ABSTRACT
Since the outset of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, behavioral scientists have stressed that sexual behavior including HIV/STD risk behavior must be studied in its sociocultural context. Though our material objective may be to change behavior in the interest of health promotion, we can accomplish this only indirectly—by influencing people's internal psychological states and resources (e.g., feelings, knowledge and skills) or through identifying and changing features in the environment and/or context to which people with their states and actions respond. At the theoretical level, we know that the substance and meanings of sexual knowledge, perceptions and behaviors all are culturally constructed and socially reproduced (see e.g., Caplan 1987; Gagnon and Simon 1973; Herdt and Lindenbaum 1992; Ortner and Whitehead 1981; Parker 1991; Weeks 1981). That is, they are learned, in a particular context, through experience with people and institutions which pressure, express and enforce a particular system of ideas and values. Since learned cultural beliefs and meanings are both individually held and collectively shared by members of the same cultural groups, sexual culture affects behavior, both as an “internal” (intra-individual) and as and “environmental” determinant of sexual feelings, expectations and behaviors.
