Development of Sexual Behavior

Introduction: A Script?

An Interactive Process

The adoption of a sexual script is an interactive process, in which the individual and society negotiate a mutually acceptable outcome. This often requires some compromise or modification. For example:
The social environment offers a script for the proper gender role, and the individual accepts or rejects it, or accepts it only in part, or changes it to suit special personal needs. This then provokes a social reaction, either in the form of praise and support or in some form of disapproval or censure. This reaction, in turn, may weaken or strengthen the individual’s willingness to accept the script, which again provokes another social reaction, and so on.
The same is true of the social scripts for erotic and reproductive behavior. Adopting or rejecting these scripts may be a long, tortuous process with many twists and turns. Very much depends on the rigidity or flexibility of the scripts themselves and on the way they are being offered. Some individuals conform very easily to social expectations, but others refuse or even rebel. This, in turn, can lead to very different social reactions - from outright repression to uneasy tolerance to reluctant accommodation - and the individual may or may not respond in kind. Depending on the case, it may take a long time, before such conflicts are resolved.

Interaction between individual and social environment
This greatly simplified graph illlustrates the basic feedback mechanism. An individual (small red figure) is offered various scripts from various sources (alphabet segments at the base of large greyish arrows). However, the individual’s reactions (red arrows) change some parts of the scripts in some way (turning the original black letters of the scripts into red ones). The modified scripts that are eventually accepted have resulted from this interaction.

The issue of scripting becomes even more complicated once we realize that in our modern world individuals are usually faced not with one or two, but with many competing sexual scripts.