th century Despite the prevailing social attitude of sexual repression in
the Victorian era, the movement towards sexual emancipation began towards the end of the nineteenth century in England and Germany. In 1886,
Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing published
Psychopathia Sexualis. That work is considered as having established sexology as a scientific discipline. In England, the founding father of sexology was the doctor and sexologist
Havelock Ellis who challenged the
sexual taboos of his era regarding
masturbation and
homosexuality and revolutionized the conception of sex in his time. His seminal work was the 1897
Sexual Inversion, which describes the sexual relations of homosexual males, including men with boys. Ellis wrote the first objective study of homosexuality (the term was coined by
Karl-Maria Kertbeny), as he did not characterize it as a disease, immoral, or a crime. The work assumes that same-sex love transcended age
taboos as well as gender taboos. Seven of his twenty-one case studies are of inter-generational relationships. He also developed other important psychological concepts, such as
autoerotism and
narcissism, both of which were later developed further by
Sigmund Freud. Ellis pioneered
transgender phenomena alongside the German
Magnus Hirschfeld. He established it as new category that was separate and distinct from homosexuality. Aware of Hirschfeld's studies of
transvestism, but disagreeing with his terminology, in 1913 Ellis proposed the term
sexo-aesthetic inversion to describe the phenomenon. In 1908, the first scholarly journal of the field,
Journal of Sexology (
Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft), began publication and was published monthly for one year. Those issues contained articles by Freud,
Alfred Adler, and
Wilhelm Stekel. In 1913, the first academic association was founded: the
Society for Sexology. Freud developed a theory of sexuality. These
stages of development include:
oral,
anal,
phallic,
latency and
genital. These stages run from infancy to puberty and onwards. based on his studies of his clients, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Wilhelm Reich and
Otto Gross were disciples of Freud, but rejected his theories because of their emphasis on the role of sexuality in the revolutionary struggle for the emancipation of mankind. Pre-Nazi Germany, under the sexually liberal
Napoleonic Code, organized and resisted the anti-sexual, Victorian cultural influences. The momentum from those groups led them to coordinate sex research across traditional
academic disciplines, bringing Germany to the leadership of sexology. Physician
Magnus Hirschfeld was an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, founding the
Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights. Hirschfeld also set up the first
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) in Berlin in 1919. Its library housed over 20,000 volumes, 35,000 photographs, a large collection of art and other objects. People from around Europe visited the institute to gain a clearer understanding of their
sexuality and to be treated for their sexual concerns and dysfunctions. Hirschfeld developed a system which identified numerous actual or hypothetical types of sexual intermediary between heterosexual male and female to represent the potential diversity of human sexuality, and is credited with identifying a group of people that today are referred to as
transsexual or
transgender as separate from the categories of homosexuality, he referred to these people as
transvestiten (transvestites). Germany's dominance in sexual behavior research ended with the
Nazi regime. Psychologist and sexologist
John Money developed theories on sexual identity and
gender identity in the 1950s. His work, notably on the
David Reimer case has since been regarded as controversial, even while the case was key to the development of treatment protocols for
intersex infants and children.
Kurt Freund developed the
penile plethysmograph in
Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. The device was designed to provide an objective measurement of
sexual arousal in males and is currently used in the assessment of
pedophilia and
hebephilia. This tool has since been used with
sex offenders. In 1966 and 1970,
Masters and Johnson released their works
Human Sexual Response and
Human Sexual Inadequacy, respectively. Those volumes sold well, and they were founders of what became known as the
Masters & Johnson Institute in 1978.
Vern Bullough was a historian of sexology during this era, as well as being a researcher in the field. The emergence of
HIV/AIDS in the 1980s caused a dramatic shift in sexological research efforts towards understanding and controlling the spread of the disease. ==21st century==