ABSTRACT
The British Psychological Society, American Psychological Association, and other similar organisations tend to define psychology as something like ‘the scientific study of mind and behaviour’. Sex is a fascinating, far-reaching, and fraught area of human experience. One debate that hasn’t stopped raging in psychology since the 1970s is whether psychology can be neutral and objective, or whether it is inevitably political: in other words, whether psychologists will have individual and cultural biases which influence what they study, how they study it, and what they find. Psychologists have often divided into two factions around these kinds of issues. The first faction the authors might call ‘mainstream’ psychologists: those who believe that it’s possible for psychology to conduct objective value-free research to determine facts about human minds and behaviour. The latter faction are often called ‘critical’ psychologists: those who believe that psychological knowledge always develops in a specific situation which will affect what psychologists find and what they do with it.
