Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

• Sex is the biological aspect of maleness or femaleness
• Gender is the social interpretation of sex, including masculinity and femininity
• Sexuality encompasses the totality of one's experience of sex and gender
• Sex chromosomes (XX for females, XY for males) are chromosomal markers distinguishing sex
• Intersex individuals possess composite genitals with both male and female characteristics
• Reproduction refers to the process or ability to create offspring

Biological vs Social Aspects

• Biological differences between males and females are straightforward
• Social and cultural aspects of being a man or woman can be complex

Defining Sex

• Sex is the biological dimension of gender and sexuality
• Characteristics do not vary significantly across societies
• Referred to as biological or physical sex
• Pertains to identity based on sexual anatomy and physiology
• Determined by examining genitals, which are external organs for reproduction
• Penis and testicles are considered male
• Vagina is considered female

Hermaphroditism/Intersexuality

• Genitals appear as a mix of male and female organs, making sex classification difficult
• Referred to as hermaphroditism, derived from Hermes (male Greek God) and a female Greek goddess
• Intersexuality is the modern term
• Naturally occurring variation in humans and animals with 1 in 1500 births (APA, 2006)

Biological Markers of Sex

• Chromosomes are protein structures containing genetic material
• Sex chromosomes (XX = female, XY = male) mark biological sex
• Hormone levels also act as markers
• Males have higher testosterone, linked to sex drive and aggression
• Females have higher estrogen and progesterone, linked to lactation, menstruation, and female reproductive functions

Gender Definition

• Gender refers to social and cultural distinctions of being male or female
• Assignment of gender becomes more complex throughout childhood and adolescence
• Expectations extend beyond clothing into behavior

Gender Norms and Expectations

• There are set behaviors that female and male individuals must follow
• Individuals are expected to align with biological sex

Heteronormativity

• Phenomenon that determines the normality of behavior, based on conformity to expectations relative to one’s biological sex

Gender Identity

• An individuals sense of who they are
• An individual's experience as a man, women or neither

Transgender Individuals

• Biological sex not aligning with gender identity
• Transgenders include males identifying as women (transgender women) and females identifying as men (transgender men)
• Individuals may undergo gender realignment surgery to align physical characteristics with gender identity

Factors Affecting Surgery Choices

• Beliefs, culture and economics

Sexual Orientation

• Aspect of gender is related to emotional and sexual attraction
• Everyone's sexuality is unique
• Capacity for attraction is diverse and complex

Sexual Orientations

• Heterosexual: attraction to the opposite sex
• Homosexual (gay, lesbian): attraction to the same sex
• Bisexual: attraction to both sexes (male and female)
• LGBT is used to refer to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community
• Can only tell if a person is gay/lesbian/bisexual if the person shares their experiences and feelings of attraction
• Feeling safe when individuals share their sexuality is important
• Safe environment needed to avoid feeling judged and discriminated against
• Prejudice/discrimination causes negative psychological effects (APA)
• Need to work toward an inclusive environment where everyone feels safe

Gender and Sexuality Through Time

• Patriarchy is a social system where men primarily hold power in politics and private spheres
• Feminism is a continuing social movement challenging the patriarchal society and oppressive practices against women
• Society has progressed, providing greater access to information
• Historical accounts show changes in humans' views on gender and sexuality
• Archeological artifacts show high regard for women in ancient civilizations

Early Divine Feminine

• Divine feminine concepts, such as Gaia in Greek mythology and the Venus of Willendorf in art, have prevailed
• Societies have been known as egalitarian based on this
• Women were treated equally with men

Egalitarian vs. Patriarchal Societies

• Egalitarian societies: men and women hold equitable power and roles
• Patriarchy is a structure upholding male supremacy in law, home, workplace, and society
• Patriarchy: the system is primarily held in the political and private spheres

Paternity and Societal Views

• Discovery of what is paternity presumably changed views of women and men
• Agricultural era: societies established communities/tamed animals, changing views of men/women

Work and Gender

• Societies have privileged men over other genders with the preferential due to the productive sphere
• Women have been viewed as solely capable of reproductive affairs

Patrilineal and Patriarchal Societies

• A patrilineal society often follows a patriarchal society
• Women were left with no inheritance
• Expected to marry with the means to support her economically
• Women were not allowed to go to school or vote

Women's Rights

• Women had to fight for the right to vote, to go to school, to go to work, and even participate in politics

