Unit 10 Lecture Notes.docx

Unit 10 Lecture Notes History of Human Sexuality The question of human sexuality is fraught with the whole nature/nurture debate set of questions that we've explored earlier in the course. There's lots of moral sensitivities around this, both religious and otherwise. It's complex and it's convoluted...

Unit 10 Lecture Notes History of Human Sexuality The question of human sexuality is fraught with the whole nature/nurture debate set of questions that we've explored earlier in the course. There's lots of moral sensitivities around this, both religious and otherwise. It's complex and it's convoluted. Before we get into some of what's going on currently, I want to take us through a very brief little history lesson. So, I'm just going to give us some snapshots of a couple of eras of history about Western sexuality. I'm going to start with the Victorian era, which is characterized as being the era of sexual repression. This is during Queen Victoria's reign and beyond it, but that's how it got its name. This is, you know, from the mid-1800s into the mid-1900s. But yes, Victorian sexuality is basically synonymous with sexual repression. Well, the word repression in general is how we unconsciously control ourselves when we suppress something than we are consciously doing. But repression is when it's happening. Subconscious only. And so, repression is the better word here for what we observe. Basically, it was just understood that sex was bad. Any hint of it was avoided in any kind of proper society. And of course, there's a very big double standard between what's going on among the common people and proper society. But proper societies, definition of it, sort of ruled the day, women were assumed to have no experiences of sexual pleasure or any interest in sex or sexuality. And that, of course, became a self-fulfilling prophecy that I think the harm of is still present in our current context. Here is a quote from Lady Hollington, the wife of the second Baron Hillingdon. And this just gives you a bit of a snapshot of the basic attitude that culture in general had about women and sexuality: "I am happy now that Charles calls on my bedchamber less frequently than of old." In the Victorian era, men and women did not share the same bed if they were married. So, if you remember the conversation about folkways, mores, norms, and laws. There, we talked about our current folk way, which would be that a husband wife shares a bed, but in the Victorian era they did not. So, "I am happy now that Charles calls my bedchamber less frequently than a world as it is by now due to calls a week. And when I hear his steps outside my door, I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England." So, no interested in sex, but wants to bear children for the sake of the continuation of England. And so that's the reason. Reverend Sylvester Graham would preach that ejaculation drained men of their vital fluids. And you risk your physical health. So, you should try to minimize how often you ejaculated because it wasn't good for you. And he believed that sexual appetite could be controlled by a whole grain flour diet. So, in the 1830s, Sylvester Graham developed a cracker called the Graham Wafer. And yes, that is the Graham wafer that we still buy today. And it was intended to reduce sexual desire. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented cornflakes for the same reason. It was designed to reduce sexual desire and to curb the desire to masturbate. A real double standard flourished during this era. Prostitution flourished because men thought they were doing their wives a favor by looking elsewhere. And in London, there was one prostitute for approximately every 12 men. So, it's significant. So, an era of human sexuality that was complicated and not very healthy. I'm going to move us forward to when we're in sort of our full revolution mode, reacting against the repression of the Victorian era. And so, this would take us to both the mid-1960s and seventies, which are sometimes called the swinging sixties. There's lots of major social upheaval happening at this time in science, politics, fashion, art. Lots of reactions to conservativism and to conformity are happening. During the 1960s revolution, a lot of major influences in the world of human sexuality because here is where birth control now becomes available to women. It had been invented a little earlier but was illegal for a doctor to give it to a woman. But in 1964, in Canada, it was legalized, and women could have access to birth control and that made recreational sex possible. You were no longer risking getting pregnant and having a baby. So that changes where and when and how you're willing to have sex. This is also the time of human potential movement. There's the pop psychology of the seventies, the Me decade. Do your own thing. It feels good to do it. You do you, all that sort of thing. This is where we start to see some experiments with mate swapping. That was called swinging at the time. Now we would call it open marriage. And then we have a reaction which follows quite quickly in the 1980s and the 1990s. So, the pendulum is all the way over here all the way over here with the repression. And then it swings all the way over here, the swinging sixties, and it doesn't take very long before it starts to swing back again. Here we see significant disillusionment with impersonal sex. The first case of AIDS is diagnosed in the US in 1981. That affects people's opinions and feelings about recreational sex. Abstinence-only education launches in the US, and that births a very powerful religious purity culture movement, which is still present in our current