In contrast with other primates, human sexual behaviour is strongly determined by cultural influences. Every society places some restrictions on sexual behaviour.
In contrast, very restrictive societies try to control pre-adolescent sexual behaviour and prevent children from learning about sexual matters.
Until recently, most Western countries would have been classified as sexually restrictive societies, but despite the fact that attitudes towards sexual activities are more permissive than they were even 30 years ago, the earliest works of sexual literature such as the Kama Sutra suggest a sophistication and lack of inhibition in early civilizations which is rare today. This is still the case even after the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ in the West during the 1960s.
Religion is a powerful influence on sexual behaviour. In spite of increasing materialism in the West, religion still exercises a hold over the minds of many of its members. Even those who profess to holding no religious beliefs can be subjected to guilt taught to them by religious parents.
Most organized religions tend to restrict and regulate sexual behaviour to within marriage or its equivalent. Some extreme religions find any sexual act difficult to admit to or tolerate, and such attitudes can lead to psychosexual problems in members of the sect. Revivalism, extreme Methodist protestantism and Calvinism are examples of such credos. Hinduism is relatively relaxed in this respect.
Reliable methods of contraception, and in particular the introduction of the hormonal contraceptive Pill, have been suggested as the main cause of the rapid changes in Western sexual behaviour seen since World War II. To some extent the importance of this has been over-emphasized, and the proposal that it has led to a loosening of sexual attitudes and widespread promiscuity is exaggerated. Certainly adolescents become sexually active earlier than their predecessors, but this tendency is in line with the increasingly earlier age of puberty, which is in turn assumed to be the result of improvements in nutrition.
Recent evidence has shown that the vast majority of 14 and 15 year-olds who are sexually active are not indiscriminate in their choice of partner; most have only one partner over several years.
One element which has had an impact on sexual behaviour is the emancipation of women. Not only is it now accepted that women can vote and pursue a career when married, it is also accepted that women can make the first moves in the mating game. This change has been largely attributed to contraception, but this is unlikely to be the whole story. It has been proposed that one of the outstanding factors in emancipation was the part played by women throughout the world in the two major wars of our century. Both of these were ‘total wars’ and the contributions that women could make in peace time as well as in war were recognized by nearly everyone during those times. When the wars ended, some women were reluctant to give up their newfound freedom, and this has since led to ‘women’s liberation,’ feminism and equal opportunity laws in many countries.
In some parts of the world the progression to women’s freedom and sexual equality has been delayed by the so-called ‘macho’ societies – especially in the Catholic countries of Latin America. A macho society is one in which men expect their women – wives, sisters, daughters – to be faithful and chaste while at the same time they expect all other women to be sexually available. This is an extreme case of the double standards that were seen in some Western cultures before the emancipation of women.
