Sexuality

Human sexuality refers to the expression of sexual sensation and related intimacy between human beings, as well as the expression of identity through sex and as influenced by or based on sex.

Sourced

• Sex isn't disgusting unless you make it disgusting!
  • Bob Leander, Paris, je t'aime

• Although humans tend to view sex as mainly a fun recreational activity sometimes resulting in death, in nature it is a far more serious matter.
  • Dave Barry, "Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys"

• As Darwin puts it in The Descent of Man, 'Male snakes, though appearing so sluggish, are amorous.' Isn't that just like Darwin? It was one of his main ideas, you know, that the males of almost all animals have stronger passions than the females. Since then we've learned a thing or two. At any rate, the female snake is right there when spring arrives in the woods.
  • Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct, 1941

• Appropriate patterns of reproductive, gender, and sexual conduct are all products of specific cultures and all can be viewed as examples of socially scripted conduct. Western societies now have a system of gender and sexual learning in which gender differential scripts are learned prior to sexual scripts, but take their origins in part from the previously learned gender scripts... There are two important points: The first is that both gender and sexuality are learned forms of social practice, and the second is that looking to "natural differences" between women and men for lessons about sexual conduct is an error.
  • John Gagnon, "The Eplicit and Implicit Use of the Scripting Perspective in Sex Research", 1990

• It is precisely because I believe it is not possible to neatly separate the sexual from other sorts of relations that I find the movement to bar the sexual from pedagogy not only dangerous but supremely impractical.
  • Jane Gallop, "Feminism and Harassment Policy"

• The dilemma of traditional sex research lay in the unconscious, but unquestioningly assumed division into opposing drives and hereditary factors. . . The division into heterosexuality and homosexuality, into heterosexuals and homosexuals, is also an artifact that rests on a grave error, namely, on the assumption that a fundamentally different model is necessary to explain heteorsexual and homosexual behavior. The entire investigation of etiology was ideologically loaded beforehand because it separated a segment of the sexual continuum and attempted to make analyses with the help of fundamentally different concepts.
  • Rolf Gindorf, "Scientific ideologies in change: Fear of Homosexuality as an Intellectual Event", 1977

• Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good". All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.
  • Bongo, From "Childhood Is Hell" By Matt Groening

• When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities.
  • Matt Groening, From "Basic Sex Facts For Today's Youngfolk" In Life In Hell

• There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large.
  • Woody Harrelson, Play it to the Bone

• Nobody knows what "causes" homosexuality any more than they know what "causes" heterosexuality. (Of course, there is far less interest in what causes the latter.) Overtly, the old psychoanalytic bugaboos are dead; there is no evidence, according to the Kinsey Institute, that male homosexuality is caused by dominant mothers and/or weak fathers, or that female homosexuality is caused by girls' having exclusively male role models. Furthermore, children who are raised by gay and lesbian couples are no more likely to be homosexual than children of heterosexual couples. Nor do people become adult homosexuals because they were seduced by older people or went to same-sex boarding schools...
  Though the causes of sexual orientation are unknown and the definitions fluid, the likelihood of converting a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation, or vice versa, is very slight. Some homosexual men and women voluntarily come for therapy to change from same-sex to opposite-sex partners, but it is not clear whether the limited "success" rate refers to a change in their feelings and the pattern of their desire, or just in their ability to consciously restrict their sexual contact to members of the opposite sex.
  • Patricia Hersch, The Family Therapy Networker, Jan/Feb 1991

• Social and cultural factors very broadly channel and limit sexual variation in human populations. Sexual laws, codes, and roles do restrict the range and intensity of sexual practices, as far as we can judge from the cross-cultural literature (Herdt and Stoller 1990). Kinsey lent his support to this view; Ford and Beach (1950) documented it in surveys; and Margaret Mead (1961) did so in her ethnographic studies. But biosocial, genetic, and hormonal predispositions also broadly limit and channel. Each culture's theory of the combination of these social and biological contraints we could call its theory of human sexual nature. Yet none of these broad principles, nor the local theory of human sexual nature, entirely explains or predicts a particular person's sexual desires or behaviors. A sexual behavior, that is, does not necessarily indicate an erotic orientation, preference, or desire. The homosexual is not the same as the homoerotic; whether in our society or one very exotic, I will claim, we can distinguish the homosexual from the homoerotic, as Oscar Wilde's case first hinted.
  • Gilbert Herdt, "Bisexuality and the Causes of Homosexuality: The Case of the Sambia"

• Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body.
  • Bell Hooks, Teaching to Transgress

• Sex is a dirty, dirty thing and you should only have it with someone you love very much.
  • Will Hunnicutt

• The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.
  • Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

• Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.
  • Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948)