Friedrich Engels

• A German philosopher and sociologist

Patriarchy

• Came about when people started having private property instead of communal living

Creation of Private Property

• The development of culture and domestication of animals led to creating surplus which allows people to have private property

Inheritance

• As a way to control excess wealth generated by advancements, male dominance as asserted over women so only the male heir can inherit family wealth

Historical Greek Views on Gender

• Aristotle, Plato, and other Greek philosophers viewed women as inferior
• Women were considered the properties of men
• A women's only job was to obey their husbands, bear children, and take care of the household
• Women were forbidden to learn philosophy, politics, and science

Ancient Egypt

• Herodotus, a Greek historian, observed that Egyptian women enjoyed a higher social status
• Egyptian women were able to inherit property and engage in trade and politics
• Greek influence spread through conquests by Alexander the Great

Ancient China

• Confucianism includes stringent written rules for how women conduct themselves
• Strict documents like "Three obedience's and four virtues" and "Precepts of women" dictated female behavior

Subtle Oppression

• Patriarchy has taken on subtle forms of oppression such as sexism

Defining Sexism

• Prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination based on sex that include:
• Prejudice (opinion or attitude towards a person)
• Stereotype (generalization about a person or group of people – influenced by media)
• The gender pay gap
• Underrepresentation in politics, military, and executive positions
• Rape on women and the associated stigma
• Very conservative expectations.
• Unrealistic depictions of women in fiction, often very sexualized.
• Women doing more housework and childcare
• Boys being trained/expected to be leaders while women were trained/expected to do house chores

Women's Empowerment Defined

• Women's empowerment (or female empowerment):
• Accepting women's viewpoints
• Making an effort to seek them
• Raising the status of women through education, awareness, literacy, and training
• Equipping women to make life-determining decisions through societal problems

Goal of Women's Empowerment

• May have opportunity to re-define gender roles or other such roles, allowing more freedom to pursue desired goals
• Empowerment: not superiority of women. Instead, aims to reduce/address social, cultural, political inequalities

Simone de Beauvoir

• Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex regarded as ground breaking feminist philosophy
• "The Second Sex" was published in 1949

Analysis of Patriarchy

• It outlines how patriarchal society disadvantaged women by slowly raising her into submission and hindering productivity/happiness

Awakening of Women

• Beauvoir’s inspired women about plight as the “wife-servant”

Le Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes

• Women’s liberation movement formed in Europe
• Sought the right to education, work, and right to vote in the 1940’s

Successes of the Movement

• Women also won right to decide on their bodies and sexualities
• Liberation movement views the intersectionality of economic status or class to patriarchy

Second-Wave Feminism

• Second-wave feminism in 1960’s-80’s addressed social and cultural inequalities

Inequalities Addressed

• Social and cultural inequalities included:
• Domestic violence
• Marital rape
• Reproductive rights
• Wage inequalities

Modern-Day Feminism

• The 90s gave birth to the 3rd wave (gender diversity)
• The 4th wave (online activism) started in 2012

Feminism Demands

• Few salient points that feminism demands include:
• Women's suffrage
• Equality in politics and society
• Reproductive rights
• Domestic violence
• Sexual harassment and violence

Other rights include

• The right to divorce
• Right to make decisions on pregnancy
• Equitable wages
• Equal employment opportunity

Contributing to Gender Equality

• Can contribute to gender equality by
• Using gender-neutral language (e.g., "humankind" instead of "mankind")
• Challenging sexist stereotypes in conversations, media, and daily life
• Advocating for policies that promote gender equality
• Supporting women-led businesses, organizations, and initiatives
• Educating others about gender and sexuality issues

Society

• A group of people living together with the following characteristics
• Involve relationships
• Is relatively large
• Socializes it's members
• Endures for generations
• Holds it's members through common culture where culture includes:

Culture

• The values, beliefs, attitudes, languages, symbol, rituals, behaviors, and customs unique to a particular group of people that is passed from one generation to another
• It includes: Family relations, child rearing, education, occupation choice, social interaction, spirituality, religious beliefs, food preference, health beliefs, healthcare and a society
• It has a clearly defined geographical territory

Major Functions of Society

• Provides a system to be functions of society (you, fam, religion, peers, school, mass media, work)
• Provides the basic needs of its members (food, clothing, shelter)
• Regulates and controls people’s behavior (law and order)
• Provides the means of social participation
• Provides mutual support to members (solidarity)