context. It is not as powerful anymore. Well, it's powerful in the places where it's still present, let me put it that way. It's just not present in as many places anymore. And then we have where we are now, where you are now, coming of age in 2000-2023. And here we have now is the advent of the hookup culture. Then you don't need to be in relationship. You just want to hook up for the sex itself. I was not able to find anything on Stats Canada at this point about this. There's quite a bit of research on this already in the US, so, I'm going to give you some rates from U.S. colleges. Typically, what happens in Canada on these sorts of things is quite similar. So, this is a study that surveyed 3500 college students and here's what they learned in that survey. They're about 50% of the hookups happen after consuming alcohol. So that's a that's a very high rate. And that's a significant finding. 15% hook up more than ten times or have hooked up more than ten times by the time they're in college. 25% have never hooked up. It's not what they do. 30% say 5 to 9 times they've hooked up and 30% would say less than three times. So that experimented, but not much more. We are also very much now in the era of open marriage and polyamory, which is the notion or the idea or belief that if you're open and honest about it to be in a meaningful relationship that are sexual with more than one person. So, they're not marriages, but they are meaningful relationships of some sort. And that of course, is defined by the individual. So, you can see that in a not very long period we've gone through some significant changes in our ideas about sexuality. And I would say we've gone from right now in our current context, I would describe it as in the in the reactionary era of freedom from first. Well, first, you had freedom for in the revolutionary era, you had freedom for sex pushing back, saying, yes, we can have sex. It's fun, it's great, let's do it. Let's stop having all kinds of repressive rules about it. So, freedom from the rules. But then we have the reaction saying what we need now is freedom for the choice not to be engaged in that kind of sexuality. If we don't want to be. And my observation at this point would be that in the current context, particularly your generation and the next few generations are on both sides of that. For some, there's very much a sense of we want freedom from the repression, we want freedom to do what we want and still there are those who now feel a lot of pressure about hookup culture, as if they do not do it they’re not very normal, unless they participate in hookup culture, so, they want freedom from the pressure to have to have sex in the hookup culture world. So, we're in a very interesting and conflicting and convoluted era right now in terms of human sexuality. The Sexual Spectrum We just had our little history lesson in video one and we're going to now come all the way into the present and we're going to talk a little bit about definitions to start with. And these are quite important as we move through our conversation about understanding human sexuality. So, two definitions to start with, so sex in a sociological context. When we talk about sex, we mean only biology or anatomy of the male or the female. Sex and gender are not interchangeable as terms because gender means all the social norms based on the on your sex. So, this is now whatever your society is saying about what it means to be male or female in your culture. Things like women are kind and gentle, men are assertive and firm. These are typical gender stereotypes. These are our cultures, norms, and expectations of what it means to be able to show that you're masculine or you're feminine based on your sex. So, these are two very different concepts, and it's important to keep those separate. We also have sexual identity, which is our subjective sense of being male or female. How well do you measure up to your culture’s norms about being masculine or being feminine? How well do you do at that? Do you think you’re a masculine person or feminine person? Or do you not think that about your sexual identity. A good way to think about it is sex is the coat rack. It's anatomy, it's the biological structure. But gender is what we hang on that coat rack. And as you can see, you know, we have these ideas about colors being male or female in particularly pink and somewhat purple, but mostly pink is totally a female color and has been for a long time. I think that's transitioning a bit. But if you walk into Toys R US, it's not really transitioning at all. You don't buy a little boy something from the girl section, which is pink. You might buy the little girl something from the boys’ section with this which is blue. And that in and of itself is interesting that you can cross in one direction but not the other. And if you just watch her little children dressed, you won't find little boys dressed in pink, but you'll find little girls dressed and pink just one of the small ways in which we have enforced gender stereotypes. We also have intersex people. So, this business of male female biologically isn't entirely accurate. We must add this in as well. These are folks who are born with a combination of male and female sexual characteristics. Historically, they've been referred to as hermaphrodites. This is someone with mixed chromosomes, mixed hormones, and then, of course, mixed organs, one testis, one ovary, or maybe they have both testes, but just some aspect of female genitalia as well, but no actual ovaries and vice versa. The characteristics in each intersex person are unique to that person. The combination of their male and female external and internal sexual