The purpose of this book is to present a decade of research on internet sexuality. In part, we are doing this by presenting a selection of our publications on the subject, and in part by writing this introduction to explain how it all started and unfolded, to reflect on the content and results of our research, and to outline some future directions.
Moreover, we discuss the themes and trends in internet sexuality research that we have observed over the years, both in our own research and in general. We will end this introduction with a short presentation of the papers that make up this collection and the reasons for their inclusion.
Our hope is that this book will be of interest to students of internet sexuality in both the social sciences and in other academic disciplines.
Entering a new research field In January 2002, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden launched the research project Netsex: Meanings and consequences of using the internet for sexual purposes. A few months earlier the project was supported by a three-year research grant from the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research and a research team was created at the Department of Social Work under the leadership of Professor Sven-Axel Månsson.
Besides Månsson, the core of the team consisted of three PhD students, Kristian Daneback, Ronny Tikkanen, and Charlotta Löfgren Mårtenson, and two U.S.-based researchers, professors Michael W. Ross at The University of Texas at Houston and Al Cooper at Stanford University. But the story really begins a few years before the start of this project.
In 1998, Månsson and Tikkanen had been working on a study on risk-taking behaviors in men who have sex with men. They found that a large number of the men in their study used the internet to arrange offline meetings for sexual purposes. It became 12 clear that the different rooms and spaces on the internet were the new “beats” and “cruising areas” for men who have sex with men.
Tikkanen and Ross (2003) likened this to a ‘technological tearoom trade’, paraphrasing Humphreys, who in the early 1970s had studied men who met and engaged in anonymous sex with other men in public restrooms (so called tearooms), even though a significant number of these men were married and identified as heterosexual.
The findings of our own research were published in research reports (Tikkanen & Månsson 1999) and in scientific articles (Tikkanen & Ross 2000; Tikkanen & Ross 2003). Around the same time, Månsson met U.S. researcher Al Cooper at a conference in San Diego. Cooper was one of the first people to conduct and publish studies on internet sexuality.
He was directing a team of researchers that had conducted the two largest studies on internet sexuality, in 1999 and 2000, and they had just begun to present the results at conferences and in scientific journals.
Inspired by the meetings with Cooper, Månsson and Tikkanen began to develop a proposal for a research project with the primary focus of studying internet sexuality in a Swedish context. Given their experience, interest, and pioneering roles in this field, Cooper and Ross seemed natural partners to bring on board. Also, at this stage, Daneback and Löfgren-Mårtenson were added to the team.
The grant was submitted to the Swedish Council for Working Life and Social
Research in February 2001 and awarded later the same year.
