Sex

In common usage, the keyword “sex” names either an identity or a practice, something an individual is or does. It refers to both the material foundation (male or female) of binary gender difference (masculine or feminine) and the real and imagined acts that ground various sexual identities (homosexual, heterosexual, fetishist, sadomasochist, and so on). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dates the first sense of “sex” as male or female from the fourteenth century, though it also notes a more pluralized (and again relevant today) usage from the sixteenth century (“so are all sexes and sorts of people called upon”), a singular usage from the same period (“I am called The Squire of Dames, or the Servant of the Sex”), and a further revision in the early nineteenth century (“the third sex”). In contrast, the OED dates the second sense of the term from the mid- to late nineteenth century, when “sexual” (“Berlin is outbidding Paris in its sexual immorality”) and “sexuality” (“Precocious sexuality… interferes with normal mental growth”) began to reference a discrete domain of physical and mental acts isolated from other corporeal appetites, imaginative practices, and forms of social relation. Coincident with these developments was the emergence of terms such as “heterosexual” and “homosexual” that name and police specifically “sexual” orientations and preferences as well as the largely medical or scientific usage of the verb “to sex,” meaning to identify a plant or animal as male or female (“The… barbarous phrase ‘collecting a specimen’ and then of ‘sexing’ it”).