organs. So, what we really must do is think as a continuum, we have male, we have female, and in the middle, we have intersex people, and they are born into a culture which has been fixated on a binary of male and female. We have highlighted an exaggerated the differences between male and female, and because they are not clearly male or female, these folks will end up feeling really isolated and alone because there is no publicly acknowledged category into which they naturally fit. What medicine has historically done. And that's now changing, but has until very recently done, is if a baby's born intersex, recognized at birth, then the parents, they run tests, and the parents are asked to decide. Is this going to be a boy? Is this going to be a girl? And they usually have a recommendation to make. Not always, but usually. And then they remove whatever they need to. If they need to do it right away or maybe in a year, two or three. And these kids often have successive surgeries. They're often placed on hormone therapies to take them in the direction or direction of the sex that was chosen for them because they were not born fully male or fully female. They were born as a mix. Because the reality is if you're born intersex and this is what we know historically about intersex, because the intersex community in the last 20 years has really pushed back on the ways in which they've been treated medically in the harm that's been done to them. Because just because you're assigned female at birth doesn't mean that's the direction your hormones are going to go when you hit puberty. And so, your erotic interests may go in the direction of homo, not heterosexuality. So, these folks are not born clearly male or female. So, in some sense, they are born somewhere on that LGBTQ plus spectrum, our cultural categories of masculine and feminine and the sexual scripts that we attach to them really don't work very well for intersex people, yet they're forced into silence. How many intersex people are? There is a question that I get asked when I talk about this in various contexts, and it's difficult to estimate. It's not exactly the kind of information that people volunteer on a job application or anything else. And because there's so much shame wrapped around it, because our culture does not acknowledge the existence of intersex people, they are made to feel weird. So, they're not going to name that. And many of them don't know because parents are often cautioned not to tell their child or anyone else in that child's village because the success of turning them into a boy or girl hinges so much on the child believing it and everyone else believing it. So, you don't want people to know. So, the isolation that the kids feel and that the parents feel, if you I've spoken with parents of intersex kids, it's very awful and it's all closeted because we don't have room in our cultural context for anything other than male or female. In many cases, individuals themselves of, as I've said, are unaware. So yes, it's very hard to measure. Sometimes we only find out during autopsies when they're checking cause of death for some other reason, and you open someone who's presented as male, and you find a full set of ovaries inside that man. But the estimates at this point, sorry. I do want to pause on this slide briefly. Chromosomal here's you can see the mix of intersex, right? We don't just have xx and xy, we have xxxx, all kinds of combinations. There's many more here than what I'm showing in the image here. So back to prevalence, we estimate somewhere between 2-4% of the population are intersex. Recognized at birth is about one in every 1500, but many of them are recognized later down the road and and some only much later down the road. So, if you take the population of Winnipeg and we use only the conservative estimate of 2%, that's about 17,000 people in the city of Winnipeg. So, we're not talking about a small group of people here. We're talking about a lot of people. What we add to this now are the new biological realities that have come to us through new DNA sequencing and cell biology research. And what I'm going to talk to you about now comes from an article by Claire Ainsworth in Nature. Nature is one of the top 20 science journals on the globe. So, this is not some small journal that's come up with something unique. This is mainstream science now. But what they have found is the WNT4-gene, and this gene actively promotes ovarian development and suppresses testicular development. And sometimes men have this gene, so, an individual with the XY chromosome can have extra copies of this and that results in atypical genitals, sometimes a rudimentary uterus and fallopian tubes. So, this is not someone who's intersex in the sense that I've just defined intersex, but this person is still somewhere on the spectrum, not quite male. We've also found the RSPO1 gene, which sometimes behaves atypically, and it results in the female xx with both ovarian and testicular development. So, these newly found genes point to a complex process of sex determination in which the identity is a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity. Essentially changes in gene activity such as those I've just described tip the balance toward or away from the sex that's been so spelled out by the chromosomes. So, what we're now seeing is a much wider variation of difference inside that male female spectrum. So, a woman with mild gene difference won't present as intersex, but she may have male-like facial hair. She may have a male like walk or a deeper voice. She might have irregular periods or fertility problems. She might have no symptoms that we can recognize from the exterior. But