• Were kisses all the joys in bed, one woman would another wed.
  • William Shakespeare, "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music IV"

• Relationship (definition): Liaison usually involving two people and their dirty dishes.
  • Richard Summerbell, Abnormally Happy, (1985)

• Molly Notkin often confides on the phone to Joelle van Dyne about the one tormented love of Nokin's life thus far, an erotically circumscribed G.W. Pabst scholar at New York University tortured by the neurotic compulsion that there are only a finite number of erections possible in the world at any one time and that his tumescence means e.g. the detumescence of some perhaps more deserving or tortured Third World sorghum farmer. . .
  • David Foster Wallace, "Infinite Jest"

• There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).
  • Ellen Willis, "Classical and Baroque Sex in Everyday Life" (1979), Beginning To See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)

• These apparently opposed perspectives meet on the common ground of sexual conservatism. The monogamists uphold the traditional wife's "official" values: emotional commitment is inseparable from a legal/moral obligation to permanence and fidelity; men are always trying to escape these duties; it's in our interest to make them shape up. The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter, self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men's sexual freedom as a substitute for real power.
  • Ellen Willis, "Lust Horizons: Is the Woman's Movement Pro-Sex?" (1981), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992)

Unsourced

• Sex is like math: you add the bed, subtract the clothes, divide the legs and pray you don't multiply!
  • Feras Yaghmour

• Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right.
  • Woody Allen

• Don't knock masturbation. That's sex with someone I love.
  • Woody Allen

• Sex is an emotion in motion.
  • Mae West

• My family never raised me to have a vagina.
  • Roseanne

• An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
  • Aldous Huxley

• Did you ever notice the people who are most adamantly against abortions are people you wouldn't want to fuck in the first place?
  • George Carlin

• From the perspective of scripting theory, same-gender erotic preferences are elicited and shaped by the systems of meaning offered for conduct in a culture. What is usually construed as culture against "man" or culture against nature is thus actually conflict among differently enculturated individuals or groups.
  What is required is a constant recognition that acts of usage and explanation are acts of social control in the strong sense, that "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are names that have been imposed on some persons and their conduct by other persons - and that this imposition has carried the right of the latter to tell the former the origins, meaning, and virtue of their conduct.
  • John Gagnon

• Great sex is great, but bad sex is like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
  • Billy Joel

• Just fuck and fuck the consequences
  • Ryan Hare

• ...if you are fat, no matter what you wear, nothing is going to make you sexier.
  • Steve Austin

• In lieu of creativity, there is an undue emphasis on sexuality.
  • Jay Christian Emerte

• Insistence on having a sexual orientation in sex is about defending the status quo, maintaining sex differences and the sexual hierarchy; whereas resistance to sexual orientation, regimentation is more about where we need to be going.
  • John Stoltenberg (1989)

• Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they become its advocates.
  • Charles Dickens

• Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
  • Mark Twain

• One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
  • Jane Austen

• Our sexual self is a complex combination of our social, cultural, and biological inheritance.
  • Pepper Schwartz

• Sex concentrates on what is on the outside of the individual. It's funny because I think it's better inside.
  • Alex Walsh

• Sex is one of the 9 reasons for reincarnation, the other 8 are unimportant.
  • Henry Miller

• Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
  • Charles Baudelaire

• The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.
  • Alfred Kinsey

• We're trained to see only male or female and to plot people into those categories when they actually don't fit neatly at all. But if we pause, watch and listen closely we'll see the multiplicity of ways in which people are sexed and gendered. There exists a range of personal identifications around woman, man, in-between--we don't even have names or pronouns that reflect that in between place but people certainly live in it.
  • Minnie Bruce Pratt

• When a man goes on a date, he wonders if he is going to get lucky. A woman already knows.
  • Frederike Ryder

• When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche

• Girls are like catalysts, they just speed up the reactions of lives of boys either in a positive way or in a negative way.
  • Madapathi Srinath

• The problem is that God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time
  • Robin Williams

• Sex COULD kill you. Do you know what the human body goes through when you have sex? Pupils dilate, arteries constrict, core temperature rises, heart races, blood pressure skyrockets, respiration becomes rapid and shallow, the brain fires bursts of electrical impulses from nowhere to nowhere, and secretions spit out of every gland, and the muscles tense and spasm like you're lifting three times your body weight. It's violent. It's ugly. And it's messy. And if God hadn't made it UNBELIEVABLY fun, the human race would have died out eons ago.
  • House, Dr. Allison Cameron (Jennifer Morrison)

• Sex is a lot like pizza, when it's good, it's really good; when it's bad, it's still kinda good.
  • Brandon Lyon

See also

• Sex
• Gender
• Bisexuality
• Heterosexuality
• Homosexuality
• Polyamory