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6 Sexual Transgressions SEXUAL ACTIVITIES provide a rich, fertile greenhouse of specimens of transgressive behavior; in few areas of social life can a member of virtually any society engage in so many varieties of normative infringements. Though some critics, most notably Alexander Liazos (1972), have complained that sociologists of deviance devote too much attention to sexual violations, the fact is, all of us are subject to a great many sexual norms, and erotic unconventionality is likely to get us in trouble. Most of us love a good sex scandal, and many of us consider past or current sexual violations as a disqualification for a wide range of conventional roles, especially those that entail dealing with children and those that demand adherence to certain “ethical” standards. Most societies set and enforce a substantial array of sexual dos and don’ts, and the range of completely acceptable sexual acts is fairly narrow. Over time, of course, the sexual rules are loosening up—normative constraints are not nearly so narrow now as they were, say, in the 1950s: Sex before marriage tends to be the norm and is pretty much taken for granted; a variety of sexual positions is considered normal, even desirable; in most school districts, a known homosexual can hold a job as a teacher; and most faiths accept known gays as clergy. Still, sexual transgressions cause more uproar here than in, let’s say, France. It is clear that violations of the sexual code constitute a major form of deviance. Consider the Bible’s sexual prohibitions. True, for most of us, The Holy Bible is not our primary source of sexual norms; in fact, many people consider most of the injunctions in the Bible as more or less irrelevant 114 / Chapter 6 for their lives. Still, if we want to understand how sexual norms work— especially where they came from—the Old and New Testaments are not bad places to start; they give us a clue to what is considered wrong. The Bible contains sixty-nine passages that refer to adultery, adulteries, adulterer, adulterers , adulteress, adulteresses, and adulterous, and we can find forty-four that refer to fornication, fornications, fornicator, and fornicators; in addition, the Holy Book explicitly prohibits sex with one’s father’s wife, daughter-in-law, mother-in-law, sister, father’s daughter, uncle’s wife, and brother’s wife—not to mention animals, another man, and one’s own wife during menstruation. It is interesting that these prohibitions are spelled out almost entirely for men, far less for women. In ancient Israel, women were expected to adhere to religious law—though they were are regarded as truly evil when they did not— whereas men frequently strayed and needed to have the rules spelled out for them. Several of these injunctions carried a penalty of death, in some cases, by stoning. Clearly, the control of sexuality and the punishment of deviant sexuality were major tasks of the prophets. And the fact is, the importance of certain sexual taboos remains in place today. To repeat what I said in the Preface, sociologically, the term “deviant” describes what, or who, is likely to be condemned within a given context, by a given audience. In the United States, in many contexts, homosexuality and homosexuals are still likely to be condemned. Most fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, rural dwellers, Orthodox Jews, devout Muslims, and conservatives consider homosexuality a sin, an abomination, a perversion. True, a (bare) majority of Americans do not condemn homosexuality, considering it an alternative practice, but this tendency veers off in a negative direction fairly quickly if one strays too far from mainstream opinion. Hence, the title of Minton’s book, Departing from Deviance (2002), is appropriate here: Dominant public attitudes toward homosexuality are changing, but they have not reached the level of full acceptance. Is “gay the new normal” (Rauch, 2011)? Not quite, but it is getting there. Consider adultery, condemned not only in the Bible but also informally virtually everywhere in the Western world and in most other places. In a review of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964/2003), Alfred Kazin, a literary critic, expresses his suspicions about autobiography as a form of literature . Great works of art tell the truth, he argued; autobiography cannot serve the same mission because the writer, especially one as great as Hemingway , can hide and shade and edit and condense and omit the crucial details of his life to his own advantage. “The defect of autobiography, as compared with...

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