Culture Definitions

• The sum of symbols, ideas, forms and expressions and material products associated with a social system
• Allan Johnson states that it is a dynamic medium through which societies create a collective way of life reflected in such things as beliefs, values, music, literature, art, dance, science, religion, ritual, technology and other
• Derived from the Latin word cultus which means care and attention provided to a human person as he grows into a mature person
• Eduard Taylor states it refers to the complex whole that includes knowledge, belief, art, moral, law by man as a member of society
• Robert Redfield states that it is an organized body of conventional understandings manifest in art and artifacts, which persist through tradition
• It is a social heritage of a society transmitted from one generation to another through language
• It is a design, a recipe or road map for living that guides the behavior of members of society (MA'AM CAREN'S analysis)

Culture vs Tradition

• Tradition comes from the Latin word tradere or traderer , which means to transmit, or to handover for safekeeping
• A ritual, belief or object passed down within a society, still maintained in the present, with origins in the past High Culture

Culture

• A culture consumed mainly by upper classes
• Popular culture (or mass culture) is a culture consumed by all classes
• That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society
• Edward Tylor states "Culture 1924[orig. 1871]:1"

Characteristics of Culture

• Culture is learned, shared, based symbol, integrated, dynamic, relative
• Key factors includes greater community, knowledge and stories
• Language, traditions and rituals, techniques and skills, tools and objects, the arts, food and drink, values
• It makes actions of individuals intelligible to others
• It tells you how to react

Enculturation

• It is the process by which a society's culture is passed on from one generation to the next and from which individuals become members of society (Haviland, et al., 2010: 148)

Components of Culture

• Material Culture refers to the concrete and tangible things that man creates and uses
• Non-material culture refers to non-material things or intangible objects and can be broken down into

Beliefs, Norms and Sanctions

• Symbols represents anything that carries a particular meaning, such as language, mathematical notation and signs that allow us to classify experience and generalize it

Norms

• Can be described as generally accepted ways of doing things, a standard or rules of expected behavior

Folkways vs Mores

• Folkways refers to the ways of the folks, William Graham Sumner called them weak type of norms and are only mildly enforced as compared to morsels which are norms that are strongly held and considered sacred and are also based on ethical and moral values where behavior is obligatory and violation leads to severe punishment
• Taboo refers to among the strongest norms (incest taboo as nearly universal) as compared to laws which are codified or formalized norms where some of the laws grew out of folkways and mores

Non-Material Culture Sanctions

• Refer to rewards and punishment intended to ensure conformity to cultural guidelines
• System of social control is the sum of sanctions in society by means of which conformity is ensured

Values and Beliefs

• Values are abstract concepts of what is important and worthwhile,they are the basis of our judgment of what is good, desirable and correct
• Belief Embody people's perception of reality and they result from one's experiences about the physical, biological, and social world

Language As a Framework of Culture

• It is a system of symbols strung together to communicate thought and also allows the culture to develop

Functions of Culture

• It serves as a "trademark" of the people in society
• Gives meaning to man's existence
• Unifies diverse behavior
• Provides social solidarity
• Establishes social personality
• Provides systematic behavioral pattern
• Promotes meaning to individual's existence
• Predicts social behavior
• Provides social structure category

Social Institutions

• It is a particular segment of society where social relations and social roles exist that is a unit of society where behavior patterns are shared and played by the members
• The goal of social institution is to satisfaction of the basic group needs and it is a relatively permanent structures of social patterns, roles, relations of people and they can be broken down into Family, School, Church, Government and Business Economy
• Family is the nucleus of civilization, the oldest and basic of all social institutions
• The types of family are classified by:
• Patriarchal Family where the authority is vested in the oldest male in the family, often the father, and the matriarchal family and by
• Egalitarian Family where the husband (father) and the wife (mother) exercise equal amount of authority that they both share as compared to

Matricentric Family

• Where in the absence of the father at home due to his work and authority is taken by the mother while the school, educational institutions help preserve, perpetuate, modify and integrate the condition of human life by promoting teaching and learning and through education, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values are acquired, shared and transmitted to other individual from generation, through teaching and learning processes

Church

• The church is a religious institution responsible for uplifting of an individual's spiritual life who's interactions among its members in order to foster unity, group solidarity while ceremonies and rituals are performed by the members throughthe guidance of the church leaders and with that in mind
• Types of religious institutions include the church and the cult and that the government, the state expresses and enforces its will through and for the benefits of the people while

