Lecture, 2/19/03 – Sexuality
Sexual identity – a set of practices and attitudes that lead to the formation in a person’s mind of an identity as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. The concept of a sexual identity requires a self-consciousness and self-examination that was not prominent until the late nineteenth century. Prior to this there were only two categories of sexual activities, the socially approved (sexual intercourse within marriage, in moderation and undertaken mainly to have children) and the socially disapproved (all other activities).
That sexual identities only recently emerged as a concept suggests that they are socially constructed. The categories we use are defined by the society we live in. This is not to say tat biological predispositions may play a role in sexuality, but whatever predispositions do exist are shaped and labeled according to social norms and values. Moreover, these norms and values about sexuality are shaped in part by economic factors such as the standard of loving and how women and men divide their labor.
Colonial Era to 1890
Prior to the American Revolution, religious authorities preached that sexual intercourse was appropriate only within marriage and only for the purpose of having children. Even among married couples who were trying to have children, sex was approved only in moderation.
The growth of commercial capitalism in the early nineteenth century provided sons with employment alternatives to the family farm, they no longer needed to wait to marry until they were given land by, or inherited it from, their fathers. As this change occurred, parents’ influence over whom their children married declined. More so than there parents, young adults tended to choose spouses on the basis of affection and mutual respect (although not necessarily passion or romantic love).
Then, in the nineteenth century, the growth of wage labor in factories separated the worlds of husbands, who typically worked outside the home and wives, who typically didn’t. Two domains came to be seen as separate spheres: hers, the private arena of home and children; his, the work and public world. This separation between women and men’s activities were reinforced by the “Doctrine of Separate Spheres”, women were said to be the guardians of virtue and morality. Consequently, women’s sexual instincts were labeled as spiritual rather than carnal. It was part of the wife’s role to limit the sexual passions of her husband and to balance the spiritual and physical sides of their marriage. By showing sexual restraint at the wife’s request, the couple could focus on their love – for marital love was seen as a spiritual condition, quite separate from erotic desires. The common wisdom was that wives were better suited than husbands to maintaining sexual restraint because of their lesser desires.
This denial of women’s sexual feelings was not a natural condition but rather the result of the way young women and men were socialized. Carl Degler points out that it might have been useful to women in order to limit the frequency of intercourse and thus reduce the number of dangerous situation of childbearing.
1890 to 1960: Romantic Love and Marriage
A series of economic, demographic and cultural changes occurred during the early decades of the twentieth century
Rising standard of living – since there were no longer facing crises of subsistence, they could focus on the quality of their emotional lives.
As the society moved from an agrarian to an industrial society, children were seen in a new perspective. No longer were they considered assets to the family economy (they no longer contributed labor). Instead they were seen to have costs. People began having fewer children and devoting more resources in each one.
Connecting romantic love and marriage – These changes produced, among other things, the rise of the private family. Young couples began to see marriage as a means of self-fulfillment to be obtained not through restraint and spirituality but through romantic love and sexual gratification. The notion began to spread that husbands and wives should be companions who attend unselfishly to each other’s needs.
No longer was love within marriage primarily a spiritual ideal; rather, sexual gratification and romance became a central indicator of your love for your spouse, which became, in turn, an increasingly important indicator of the health of your marriage.
Cherlin points out that the meaning of romantic love itself is elusive and subdivides into two categories: passionate love, the sexually charged attraction at the start of many love relationships and companionate love, the affection and partnership felt in a love relationship of long duration.
Gender differences in romantic love. Women and men may experience romantic love differently. Women more often use practical criteria in addition to romantic love in choosing a spouse, whereas men rely more on romantic criteria such as physical attractiveness.
Evolutionary psychologists would argue that these differing preferences reflect the reproductive strategies that men and women have evolved: women valuing support and commitment in men; men valuing evidence (physical attractiveness, young age) that women can bear children.
Arlie Hochschild argues that women have these preferences because they are financially dependent on men; even when married women work outside the home, they tend to earn less than men. Therefore the choice of a spouse is more important to them in material terms. But since our culture places such an emphasis on love in marriage, women feel they must come to love the men they choose. Women spend more time managing their feelings of love, by which she means being aware of one’s feelings, working on them, and consciously shaping them.
