Sexual law is a highly political issue. Some argue for more restrictive sexual laws and harsher enforcement. Others argue for more personal freedom. The sexual laws currently being debated across America include laws about:

• marriage and domestic partnerships

• divorce, child custody, and child support

• sexual health and safer sex

• sexuality education in the schools

• teenage pregnancy

• abortion and contraception

• civil rights for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans-gender

• sexual assault

• sexual abuse of children

• sexual harassment

• pornography

• HIV/AIDS discrimination

Marriage and Domestic Partnerships

Each of our states has its own marriage laws. Each can decide who can marry, set the legal age for marriage, and state requirements for blood tests and marriage licenses. As of this writing, marriage can be legalized only between a man and a woman.

Bigamy

Bigamy—to have more than one spouse—is against the law in all states. There are two forms of bigamy. “Polygamy” or “Polygyny” means having more than one wife. “Polyandry” means having more than one husband. Polygamy is legal in some societies. Polyandry is no longer legal anywhere.

Domestic Partnerships

In the past, many states considered women and men who lived together for a significant period of time (different time requirements in different states) and who publicly described themselves as “husband and wife” to be common-law spouses. This gave them certain benefits held by other couples who had been married in an official way.

There are now more single people in our country than at any other time in history. Many never marry. Many divorce and do not remarry. Many singles live together in long-term, sexual relationships. This is called cohabitation. Increasing numbers of cities, states, corporations, and insurance carriers recognize these relationships and confer on couples some of the benefits otherwise available only to couples who are legally married. In some cases, same-sex couples also receive these benefits. These relationships, when recognized in this way, are sometimes called domestic partnerships.

Gay Marriage

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court overthrew all miscegenation laws in its decision Loving v. the Commonwealth of Virginia. The Supreme Court ruled that laws against marriage between persons of different races violated the right of equal protection. As we go to press, similar arguments are being used in the state of Hawaii, where legalized gay marriage is being debated. So many people are against gay marriage, however, that the U.S. Congress recently passed a new law, the Defense of Marriage Act, that allows states to disregard gay marriages recognized in other states. Some people think this law is a violation of the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution—which makes the official acts of one state valid in all states.

The Defense of Marriage Act also allows the government to withhold certain federal benefits from the spouses of gay marriages. These benefits include Social Security, veterans benefits, and federal pensions. President Bill Clinton signed this law in 1996.

Many states already ban same-sex marriage, and other states are considering similar laws.

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Men who report being sexually assaulted by women were pressured by guilt or threat of breakup. Some described being too drunk or incapacitated to be able to control the situation. Others report being threatened with physical violence, blackmail, or demotion.

Sexual assault against men by women is much less common than sexual assault against women. There are more than 9,000 cases of sexual assault by women against men reported each year, but sexual assault against men is often unreported. Men encounter disbelief when reporting a woman as a rapist. They may fear public and private humiliation. They may feel that they have failed to be masculine enough to defend themselves. Some fear they will be perceived as effeminate or homosexual.

The emotional effects of sexual assault for men are anger, fear, shame, guilt, and disruptions in sexual, social, and family relationships, as well as in sleeping and eating. Professional counseling can help relieve these effects. Rape-crisis centers assist men as well as women.

