Snips and Snails and Theorists’ Tales

Abstract

This article locates classical sociology within the context of widely circulating scientific ‘truths’ about sexed bodies, exploring how the emerging discipline of sociology both drew on and contributed to the construction of a scientifically grounded sexual dimorphism. Through an examination of Durkheim’s theory of conjugal society and Weber’s writings on the routinization of sexual conduct, the extent to which anxieties about masculine sexuality animated classical conceptions of the shifting mind/body relationship in modernity is illuminated. This is read alongside a shared problematic in the sexual science of the time - concern over the relationship between ‘modern’ life and male sexual dysfunction. I argue that the manner in which both sociology and sexual science problematized male sexuality as a pivotal issue of modernity is illustrative of the construction of a fundamentally gendered ontology of the social. I argue that the actively internalized struggle of mind and body in sociology’s men renders them universally individual, whilst its women are collectively particular, and that this is a legacy with which social theory continues to struggle.