Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide - Vol. 3

It would not be accurate to say that sexologists invented either sexuality or pornography, but they have certainly shaped conceptions of both. "Sex Research and Social Change," by John Gagnon, attributes the origins of sexology (the science of sexuality) to Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud. Others date the inception later. In "Sexology Struggling to Establish Itself amid Wide Hostility," Edwin Haeberle tells Philip M. Boffey that sexology actually began in Germany after the turn of the century and flourished until it was suppressed by the Nazis. Now, says Haeberle, an early theorist in the field and one of several thousand researchers to attend the 6th World Congress of Sexology held in Washington in 1993, "the field is in total confusion. It's like the state criminology was in 80 years ago, when it was just getting started. But I would still call sexology a science, an interdisciplinary effort where the natural sciences and the humanities have to work together" (CI). Haeberle has selected and annotated excerpts from the work of sexologists like Iwan Bloch, Albert Moll, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Max Marcuse for The Birth of Sexology: A Brief History in Documents. Gert Heckma's "A History of Sexology" is an excellent, succinct chronicle of those and other pioneers. Most luminaries in other countries are beyond our scope here, but volume III (Sexualwissenschaft) of the Bilderlexicon der Erotik introduces figures of international significance, and Charlotte Woolf's Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology, though necessarily focused on Germany, traces lines of influence radiating from Berlin to America.

More comprehensive is the coverage of trends, issues, breakthroughs, and controversies in Vern L. Bullough's Science in the Bedroom: A History of Sex Research. On a different note, the scientist Paul R. Abramson asks whether rigor

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