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Adolescence in American society is generally viewed as a period of change, friction, and problems. It is a period during which the individual is no longer a child and yet not quite an adult. The adolescent is encouraged to be independent and to be assertive, but with regard to sexual expression there are varying degrees of prohibition depending on gender and social status. More restrictive sexual standards are applied to women than to men, blacks are more sexually permissive than whites, and lower social class people are generally more permissive than other social groups. The sexual restrictions imposed by society on adolescents at a stage when the physiological need for sexual expression increases creates many conflicts. The period of conflicts is now longer than it ever has been, because there has been a prolongation of adolescence both biologically and socially. The mean age at menarche in the Western European populations declined from about age sixteen in 1870 to age fourteen by around 1930 and went down to about age thirteen years during the 1950s. The present mean age at menarche in the United States is about age twelve. Socially, there have been changes in the life cycle. The median age at marriage for United States women increased from 20.3 years in 1960 to 21.6 years in 1977, and the proportion of unmarried adolescent women has increased dramatically. In 1960, 60 percent of nineteen-year-old women were single compared to 74 percent in 1977 (Current Population Reports). Also, adolescents are exposed to sex to a much greater degree than ever before, both through the mass media and through personal experiences. Under these circumstances, the restrictive standards of society with respect to sexual behavior are likely to be violated. There seems to be a greater tolerance now of the violators of the sexual code than there was a few decades ago, but this tolerance is not usually extended to the young woman who becomes pregnant before marriage. The social, psychological, and economic consequences of an out-of-wedlock birth are grim for both the young mother and her child.

Most earlier studies on adolescent sexual behavior have dealt not with the consequences of sexual behavior but with different types of sexual outlets in the context of sexual standards, interpersonal relationships, attainment of orgasm, and marital happiness. For example, Kinsey studied the correlation between premarital patterns of various types of sexual behavior and subsequent sexual adjustments in marriage, based on the sexual histories of females of all ages; Reiss analyzed premarital sexual standards and premarital sexual permissiveness: Ehrmann examined premarital sexual behavior in terms of sex codes of conduct and the love relationship; Burgess and Wallin analyzed factors influencing engagement and marriage adjustments; Kirkendall studied premarital intercourse and interpersonal relationships based on experiences of 200 college-level males; and Locke dealt with premarital sexual intercourse and marital sexual adjustment among 525 divorced and 404 happily married persons.

We will examine adolescent sexual behavior from the viewpoint of the consequences of sexual behavior, for example, out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Our focus will be on premarital sexual behavior and more particularly on the social aspects of premarital intercourse (heterosexual coitus) among women fifteen to nineteen years of age. Our findings are based largely on data from two national surveys of women aged fifteen to nineteen. In the first study, conducted in the spring and early summer of 1971, interviews were obtained from a national probability sample of 4,611 adolescent women fifteen to nineteen years of age living in households and in college dormitories in the continental United States. The sampled population included young women of all marital statuses and races (Zelnik). A similar but independent study was carried out in the spring and summer of 1976, with a national probability sample of 2,193 adolescent women fifteen to nineteen years of age, who lived in households in the continental United States. Again, the sampled population covered women of all marital statuses and races (Zelnik).

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Affectional-sexual development, in comparison with other aspects of development, motor and language, for example, has been more often repressed than encouraged by most families in the United States and throughout most of the Western world. In the United States, sex is seldom treated as a strong and healthy force in the positive development of personality. Infant sexual behavior, in the eyes of many, is negative, perverse, and destructive. Some see infant sexual-affectional potential as related to excesses—addictions that control the individual and weaken reason. That infants have erotic capacity has been pointedly ignored or overlooked. After an asexual infancy and childhood, sex is supposed to burst out in full bloom at puberty or, better, later. Sexual innocence has been assumed to be normal and appropriate. Still earlier, infants were considered depraved if they masturbated, asked sex-related questions, or showed any sexual interest or curiosity. Ignorance was and is deemed best to keep dormant any precocious sexual feelings. It has been taken for granted that other aspects of physical and mental growth would proceed gradually from birth to full maturity, but knowledge about sexual capacity and interest has been either consciously or unconsciously suppressed even in the community of social and behavioral scientists. This is an enigma, for as early as the turn of the century, Bell, Freud, and Moll were reporting that in infants of suckling age, various parts of the body could give pleasurable sensation and romances did develop in childhood, and it was known that “unscrupulous nurses” had found that they could calm crying babies by stroking their genitals. Freud observed that sexual behavior of the infant and child not only was ignored but “the educators consider all sexual manifestations of the child as an ‘evil’ in the face of which little can be accomplished”. To find sexuality suppressed in the schools is perhaps understandable; to find it largely overlooked in the behavioral and social sciences is more difficult to understand and to accept.

