Sexual Scripts

In any given society, at any given moment in history, people become sexual in the same way they become everything else...without much reflection. They pick up directions from their social environment. They acquire and assemble meanings, skills and values from the people around them. Their critical choices are often made by going along and drifting. People learn when they are quite young and few of the things they are expected to be, and continue slowly to accumulate a belief in who they are and ought to be throughout the rest of their childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Sexual conduct is learned in the same ways and through the same processes; it's acquired and assembled in human interaction, judged and performed in specific cultural and historical worlds. (Gagnon 1977, p. 2)

The idea of sexual scripts is advanced. Viewing conduct as scripted is a way of organizing our thinking about behavior. Scripts are the plans people may have in their heads for what they are doing and what they are going to do as well as devices for remember what they have done in the past. Scripts specify, like blue prints, the who's, what's, where's, when's, and why's for given types of activity. According to this perspective all social behavior is scripted.

Who an individual has sexual relations with is defined. Most people do sexual things with a restricted number and kinds of people who are usually members of the opposite sex and of the same age. There are limits set by blood relations, marital status, race, ethnicity, religion, and social class. What one does sexually is also important. Of the whole range of sexual acts, most are classified as right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate.

Sex is usually in private and in the absence of children. It can be constituted in a number of ways - the day, week, year, or person's age. Most societies tend to see sex as more or less appropriate at one age or phase. It comes as a shock to many young people that adults over 60 continue to engage in sexual acts. The leading reaction is, "How can they....they are old". This reaction implies that sex is only good between young people and that older people can not be sexually attractive. A judgment like that has no basis in biological fact but emerges from social definitions of when it is appropriate to be or not to be sexual.

Society approves of doing sexual things in private. According to Freud, it is important that children do not see their parents having sexual intercourse. The notion of separate bedrooms is a Victorian middle class idea, and in the past, children would have slept in their parent's bedroom. The why of sex is rhetorical. Sex is for having children and can be for pleasure, lust, fun, passion, love, and rebellion.

The who, what, when, where, and why headings of sexual scripts in any society can be organized. Learning a sexual script is part of growing up in any society. The scripts we accumulate and are ability to apply and manipulate them are rarely the outcome of a systematic and conscious learning process but rather an accumulation of responses to the multiplicity of cues and hints that are provided by the social world around us.

There are arguments that biology sets everything. Gagnon argues that while it is possible to study and learn from primates, it is not possible to make predictions from their behavior to that of humans. The second strand of this argument