[Social transformation of sexuality in the past decades. An overview]

The societies of the Western world have witnessed a tremendous cultural and social transformation of sexuality during the eighties and nineties, a process Sigusch refers to as "the neosexual revolution". Up to now, this transformation and reassessment of sexuality has proceeded rather slowly and quietly. Yet both its real and its symbolic effects may indeed be more consequential that those brought about in the course of the rapid, noisy sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. The neosexual revolution is dismantling the old patterns of sexuality and reassembling them anew. In the process, dimensions, intimate relationships, preferences and sexual fragments emerge, many of which had submerged, were unnamed or simply did not exist before. In general, sexuality has lost much of its symbolic meaning as a cultural phenomenon. Sexuality is no longer the great metaphor for pleasure and happiness, nor is it so greatly overestimated as it was during the sexual revolution. It is now widely taken for granted, much like egotism or motility. Whereas sex was once mystified in a positive sense--as ecstasy and transgression, it has now taken on a negative mystification characterized by abuse, violence and deadly infection. While the old sexuality was based primarily upon sexual instinct, orgasm and the heterosexual couple, neosexualities revolve predominantly around gender difference, thrills, self-gratification and prosthetic substitution. From the vast number of interrelated processes from which neosexualities emerge, three phenomena have been selected for discussion here: the dissociation of the sexual sphere, the dispersion of sexual fragments and the diversification of sexual relationships. The outcome of the neosexual revolution could be described as self-disciplined and self-optimized "self-sex".