sexualist

English

Etymology

sexual +‎ -ist

Noun

sexualist (plural sexualists)

1. (botany) One who believes that plants reproduce by sexual reproduction, especially one who accepts the sexual classification method of Linnaeus.
   • 1816, Patrick Keith, A System of Physiological Botany - Volume 2, page 341:

     But if this is at all an argument, it is one from which the sexualist has but little to fear; as in the case of slips and layers there is in fact no production of a new individual, but merely a prolongation of the old; or at best a multiplication by means of division, as in the case of the Polypi: and although plants are capable of being multiplied in this manner, it is no proof that they may not be propagated by means of sexual intercourse also.

   • 2017, Lincoln Taiz, Lee Taiz, Flora Unveiled: The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants, page 420:

     Both the asexualist Spallanzini and the sexualist Erasmus Darwin cited Koelreuter, and the German botanist Johann Hedwig, the first to describe male and female reproductive structures in nonseed plants (cryptogams), declared in 1798 that Koelreuter had demonstrated “beyond all doubt" that "propagation by sexual union takes place in the plant world also."

   • 2020, Felicia McCarren, One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet: La Source 1866-2014, page 70:

     It was the sexualists who successfully freed their minds from such cultural biases and glimpsed the true sexual nature of plants. The sexualists went on to demonstrate the presence of both the sexual and asexual generations in the life cycles of all plants, as revealed by Hofmeister's great synthesis, thus enabling the asexualists to share in the ultimate solution to the puzzle.

2. One who is very sexual; A person who is very lusty.
   • 2006, James Thomas Sears, Behind the Mask of the Mattachine:

     My interest was centered in what I call "the true homosexual:" the man who has male genitals, who is an active male sexualist, and who likes to play with other male genitals.

   • 2009, Sonia Front, Transgressing Boundaries in Jeanette Winterson's Fiction, page 77:

     Sappho, being a poet and "a sexualist," embodies the word herself; language and sex become one in her: "Say my name and you say sex," she is the outcome of "the union of language and lust."

   • 2013, Stuart J. Dimond, Neuropsychology, page 469:

     […] sexualists whose behaviour dominated by sexuality at the expense of other attributes is so because of the relative mass of brain which genetics has given to their sexual brain?

   • 2013, Hans Licht, Sexual Life In Ancient Greece:

     According to Athenaeus Stesichorus, 'Who was to no small extent a sexualist,' also wrote this kind of poem, which was already named in antiquity 'a "song about boys".'

3. (usually with a hyphenated prefix) Someone with a specified type of sexuality.
   • 1917, Alfred Adler, The Neurotic constitution, page 141:

     Reminiscences out of his infantile preiod were utilized in the neruosis, as a result of which he came near being the victim of a homo-sexualist.

   • 1918, Noel Pemberton Billing, Verbatim Report of the Trial of Noel Pemberton Billing, page 268:

     And anybody taking part in it must be a perverted sexualist?

   • 1948, Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence:

     'Well, I know', says Dr. Poole decidedly. 'I know I love you. I know I want to be with you. Always. Till death do us part,' he adds with all the fervour of an introverted sexualist suddenly converted to objectivity and monogamy.

   • 1998, Erwin J. Haeberle, Rolf Gindorf, Bisexualities, page 183:

     Thus we have hetero- and homosexuals, rather than daylight versus nighttime sexualists, or standing-up versus lying-down sexualists.

   • 2000, Jens Hoyrup, Human Sciences: Reappraising the Humanities Through History and Philosophy:

     The pan-sexualist, of course, may claim that this is just a proof that religion and social protest are nothing but ( misdirected ) expressions of sexuality.

   • 2003, Laurence Senelick, Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894-1925, page 4:

     An early article by Ludwig Frey on the Rupfertum or fleecing of urnings drew a lurid picture of proletarian criminals haunting public toilets at dusk to lure the "contrary-sexualist" to his doom.

4. One who promotes sexual freedom.
   • 1972, Richard H. Rush, The Wrecking Operation: Phase One, page 94:

     A much more thoroughgoing sexualist was Wilhelm Reich who advocated sexual freedom for adolescents, children and married people.

   • 2002, Paul D. Cain, Leading the Parade, page 35:

     As Hal told me, "I'm a sexualist. I've always said , 'We're fighting for sexual freedom. Let's have some . '

   • 2016, Elisabet Björklund, Mariah Larsson, Swedish Cinema and the Sexual Revolution, page 58:

     In a published editorial conversation about I Am Curious (Yellow), Jonas Sima ponders whether Sjöman should be considered a "sexualist" or a socialist. He argues that Sjöman's goal may have been primarily to tear down sexual taboos, not to reform, let alone revolutionize, society.