like intersex people, these folks never discover their milder versions of themselves unless they're seeking help for fertility, unless there are tests being done for other medical reasons. So, to wrap that all up in sort of everyday language, the biological realities that we're seeing now is that just because your chromosomes are male doesn't mean all your genes will be. Just because your chromosomes are female doesn't mean all your genes will be. The other thing is there's lots of things being found in the world of individual cells. I'm just going to focus on the one and that's microchimaerism and this is when the stem cells from a fetus cross the placenta into the mother's body and vice versa. So, you can see the little picture here from in either direction they can cross. So, a woman who bears a male child, some of her cells may cross into the male baby or some of the male's cells from the baby may cross into the female. It goes both ways, micro chimeras and is now known to be quite widespread. They think it's about one in 100. And so there are researchers who are now saying that most of us have some mild degree of difference of sex development. So, this is the actual continuum that we have now based on the new science, you have the male and the female on the one end and then you have the intersex in the middle and then you have the micro-chimerism and the WNT4 for gene, which moves you away from the binary of just male but doesn't put you into the territory of intersex or on the opposite side, micro chimeras in the RSPO1 or one gene which moves you away from the binary of female, but not all the way into the intersex category. So, Clare Ainsworth in this article writes almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some of which might not match the rest of their body. I want to linger for a moment on this picture that I've had tucked in the corner at the bottom of the slides in several of them, because this is essentially what's happening. This dichotomy of male and female biologically can no longer be defended scientifically. In fact, it's very much the opposite of that. There is a full spectrum. And so, this is just an image where we're taking the paint, you know, in the roller, and we are painting over that binary, and we are now going to have to start thinking in terms of sexuality as a spectrum rather than as the binary. And I mean this now biologically, apart from conversations about identity. I'm talking just about biology for the moment. Differences between Intersex, Genes and Microchimerism Intersex, WNT4, and RSPO1 Intersex-refers to a diverse combination of male and female traits and affects the number of sex chromosomes. Can be pronounced with both testes, ovaries, etc. WNT4-affects development of female reproductive system but does not actually change the number of sex chromosomes. For example, a male may have less developed genitals but not actually have physical female characteristics. RSPO1-plays a crucial role in the development of the female reproductive system. Like WNT4, variations in this gene can influence the development of sexual characteristics in ways that don’t align with an individual’s chromosomal sex. Intersex and Microchimerism Microchimerism-Refers to the presence of a small number of cells in a person’s body that originated from another individual. This can occur when cells from a fetus cross the placenta and enter the mother’s body during pregnancy, and vice versa. So, if a male individual has micro chimerism because of cells from a female sibling or mother, it means that they have some cells in their body that are genetically female. However, this does not change the person’s sex or gender identity. It’s just one of the many fascinating ways in which human biology can be more complex than the traditional binary categories of male and female. LGBTQ+ in Canada Just want to give us a few demographics of what's going on in Canada. So here are some current Canadian stats about the LGBTQ plus community in Canada. This is Stats Canada 2016. There were some more updated stats. They weren't that much different, and this chart was a lot nicer. So that's why I've gone with this one. But here you can see that Canada is home to about 1 million people who are part of the Rainbow community. We're not talking about a small group of people here. And what's interesting here is that more than half of that community ages 15 and older are bisexual. Now, if you think back to the previous video where we talked about what we're now seeing in the science, about the complexity of the spectrum of male to female and what we're now learning, this stat here actually makes some sense that there's lots of folks who are experiencing their sexuality as somewhere in the bi category, and there's lots of different terminology. I'm not going to spend time with that. I just want to recognize sort of the larger category where they're not totally male or totally female. They they're acknowledging themselves as being somewhere on that spectrum. This comes from StatsCan 20-21. So, I just want us to think about this a little bit. Violent crimes. As you can see here, violent crimes accounted for more than half, 53% of hate crimes targeting sexual orientation. That's significant. By comparison, only just one quarter of hate crimes targeted religion. Only 52% of hate crimes targeting race or ethnicity were violent. So, we're talking about violent crimes. There are other forms of crimes as well, hate crimes. But I'm talking about the violent ones. So comparatively, that gives us some sense of the risk and the danger that folks in our rainbow community live in, in the Canadian context, based on these statistics from