Sexual script theory

Sexual script theory is a theory introduced by sociologists John H. Gagnon and William Simon in their 1973 book Sexual Conduct. Its basic principle states that all social behavior, including sexual behavior, is socially scripted. The idea is that sexual scripts are guidelines for appropriate sexual behavior and sexual encounters. Sexual behavior and encounters become behavior which is learned as well as instinctive. Each partner in consensual encounters acts as if they are an actor in a play or film following a script, rather than acting on impulse alone. Research on sexual scripts and sexual script theory has concluded that sexual scripts are gendered.

Thus, sexual scripts have been described by researchers as a form of social construction. Sexual Script Theory (SST) and its application in clinical practice are founded on the idea that the subjective understandings of each person about their sexuality (and called a sexual script) substantively determine that person's choice of sexual actions and the subsequent qualitative experiencing of those sexual acts. Scripts refer to social functions. They dictate what one should be doing at a particular time and in a particular place if one is to play the role characteristically associated with that script. There may be several people involved in the same situation, but they may differ in the roles that they have been given or have chosen to enact. It is a cognitive schema that instruct people how to understand and act in sexual situations. A key learning factor in understanding sexual script theory is social constructionism, which is, "the interpretation of reality, including human behavior, is derived from shared beliefs within a particular social group." In regard to sexual human behavior, the meanings attached to those behaviors, including what makes them “sexual” behaviors, derives from metaphorical scripts individuals have learned and incorporated as a function of their involvement in the social group. According to Gagnon and Simon, “Scripts are involved in learning the meaning of internal states, organizing the sequencing of specifically sexual acts, decoding novel situations, setting the limits on sexual responses and linking meanings from nonsexual aspects of life to specifically sexual experience.” Gagnon and Simon layer sexual script theory in three levels, they state, "scripts are a metaphor for conceptualizing behavior within social life. Most of social life most of the time must operate under the guidance of an operating syntax, much as language is a precondition for speech. For behavior to occur, something resembling scripting must occur on three distinct levels: cultural scenarios, interpersonal scripts, and intrapsychic scripts."

• Cultural scenarios - provide the context for roles, and contain institutional arrangements and symbols that comprise collective life. Cultural institutions such as government, law, education, and religion can influence as they are experienced on a daily basis.
• Interpersonal scripts- rest on the roles and general circumstances provided by cultural scenarios, yet they entail adaptation to the particulars of each situation. Accordingly, each social actor helps create interpersonal scripts by adapting the general guidelines they learned from their experiences in the culture to the specifics presented in each social encounter.
• Intrapsychic scripts- creates fantasy in the rich sense of that word: the symbolic reorganization of reality in ways to more fully realize the actor's many-layered and sometimes multivoiced wishes.

Gagnon and Simon also note that the most prominent and affected have "age requirements" such as “You cannot engage in X until you are Y years of age,” or “By age Y you must have done X.” Gagnon and Simon further elaborate by stating,

"Common scripts themselves may have variants based on the relative ages of the actors, or at least the actors within a particular script are evaluated differently based on their respective ages. Adolescence and early adulthood are the most troubling stages for individuals and for the culture to which such individuals belong; it is during these stages that individuals are developing and refining their interpersonal and intrapsychic sexual scripts. “The major cultural scenarios that shape the most common interpersonal scripts tend to be almost exclusively drawn from the requirements of adolescence and early adulthood. There are virtually none tied to the issues of subsequent segments of life.”

Simon and Gagnon also note the extreme ends of the lifecycle might be that of as the presexual (childhood) and the postsexual (old age), at least in terms of predominant, shared scripts. They go on to explain, “Not that sexually significant events do not occur during these periods, but they are not or only rarely anticipated in prevailing cultural scenarios dealing with the very young and the very old."