Adjective

sexualist (comparative more sexualist, superlative most sexualist)

1. Engaging in sexualism; discriminating based on someone's sexuality.
   • 2011, Brendan O'Leary, How to Get Out of Iraq with Integrity, page 211:

     One would suggest that Iraqis have always been extraordinarily xenophobic, intolerant, racist, patriarchal, sexist, and sexualist.

   • 2014, Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco, Queer Necropolitics, page 180:

     The particular ways different trans conceptualizations of space coalesce around PFZs provides a powerfully clear image for how classed, racialized and (cis) sexualist policies and powers impact trans communities in DC.

   • 2015, Marc Solomon, Winning Marriage:

     Ours is a sexualist society," Evan began. "In particular, we have come to believe in constraints on the love which can exist between women and woman, and men and men. ..."

2. A proponent of sexualism: advocating preferential treatment of women because of their role in reproducing the species
   • 1978, Marilyn J. Boxer, Jean Helen Quataert, Socialist Women, page 89:

     In a sexualist regime, society would be properly organized to support its reproductive resources as well as its productive forces.

   • 2018, Karen Offen, Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920:

     That socialist program promoted class stuggle, while a sexualist program proposed to resolve the struggle between the sexes.

3. Pertaining to Linnaeus' sexual system of botanical classification.
   • 2001, Spencer & Collen, The Eighteenth-century Novel - Volumes 1-7, page 133:

     When Linnaeus' sexualist system of botany initially became known in England, there were detractors who charged that Linnæus and his botanical classification system were obscene.

   • 2003, Amy King, Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, page 57:

     Even Robert Thornton, who defends the sexualist system in his introduction to New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus, inadvertently reveals botany's fraught reputation as unmanly and nonanalytical: "by this analytical mode of studying Botany we rise far superior to the Contempt which is commonly cast on this lovely Science, by those who are ignorant of our Procedure... it must be allowed on every side to be a manly sort of Puzzle, as amusing as it is instructive."

   • 2020, Felicia McCarren, One Dead at the Paris Opera Ballet: La Source 1866-2014, page 62:

     By the mid-nineteenth century, the international careers of botanists, the visibility of illustrations and botanical texts point to a broad readership and familiarity with sexualist botany on a European scale.

4. Based on or deriving from sexuality.
   • 1917, Alfred Adler, The Neurotic constitution, page 141:

     Sexual discourse too becomes entirely phantasmatic when sex itself, the critical reduction of moral and social mystification that it used to be, becomes the mode of rationalisation of a problem situated at the level of the total symbolic destruction of social relations, an examination of the sexualist discourse contributes to locking away under a security code.

   • 1941, Roland Dalbiez, Exposition, page 216:

     Note that while Freud does not maintain that all dreams are of sexual motivation, in the particular case of the psychogenic nightmare he holds uncompromisingly to the sexualist interpretation.

   • 2014, Susan Gal, Kathryn Woolard, Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority:

     See also La Grasserie (1904:227), who argued that the languages of uncivilized societies lack sex-gender systems "precisely because of that extreme easiness of sexual relations" among their speakers. Under conditions of promiscuity, the "sexualist idea" would be of relatively little power or interest.

   • 2018, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dreams Must Explain Themselves:

     Sexualist reductionism is as bad as any other kind. If not worse. When I had a hysterectomy, I worried about my writing, because sexualist reductionism had scared me.

5. Sexist.
   • 1996, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, page 199:

     Conservatives, as I am using the word, support hegemonic capitalism while protecting a "learned ignorance" of their necessary resultant support for racialist and sexualist social structures.

   • 2004, Lisa Adkins, Diana Leonard, Sex In Question: French Feminism, page 48:

     My interpretation, non inconsistent with that of Orobio de Castro, is that in the sexualist perspective of western societies, the sex of women is, above all, a 'no-sex male'.

   • 2012, Steve Esomba, Wall Streets Infected By Arab Spring, page 41:

     The reasons for women discrimination in Islam are mainly sexist, sexualist and sensuous: the men do not have to look at a woman ahead of them as this might make the men aroused. Imam Nawawi is credited to have justified the sexualist, ghostly, censored and second-class allocation of women Islamic preachers as follows: "If a woman leads a man in a congregational prayer, the prayer is invalid. As for her prayer, and the prayer of the women praying with her, it is sound."

   • 2018, The Language of Bion: A Dictionary of Concepts, page P.C. Sandler:

     In short, Manila was able to steer clear of the racialist and sexualist dominant discourse that haunted the community.