Stats Canada. So just two concepts I want to rule out in combination with that we're very familiar with the word homophobia. This is irrational fear of homosexuality and others, perhaps fear of sexual feelings in oneself or self-loathing because of one's own homosexuality, depending on your background, the moral beliefs you've internalized. So, homophobia isn't just directed at others, it may indeed be directed at the self. This concept, I think, is particularly useful in this conversation, and this comes from one of my colleagues, Dr. Dennis Hiebert, no relation, who developed this concept, homopression, in which you're using the social power of moral and legal codes to take from LGBTQ people their dignity and liberty, to express themselves sexually. So, it's not a hate crime, but you are still setting up the social structure. And remember, we talked earlier about the social structure of the relationships that are ordered and persisting. So, when we set up social structure in such a way that those who are inside the LGBTQ plus, community are ostracized in some way or left out or marginalized, that might not be a fear-based thing, but it's certainly oppressive whether it comes out of fear or not, because that's subjective. But the behavior itself is not. If you feel they need to be excluded from various places, then that's a form of homo oppression. Sexual Socialization And this one will be a little bit on the longer side. But it's the section that all had to sort of be delivered together. So, I want to talk in this video about sexual socialization. Now, we've already talked previously in the course about socialization more generally. So, you have a good sense of the power of socialization and how much we don't even notice when we're being socialized. In this case, I want to talk about sexual socialization, which is internalizing cultural beliefs and norms about human sexuality. There are lots of ways in which we are learning to be sexual. Sexual arousal is not purely natural. Physical response beneath the apparent instinctiveness of sexual desire and attraction lies all kinds of profound meaning and cultural scripts. The connection between physiological arousal and emotions is not automatic and natural. They are, in many cases, learned and situationally defined. So, sexuality is a classic example of the definition of the situation, because that determines our responses in many cases. So, we have what we call sexual scripts, and we've talked about all kinds of social scripts throughout this course. And now we're going to talk about sexual scripts that we learn that tell us how to think about sexual encounters and how to act during sexual encounters. Sexual arousal is guided by scripts that tell us who, what, where, when and why. They help us to define what would be considered as a sexual sensation, event, object, or situation. And we start simply with our culture. It defines for us what's considered sexually attractive. So, if you look at all these images in each case, in each cultural context, the images you're looking at here are highly sexually attractive people in their cultural context. So, in some contexts with this one where my arrow is here, where the faces are all painted very white and the form and shape of the body is not revealed much in any way is very different than the one below it, in which we have a series of core coils placed around this woman's neck year after year until she has this very elongated neck. And that's considered exceptionally attractive. If you look around at all the kinds of different images, this is a lip plate that's been placed in and over the years, a bigger and bigger lip plate that has stretched this woman's lip. Over here we have a face that's filled with tattoos, which is common in our cultural context. So, what's defined as attractive is highly culturally located in all sorts of ways. If you look at these two images here, this is a picture from the Renaissance era. I believe it's the Baroque era. And these are paintings of what would have been considered the most attractive women in that era. Note they carry a reasonable amount of weight. Note There's some cellulite involved and some rolls and all kinds of lovely things. You move over to where my arrow is now, and here we have an image which is now culturally defined as beautiful. And you can see that these two images are very, very different. But the way one might assess this image as sexually attractive, this culture would not have. She's much too thin. She has no real meat on her at all. What we see here is sexually attractive in this image is what this culture over here would have seen as sexually attractive in this painting. It's trained. We are trained into what we consider to be desirable or attractive. We also have sexual scripts about when and where it's appropriate to be aroused. So, in various cultures, at different times in history, sex was considered indecent or unmentionable and was only supposed to happen for the purposes of procreation. Remember we talked about the Victorian era and their very repressed ideas about sexuality and the assumption that women did not experience sexual pleasure, nor did they desire sexual pleasure. Arousal was, you know, never appropriate. But think now about we're thinking about where and when it's appropriate to be aroused. Think about a doctor patient relationship, a breast examination or gynecological examination is an intimate and full disclosure of the body, but it's scripted. We have a definition of the situation for it, and it's perfectly acceptable. But that very same behavior taken outside of that medical examination room and put into a bedroom would be give an entirely different