Sexology
Sexology is the interdisciplinary study of human sexuality, including sexual behavior, identity, relationships, health, and social norms.
Human sexuality: The ways people experience and express sexual feelings, identities, behaviors, and relationships. This broad subject supplies sexology’s central object of study.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing: An Austrian-German psychiatrist whose 1886 book Psychopathia Sexualis classified sexual behaviors and desires. His influential classifications helped establish sexuality as a subject of clinical study.
Sex therapy: A form of psychotherapy addressing sexual concerns, functioning, and intimacy in individuals or couples. It applies knowledge about sexuality to structured clinical treatment.
Moralism: A tendency to judge conduct primarily by conformity to moral rules. Sexology distinguishes empirical description from moral condemnation, though historical work often blurred them.
Sexual behavior: Actions and practices associated with sexual interest, intimacy, or reproduction. Behavior is one observable dimension sexology investigates.
Havelock Ellis: An English physician and writer whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex examined sexuality and sexual variation. His work helped popularize comparatively open, evidence-oriented discussion of sexual life.
Comprehensive sexuality education: Education about sexuality that includes relationships, consent, health, identity, and sexual development. Research on development and health informs its evidence-based curricula.
Social constructionism: An approach emphasizing how social processes shape categories, meanings, and institutions. It challenges explanations that treat sexual identities and norms as purely natural or fixed.
Sexual orientation: A pattern of romantic, emotional, or sexual attraction to people of particular genders or sexes. It connects patterns of attraction with identity and social experience.
Magnus Hirschfeld: A German physician and sex researcher who founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1919. His institute joined research, counseling, and advocacy in an early sexology center.