By Michael Stambolis-Ruhstorfer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor (Maître de conférences), Université Bordeaux Montaigne
Almost all of us do it. In many countries, it permeates popular culture. Some people think it’s delicious. Others find it vulgar or distasteful. It can be a basic part of survival and a source of meaning and pleasure. It happens in almost every home and even on lots of street corners. In short, it’s happening everywhere. And I’m not talking about eating hamburgers. I’m talking about sex.
Despite this utter ubiquity of “doing it,” social scientists have given sex far less attention than other equally universal human behaviours. That is not to say that people from artists and writers to priests and parents haven’t paid attention to it. On the contrary, sex is something of an obsession that is at once taboo and omnipresent. But perhaps because of its simultaneous association with morality and vulgarity, social scientists—the people whose job it is to study human behavior—have often rejected the topic or relegated it the sidelines. That ignorance has led us to think sex isn’t related to the kinds of issues that SEN readers care about, such as national identity and ethnic communities.
