SCIENCE IN THE BEDROOM

ISBN-13: 978-0-465-03020-0
Writer: Vern L. Bullough
Title: Science In The Bedroom
Subttile: A History of Sex Research
Language: English
Place of Publication: New York
Publisher: BasicBooks, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Year of Publication: 1994
Format: 157x240mm
Pages: viii+376; Notes 301; Index, 361
Illustrations: Writer's single colour photo on back flap by Andrea Sperling/FPG
Jacket Design: Paul Gamarello
Binding: Cloth spine and boards in duotone dust jacket
Weight: 794 gr.
Original Price: USD 25.00 / CAD 33.50
Entry No.: 2011015
Entry Date: 2^nd August 2011

BOOK DESCRIPTION

From the first serious sex research study ever undertaken (in France with a group of prostitutes in 1830) to the work of Masters and Johnson in our own day, sex research has been a field mired in controversy. Science in the Bedroom shows how, for most of its history and in whatever country it has been undertaken, sex research has been driven by forces outside itself. Among those forces have been groups marginalized as deviant, including homosexuals, free-love advocates, and feminists; courts and governments in search of independent data to support public morality standards; the desires of women for safe and effective contraceptive devices freely disseminated; the desire of doctors to medicalize all sex research and to view only the research that produces treatment therapies as valuable; and the fears of public funding institutes that their images  will be sullied if they support independent sex research. The book traces how this moral overtone led the Rockefeller family to support sex research and how their money led to basic scientific  breakthroughs in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the Kinsey studies. The backlash was so great, however, that the Rockefeller Foundation dropped its sex studies.

Based on archival sources and extensive personal interviews, Science in the Bedroom celebrates the lives and work of the major figures who risked their academic reputations to work in a stigmatized field. Vern L. Bullough emphasizes the difficulty of researching sex, since it involves not only biology but psychology, sociology, anthropology, history literature, and a variety of professions, including medicine, religion, law, nursing, and social work. Containing fascinating new material on the efforts of a group of turn-of-the-century German homosexuals to decriminalize homosexuality, and on such important but largely forgotten female sex researchers as Katherine Bement Davis and Clelia Mosher, the book credits courageous homosexuals and feminists for much of the best early work.