In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he was no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.

Source: Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, p. 33 . New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950. With permission of Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

PREFACE

In my senior year at Syracuse University I took a course in philosophy. The professor asked the class to write a paper about a controversial social issue of our choosing. I chose to write on premarital sexuality. I had always been interested in sexuality on a personal level - which I suppose does not distinguish me from most other humans. But I had other reasons to be interested - I had grown up in a coalmining town with open prostitution, and that was at least a bit unusual. Because of this background, when I entered the army what surprised me was the tameness regarding sexuality of the men in my outfit compared to the men I knew in my hometown. My curiosity was aroused concerning just how such different sexual customs could be produced within the same gender. That was why, when my philosophy professor asked us to do a paper on a social issue, I thought I would, in that assignment, begin to unravel the sexual enigma. It wasn't quite as simple as I thought, and it began a lifetime devotion toward the scientific understanding of human sexuality.
Surely those events were not the only reasons for my interest in sexuality. Since early childhood I have been fascinated by intellectual puzzles, Sexuality was very much a puzzle to me. Why did people feel so strongly about it? Why did they differ so much, and how do they change? Eventually I chose sociology as a field that would help in the clarification of this and other socially relevant questions. This book is a natural outcome of all the research and theory work I have done since receiving my Ph.D. It surely does not remove all the mystery of sexuality, but this book has shed more light in that direction than anything else I have done.
I am very certain about the value I place on sociology as an explanatory approach. Until now, there has not been any overall explanation of sexuality from a societal perspective. To be sure, there have been a few attempts. Some people, and I am one of them, have developed mini theories explaining this or that aspect of sexuality. But no overarching theoretical explanation from a sociological perspective exists. I wrote this book to fill that gap.
I am not writing this book just for my fellow sociologists. They already are convinced of the value of sociology. I am also writing it for those in other sciences and for those who in their day-to-day professional work deal with problems of human sexuality, and also for the intellectual curious whatever their specialty might be. I think my explanatory schema will be useful to all who have sufficient motivation to consider seriously the reasoning and evidence underlying my approach.
I have written this book with one goal in mind: To develop an overall explanation of human sexuality that will apply cross-culturally and will explain how society organizes and shapes our sexual lifes. Whether you agree or not regarding my success in doing this, I hope you will remain among those who seek such an answer.

Ira L. Reiss

Minneapolis
December, 1985