ABSTRACT
This chapter explores sexual morality – the moral boundaries we draw around sexual matters – and how those moral lines vary and shift as they are used to reinforce or challenge the social order and its power relations and inequalities. Fischer discusses how what is considered right and wrong, sexually speaking, is not fixed and absolute but varies across cultures and changes over time. Sexual morality can signify hierarchy at both interpersonal levels and at the larger cultural level. Our society’s rhetoric about sexual morality often reveals certain moral logics and deeper cultural meanings about what we consider pure or polluted, corrupt or innocent. By analyzing a society’s sexual morals, we can unpack deeper cultural patterns and long historical trends that influence how people draw moral boundaries between what they think of as acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior, and between “corruption” and “innocence.”
