How Has The Social Perception of Sex Changed In A Century?

Sophie Genigeorgis
Nov 4 · 3 min read

I have always loved children. Being born into a family where I was the second youngest, I always wished I had younger cousins to play with. That is why when my cousin announced she was pregnant, I was absolutely ecstatic. Per tradition, my cousin had a girl and I watched in delight as baby Alli grew and grew.

It wasn't until this summer when I was a sophomore in university that I realized being around small children presented its own challenges. Alli and I were sitting outside on the patio when she suddenly asked me, “Where do babies come from?”. As I racked my brain trying to come up with an appropriate answer to tell her, I was confronted by my own uncomfortableness surrounding sex.

I realized that my uneasiness to answer her question ran deeper than just her age but was primarily due to my own awkwardness discussing sex socially. Up until this moment, I had never discussed sex openly and casually. Growing up in a conservative catholic home, sex had been labeled a “socially inappropriate topic” that was strictly off-limits to discuss. From home to church to school and back, all outlets of my life had shunned sex from the conversation, inadvertently giving it some seriously tense connotations. The unintentional product of this avoidance of sex was that it had developed feelings of uneasiness, shamefulness, and embarrassment. I realized that because my environment had banished the notion of sex, I had by proxy developed a discomfort with the topic and inadvertently, taken on the same bias and stigma regarding sex that my family, school, church, and peers had towards it.

After this astonishing conclusion, I suddenly wondered why? Why was it that my environment, my whole world, had typecasted sex this way? Why was it that sex had been turned into such a taboo, sinful topic and had it always been this way?

My initial answer to why sex was taboo was “because society views sex this way” and at first this satisfied me. Sex is a personal, private matter and therefore the link between sex and social indiscretion seemed natural. At first glance, it made sense why my society regarded sex as taboo because of its personalness.

But upon further investigation, I realized this didn't make any sense for two reasons. The first is I couldn't logically claim the root of sex’s social perception came from society because that was just circular. Not only did it logically fail, but it left me without a true reason as to why it was perceived this way. In addition to this, this answer also didn't account for all the negative connotations surrounding sex. If sex was just a taboo topic solely because it was a personal matter, why are there such strong stigmas and opinions surrounding the specifics of if? Why is it that there are such controversial ideas on how, when and with whom people should be having sex?

After exhausting this answer, I realized that if I wanted to truly understand why society views sex the way it does, I would need to look in the past. I believe that in order to fully understand the perception of sex in modern-day society, a deeper analysis of the evolution of sex over the past century needs to be explored. By looking at the social progression of sex over time, perhaps the root of sex’s social perception can be identified.

At first glance, this seems daunting as so much has happened in a century, but upon exploration, this analysis can be grounded by 3 major events. For my analysis of the evolution of sex’s social perception, I will focus on 3 main historical time periods and events that have had a significant impact on the perception of sex. These three times are the 1920’s, the sexual revolution, and the birth of online dating. Through an investigation of these 3 events, I plan to analyze the social changes regarding sex to hopefully gather an overarching idea of how and why society’s perception of sex has changed.

Sophie Genigeorgis
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