Sexology
[2][3] Sexologists apply tools from several academic fields, such as anthropology, biology, medicine, psychology, epidemiology, sociology, and criminology.
Sex manuals have existed since antiquity, such as Ovid's Ars Amatoria, the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, the Ananga Ranga, and The Perfumed Garden for the Soul's Recreation.
[9] In England, the founding father of sexology was the doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis who challenged the sexual taboos of his era regarding masturbation and homosexuality and revolutionized the conception of sex in his time.
Ellis wrote the first objective study of homosexuality (the term was coined by Karl-Maria Kertbeny), as he did not characterize it as a disease, immoral, or a crime.
[11] Aware of Hirschfeld's studies of transvestism, but disagreeing with his terminology, in 1913 Ellis proposed the term sexo-aesthetic inversion to describe the phenomenon.
Wilhelm Reich and Otto Gross were disciples of Freud, but rejected his theories[vague] because of their emphasis on the role of sexuality in the revolutionary struggle for the emancipation of mankind.
Pre-Nazi Germany, under the sexually liberal Napoleonic code, organized and resisted the anti-sexual, Victorian cultural influences.
The momentum from those groups led them to coordinate sex research across traditional academic disciplines, bringing Germany to the leadership of sexology.
Physician Magnus Hirschfeld was an outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, founding the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights.
Hirschfeld developed a system which identified numerous actual or hypothetical types of sexual intermediary between heterosexual male and female to represent the potential diversity of human sexuality, and is credited with identifying a group of people that today are referred to as transsexual or transgender as separate from the categories of homosexuality, he referred to these people as transvestiten (transvestites).
[3] Post-WWII sexology in the U.S. was influenced by the influx of European refugees escaping the Nazi regime and the popularity of the Kinsey studies.
Until that time, American sexology consisted primarily of groups working to end prostitution and to educate youth about sexually transmitted infections.
[26][27] Technological advances have permitted sexological questions to be addressed with studies using behavioral genetics,[28] neuroimaging,[29] and large-scale Internet-based surveys.