set of meanings, and the physiological responses would likely be very different. So, because we have a very clean definition of the situation and it's a very controlled environment, there is no sexual arousal presence, but you put the same behavior in the bedroom and there is so where and when it's appropriate to be aroused is something that we're trained into. Even when we look at clothing, why is it not proper to wear only your underwear in public? Because that's way too revealing. And yet it's perfectly acceptable to wear bikinis that are only just a few square inches of cloth. They reveal way more often than underwear does. So, it's just all about the meaning we attach to the situation. This is a beach. This is a bikini. This is fashionable. This is okay. She walks down the street in and in her underwear. no, no, we can't do that. That's socially inappropriate. Another of our sexual scripts is what's permissible in the world of sex. And I'm just going to give you some cross-cultural examples in this case, there are numerous people groups that encourage sexual expression in masturbation in their children. Some of them are from the Himalayan region and some of the islands of the South Pacific. Intercourse among children as young as 11 or 12 is considered perfectly acceptable. So, they would not have any of the historical taboos that we have had around masturbation, which has been largely silenced historically. And now when it is mentioned, it's often mentioned in the context of humor. It's not actually something we can just talk about. We place a very high value on marital fidelity, even in the context of polyamory and open marriages and all of that. There's still a dominant moral belief in the notion of fidelity in marriage. But among some of the Inuit people, historically no longer now. It was considered hospitable for a man to offer his wife for sexual relations with someone who came to visit. So, cultures can be very different in what is or is not permissible. If you look at the Old Testament, the Israelite in Hebrew culture, you know, from the Torah, the Old Testament, depending on if you're reading it inside Christianity or Judaism, it just has a different name. But if your wife couldn't conceive, then she would give you her handmaid to have sex with so that that person would conceive. In strongly traditional areas of Islamic Pakistan, if a woman is raped and presses charges, she may be imprisoned because a man's testimony may be more credible than a woman's. So, if he says she consented, then she may be in prison for adultery. So, what is permissible is highly culturally located and then how to behave sexually. We have historically very long old scripts about we expect the male to be the sexually aggressive one. The more experienced, the more promiscuous. We have a strong double standard there. You know, if he's sexually active, he's a stud. If she is, she's a whore. That's changing somewhat in some ways, but not entirely at all. That double standard is still very much there. In lots of places. We expect women to desire love more than sex. We would think it very odd for a woman to be as interested in sex as a man. Think of the Victorian era. So those ideas are still with us. The man is the subject of desire. He's the one doing the desiring and the woman is the object of that desire. She's the one being desired. That is still a very dominant script that we have. If we look cross-culturally, there are cultures in which kissing would be considered extremely gross and unpopular. There are other cultures in which parts of the body are experienced very differently depending on what you've been trained culturally to be attractive. So, in some cultures it's the hair that's highly sexualized, not the breasts or ankles that are highly sexualized. I'm just referencing back to what we've been trained to. And there are cultures in which a much thicker female body is considered far more sexually attractive than the slender ones that we've been trained to think are the most sexually attractive. So even how to behave sexually and how to respond in a moment sexually is trained. In some ways another form of sexual socialization that's dominant in our cultural context right now is pornography. Now, pornography doesn't resemble real life sex. And so, it produces a fantasy world that doesn't exist. In porn no one says no or gives a way of saying no. Consent is typically quite meaningless and no one has second thoughts or feelings. No one's getting pregnant, getting in STI. So porn, which is being consumed at high rates, it's anonymous. It's free. So, it's very accessible and it’s available everywhere. And right now, the most downloaded form of pornography is violent porn, and the rates of female porn consumption are continuing to rise. Male rates are higher, but female rates are continuing to rise. So here are some of the things that pornography, which is being used extensively in our cultural context and being consumed by both males and females of all ages teaches us. First, skews reality, which I've just talked about. Porn also renders violence invisible by sexualizing violence. The violence gets hidden because the slapping, the choking, the gagging, the hair pulling, or the gang rape is all happening in the context of something that's also very arousing. And so, in that state of high arousal, the one consuming the porn isn't recognizing the degree to which their sexual desire is being trained to need violence as part of their arousal mechanism. Porn is also addictive. Rates vary depending on the study, but about 60% of men would say that they are addicted. About 10% of women would say that their addicted. Porn is now functioning