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.