What would be the outcome of a concerted effort to give infants the opportunity to develop fully their capacity for sensory and affectional response? We do not know because we have not wanted to know. Those who argue that the individual, to be fully human, must have the opportunity to develop all his or her capacities argue that this principle should apply to sexual capacity as well as to intellect and motor skills. Those who argue for discipline, self-control, and the curbing of harmful or socially disruptive human tendencies, argue that only the minimum of stimulation and no erotic experience should characterize the personal encounters of infants. Those who opt for restriction of erotic expression in infancy and childhood are in the majority in the United States at the present time.

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In micropenis, the penile corpora are underdeveloped. They may be so small that the penis looks like a clitoris. Unlike a clitoris, however, the micropenis has a median raphe, a covered urethra, a foreskin, and a glans in which the urethral meatus is normally placed. It may or may not be erectile, dependent upon the amount of corpora cavernosa and corpus spongiosum present. The scrotum is present and fused. The testes may be descended or either unilaterally or bilaterally cryptorchid. The etiology of micropenis is unknown.

In the two cases of micropenis compared here, the sex of assignment, rearing, and rehabilitation (surgical and hormonal, as required) was male and female respectively. In the male case, the boy differentiated a masculine gender identity/role, but not without difficulty. As a child, he did not join in rough-and-tumble play. He played more with girls than he did with boys. At the age of ten, he revealed to an interviewer that he had often thought about changing his sex. He already had made up his mind, however, that he would not bother with a change of sex unless he could be guaranteed to have children by his own pregnancies. Despite application in childhood of testosterone cream to his penis and, in adolescence, injections of androgen (given primarily to induce a masculinizing puberty since his testes were vestigial and defective) the micropenis remained excessively minute. Consequently, its use in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships was grossly impaired. Maintenance of intromission was, in fact, impossible.

At the present time, despite surgical and/or hormonal treatments for micropenis, there is no evidence that such treatments produce a fully functioning penis of adult size.

The other micropenis infant was surgically rehabilitated as a girl during the fourth month after birth. This consisted of bilateral gonadectomy and feminization of the external genitalia. At age twelve, feminizing puberty was exogenously induced by means of oral estrogen. Vaginoplasty was performed at age seventeen.

In childhood, this girl played with boys and girls. Although she did prefer outdoor activities, it was not to an intense or one-sided degree. With adolescence, she began to be interested in boys and had experiences with necking and petting at age thirteen, even though girls in her family were not officially permitted to date. At age eighteen and a half, she had intercourse for the first time with her steady boyfriend.

Three years later they married. Her gender identity/role is unquestionably female.

The fact that the testes of the infant assigned and reared male were defective and did not produce pubertal androgen, and that the testes of the infant assigned and reared female were removed before the age of six months, might eventually prove important in relationship to the differentiation of their erotic gender identity/role. In normal XY infants there is an increase in plasma testosterone from birth until the second or third month of life, followed by a gradual decrease. By the seventh month, the level of plasma testosterone diminishes and stays at the low, pre-pubertal level of boyhood. Perhaps the high postnatal level of plasma testosterone is needed to complete the job, initiated prenatally, of setting in the brain thresholds for the release of certain types of sexually dimorphic behavior later in life. This hypothesis is currently only speculative. In any event, the lesson of the matched pair of micropenis individuals teaches the same lesson taught by individuals matched for various diagnoses of hermaphroditism. It is that, in the differentiation of an individual’s gender identity/role, the determinants are prenatal as well as postnatal. It is possible for postnatal determinants to override prenatal ones, just as it is possible for prenatal determinants to intrude on postnatal ones. The various possible permutations and combinations still need to be clarified.

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