sort of as an all-purpose drug for coping with all kinds of negative emotions, like loneliness or shame or self-doubt. And when the arousal factor of porn isn't strong enough anymore, then the consumer looks for something slightly more extreme to get aroused again. And so, what we're seeing in the world of neuroscience, which is now studying the brain's behavior in the world of porn consumption, is that ordinary porn gets too boring. The dopamine hit no longer produces the same level of excitement. And so, consumers of porn are seeking out more aggressive form with more unrealistic positions in it, with more violence and humiliation, because they need that to get the same level of dopamine hit. So, in that sense, this behaving very much as an addiction. So porn is now the current, the predominant form of sex education I think for many because of how much it's consumed. Porn also harms relationships. So, males who use pornography often rate their real-life partners as lower on attractiveness levels. They find the performance of their sexual partners lacking in some way. They demand sexual activity from their partners that looks like what they've seen in porn. It's often demanding and demeaning. And so, a 25-year-old male can no longer get erect with their own real-life partner because they've been so trained with porn. And we're seeing the use of Viagra at younger ages as a result. So, here's a quote from Matt Fraud in the world of neuroscience who says If you continually strengthen the brain maps linking sexual excitement to porn, those maps enlarge and crowd out maps linking sexual excitement to a real person or real sex. Porn also turns women into objects. This is something we've talked about already for a long time because the female in the porn scene becomes an object, a trophy, you know, look like what a beautiful woman I'm having sex with. She's a sexual plaything, eager to accommodate the sexual urges of the male. She's presented as a sexually insatiable nymphomaniac who enjoys being raped, violated, or pushed around. And this, of course, produces a female appearance obsession. It's logical that it does, although it's very, very unhealthy that it does. This is a chronic, painful preoccupation with her physical appearance, which we often mislabel as vanity. But it's just rooted in her fear and insecurity because she knows that to be considered a sexually desirable female, she must in some way meet the standards of these porn scripts. And so porn scripts and images have enormous power in the lives of girls and women if that's the standard by which they are also measuring themselves, which they are because their male partners are measuring them, by that standard, porn creates what we call spectatoring. It teaches consumers of porn to watch themselves as part of their sexual experience. You've been taught about porn by how about how sex is supposed to look, how desirable women look in porn, how a desirable man looks in porn. And so, when you're in a real-life sexual encounter, what you're doing is you're worrying about whether you meet the images that you have in your own mind that come from pornography. So, you've taken yourself out of the moment, the sexual moment itself, to watch yourself, to make sure that you meet those demands of those scripts. And that pressure is there for males, too, though it's not as great, but it's there for males, too. Can they perform the way the males in the pornography can or can they not? In the world of pre-marital coaching, which I do a fair bit of. It's not unusual to encounter couples who really struggle sexually because their sexual socialization was deeply embedded in pornography and pornography scripts. And because of pornography, sex becomes about how it looks and how it's done rather than how it feels and what it means. Now, I want to rest on those words for just a bit. When the focus is on how it looks and how it's done. You're no longer inhabiting the moment at all. You're simply watching yourself in that moment and you've lost the ability to feel it and to explore what it might mean. And so, in these ways, porn consumption, particularly when it becomes addictive, becomes a form of sexual self-harm because it interferes profoundly with your ability to engage in a real life, healthy sexual relationship. The Maltz Hierarchy This will again be a bit of a shorter one, but what I would like to do here for the final video is introduce you to what's called the Maltz hierarchy, which explores the content and meaning of sexuality. It's developed by Wendy Maltz, who first developed this in 1995. It's been applied and used extensively. She's continued to work with it to the present context, and she's published in all sorts of ways on this topic. And I think it's just a very useful way of understanding the sexual experience. She begins simply by seeing that sexual energy is a neutral force, and depending on what culture you're in, religion, family, background, that may not be what you've been taught. You may have been taught that it's a powerful negative force that must be controlled. Or you may have been taught that it doesn't need any control at all. I have no idea where you've come from, but I know that that can be at either end of the spectrum. But the intent and the consequences of sexuality can lead to either negative or positive outcomes. So, she begins with ground zero as the neutral area. So, ground zero is what's neutral. And then she builds up from ground zero into increasingly positive directions and then down from ground zero into increasingly negative directions. So, we're going to start with level one, which she calls positive role fulfillment, and this would be basic social