Sexual script

The idea of sexual script brings a new metaphor and imagery for understanding human sexual encounters as social and learned interactions. The concept was first introduced by sociologists John H. Gagnon and William Simon in their 1973 book Sexual Conduct. The idea highlights three levels of scripting: the cultural/historical, the social/interactive and the personal/intra-psychic. It draws from a range of theories including symbolic interactionism, discourse theory and feminism. It is the foundation of the new Critical Sexualities Studies and the reshaping of the field of sexualities studies in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. The theory of sexual scripting brings sociological, cultural, anthropological, historical and social psychological tools to the study of human sexualities. Whereas human sexuality is usually seen as the province of the biologist and the clinician, scripting helps research and analysis to understand sexualities as less biological and more cultural, historical and social.