Main Functions of Government

• Promoting the physical, economic, socio-cultural well being of the people and administering social justice
• Promoting progress and development, security, and protection
• Preserving the State from internal and external threat
• Types of government and how power is divided include Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy
• Business economy business economy is a system of management of material goods and services, labor and capital where
• The production and distribution of goods and services within a society are very essential to its existence and the types are production of goods, consumption of goods, distribution of goods and services

Love, Intimacy and Relationship

• Complex phenomenon characterized by an affective and cognitive inclination to someone and a set of social behaviors geared towards cohesion while intimacy is something different
• The psychosocial component of love that refers to an intimate understanding of someone that is emotional closeness and connection as compared to passion

Passion vs Commitment

• The emotive and physical component of love that drives sexual and romantic attraction as compared to the long lasting and permanent bond of commitment, referring to the decision to engage and maintain a loving relationship
• Relationships are social bond between and among individuals manifested through communication and other forms of interaction which can be broken down by the color wheel of love and John Alan Lee

John Alan Lee

• A Canadian psychologist, suggested that there are different types of love categorized by primary types and secondary types where the primary types include eros, philia, and storge while the secondary types include pragma, agape, and philautia

Romantic and Companionate Love

• Hatfield and Rapson suggests that there are two general types of love as compared to that of love languages
• Gary Chapman, a world-renown author, suggested that people have various ways through which people give and receive love that he referred to as love languages which includes

Types of Love

• Words of affirmation, toch and time as well as giving of gifts to show your love

Stages of Relationship

• In his analysis of close human relationships, George Levinger postulated that there are stages that intimate relationships go through, namely getting to know each other, building up a relationship and a consolidation after which the union experiences a deterioration followed by an ending to there relationship

Sexual Behavior

• An action with sexual intention and context
• Actions that humans agree to interpret as an expression of their sexual motivations or intentions
• Behaviors are generally erotic and involve any of the primary or secondary erotic zones
• Body parts are erogenous zones
• Behaviors can be typed by aim

Types of Sexuality

• Auto-erotic (self-directed stimulation)
• Homoerotic behaviors are sexual behaviors oriented to the same sex
• Heteroerotic behaviors used to refer to sexual behaviors
• Copulation requires insertion of the penis to the vagina
• Behaviors can also be non-copulatory: hugging, kissing, caressing
• Behaviors can also involve oral stimulation of the genitals, fellatio (oral stimulation of the penis) or cunnilingus (oral stimulation of the vagina)
• Erotic is related to sexual stimulation, has something to do with the erogenous zones

Sexual Response Cycle Actions

• Sequence of events from arousal to orgasm to resolution of sexual tension
• Sexual dysfunction is a concern or problem while sexual response cycle dysfunction is a problem

Copulatory Behavior

• Related to the insertion of the penis to the vagina while paraphilia is arousal from nonliving objects and or

Heterosexual Reproduction

• For heterosexual couples, one of the ultimate goal of the sexual act is reproduction and sequence referred to as sexual response cycle in that sense while masters developed the masters and Johnson model of the sexual response cycle starting with

Master and Johnson Cycle

• The excitement phase is the first phase which means an elongation and stiffening of the penis so it can be efficiently inserted to the vagina followed by
• Plateau phase
• Orgasm in 3rd stage as climax and resolution

Human Model of Sexual Response

• Kaplan added human aspect where in 1st phase it's all desire
• Arousal is next phase in that model in which excitation and plateau take place as A Physiological response which ends with orgasm
• Arousal is the physiological component of sexual response where bodily changes occur as an outcome of sexual stimulation' where by orgasm ends.

Desires Defined

• Desire is the psychological component of the sexual response and Involves thoughts and feelings and the most severe response is pain while in that state and Paraphilla arises when an object or person that seems unusual is present and it remains clinically distressing for at least 6 months when

Exhibiting Common Paraliphilic Disorders

• It is often considered common to exhibit Exhibitionism, Fetishism, Frotteurism or even sexual masochism

Stereotyping

• Stereotypical traits are a way to generalize beliefs about a group of people where they become an over-generalized belief about a particular group or class of people, stereotypes can convey positive or negative examples

Prejudices

• Often described as a negative attitude towards a person and it an unjustified or incorrect attitude towards that person while