or marital or partnered or life partnered role behavior. Typically, in our culture, that would be the role initiating, the female responding. There's mutual respect. There is a sense in which being sexually engaged is understood as a cultural and or religious duty in a positive sense that sex is for reproduction. It has a very special meaning when you're trying to conceive. This is sex as physical release, which is level one, positive role fulfillment. It's a form of self-gratification in a positive sense. It's acting out of the basic sex drive in ways that are not harming but, you know, positively fulfilling. And the goals in this level are typically pregnancy, reduction of sexual tension and fulfillment of role. And these are all positive things. The next level up from there would be making love manifest. So, in this context, sexual exchange or relationship is much more focused on pleasuring. So, pleasuring of the other, the mutuality of pleasure, you know, working that through learning to talk about the sexual experience so that it can be maximized for each of the partners involved. There's some creativity here. There's some experimentation here. It's an erotic recreational experience. It's so there's more being invested here, and more meaning being embedded in it at level two. And then level three is what she calls authentic sexual intimacy. Here is where you've now moved toward much deeper emotional openness and honesty, not just in sexual experience, but as people more generally in the world. Together. You are learning to self-disclose more and more with each other. You are learning to trust each other more. And that then begins to weave into the sexual relationship in ways that are positive. An ability to express, you know, verbally those things. I really liked that I didn't so much like, etc.. There's emotional closeness that can develop here in this kind of context, a deeper sense of wholeness. Occasionally, there's actual feelings of ecstasy, and this is much rarer and doesn't happen routinely for most partners or couples. This happens occasionally, so, there's nothing wrong with your relationship if it's mostly level one, positive role fulfillment. And sometimes, you know, level two, I mean, the seasons of life change where you might land up, what level you might land up in. And then we have level one in the negative direction where there's impersonal interaction happening. There's a lack of respect for the self or for the other. You don't care about the other person's psychological experience of the sexual exchange. You are emotionally closed off to this person. You disregard possible consequences like pregnancy or that person's uneasiness or uncomfortable. Feelings are pushing someone farther than they want to go. In the world of dating, this is not unusual, but this is also not unusual in the world of marriage. I work as an abuse and response prevention specialist, and so we see these kinds of sexual exchanges in marriages where you're not caring about the other person or their sexual experience. You just want what you want. In increasingly negative would-be level two abusive interaction. This is where you consciously drawing satisfaction from dominating the other person, where one partner is using sex as a form of power and that can go either way. That can be pressure to have sex or that can be I won't have sex with you unless you do this other thing for me that plays itself on all kinds of different ways, but where it becomes a bargaining tool, then it quickly lines up in the world of potentially abusive when there's degrading course of communication as part of the sexual act, when you're exploiting that other person's self-esteem, and damaging it in some ways, saying embarrassing or mean things that are intended to humiliate that person about their sexuality, appearance or their sexual performance, it can be downright degrading. Personalizing and dehumanizing. And then finally, the third level would be violent interaction when sex is used as a physical expression of hostility. When sex organs are weapons and targets, when physical harm and pain is inflicted apart as part of the sexual act, when there are violent forms of humiliation present, you're tying the person up, hair pulling to control the person, forcing a person's body into contorted positions. And yes, these things happen inside of partnered relationships with people that you are intentionally partnered with. There may be slapping, choking, rape or beatings. This can get very, very extreme. So, this sort of gives you the range of the sexual experience. And I find that this is very helpful for folks because it helps them to identify their own experiences and to recognize, some of what I thought was probably just normal is impersonal interaction, and I don't want that or what I'm experiencing is abusive in some way, or perhaps in violent, and then recognizing that just because it's not, you know, awesome sex doesn't mean it isn't positive role fulfillment sex. And you should feel good about that. So, it's just helpful to see the range of motivations for sex. As you can see from the descriptions I've given you here, include everything from the release of sexual tension to showing love, having children, to giving and receiving pleasure or gaining power, ending an argument demonstrating commitment, seeking revenge, proving masculinity or femininity or degrading someone. It's as you can see from the, you know, my little angel wings there that my arrows circling it can be a heavenly experience or it can be a hellish experience. The range of what can happen inside of human sexual relationships is everything from one end of that continuum to the other.