1960 to the Present
Factors affecting changing view of sexual activity
Increased economic independence of women
More effective birth control
Increased emphasis on individualism.
Restraints on sexual activity in marriage weakened.
Cohabitation rates increased
Premarital activity increased. The change for men have been less dramatic for men, reflecting the decline of the sexual double standard The major difference that remains is that men were more likely to report having two or more sex partners in the past year.
Sex as pleasure removed from sex as reproduction
Sex seen as a personal matter. Weakening of state inference, e.g. 1965 Supreme Court ruled that a state law prohibiting the use of contraceptives violated marital privacy.
Much more tolerance toward premarital sex. In 1972, the court using similar reasoning to overturn laws prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried persons.
Sexual monogamy is still the rule rather than the exception. Both in value and practice.
However with the cultural and economic changes that have taken place, marriage must compete with singlehood and cohabitation.
Childbearing Outside of Marriage
One consequence of the cultural changes in sexuality is the rise in childbearing outside of marriage. The majority of children born outside of marriage are born to teenagers. Why? Two important changes:
Having sexual intercourse prior to marriage has become common. (15 to 19 year olds- almost 50%)
Second the incidence of early marriage has decreased. (the average first time marriage for women is now 25 and for men is 27).
Earlier sexual activity and later marriage have lengthened the stage of life when young adults can have a child outside of marriage. Until the early 1960s, the proportion of first births to never-married women rose dramatically. By 1994, 40.5 % of all first births fell into this category.
Making the transition to motherhood without a husband is now the predominant experience for African-American women. In 1998, 77% of first births to back women were to unmarried mothers. Childbearing outside of marriage was also the majority experience among Hispanic women, at 52% . But recently this has been rising more rapidly among whites; 34% of first firths to white women were to unmarried mothers in 1998.
The Teenage Pregnancy Problem –The probability that a teenage girl will have a baby in a given year is lower than at any time since the federal government began to keep statistics a half-century age. So what is the problem. Marriage, or rather the lack of it. Marriage among teenagers had decreased faster than birth rates have. For example in 1960, 31% of 18 or 19 year olds were married. Now just 6% of 18 to 19 year women are married. One 2% of black18 to 19-year-old women were married in 1998.
Consequently, the nonmarital birth ratio – the proportion of all births that occur to unmarried women – has increased sharply for teenagers even though the birthrate – the probability that a teenager (married or not) will have a birth has declined. The nonmarital birth ratio for 15 to 19 was less than one of three; by 1998 it had risen to three out of four. Putting it another way, for the four pregnant teenagers, 3 will be unmarried.
Few unmarried teenage mothers report that they intended to become pregnant (four out of five pregnancies among teenagers were unintended). Most teenage pregnancies are not planned which is why one-third end in abortions.
Alternative life-course strategy? – in some low-income neighborhoods having a first child as a teenager may be an alternative strategy for entering adulthood that is accepted by the young mothers and their families. Waiting for marriage may not be a reasonable option since they may not believe that the father of their child will be able to support them. They may see that parents disapprove of early pregnancies but value and accept the babies who are born. Their own mothers may be willing to primarily raise the child and thus the responsibility is shifted to the grandmother.
This is not to say that there are not consequences for adolescent girls.
Less schooling
Lower paying jobs
Fewer stable marriages
More likely to receive public assistance
These are all true … but is that a selection effect? Are these above characteristics the result or the causes of teenage pregnancies? Do teenage mothers grow up to be poor at a higher rate because of the effects of 1 having a child as a teenager or 2 coming from low-income families. Recent studies suggest that some of the apparent effect of teenage childbearing is indeed a selection effect – in other words teenage mothers probably would grow up to have somewhat lower incomes even if they had waited until after age 19 to have children. But some studies still suggest that the economic circumstances of teenage mothers remain worse after the selection effect is accounted for. For example, these young women are somewhat less likely to graduate from high school.
However, some of those who drop out of school later return to school and obtain a high school diploma or GED (2/3s in the study eventually) and although some receive welfare, the welfare is not a permanent situation. In the same study, two-thirds were no longer receiving public assistance.
We do know that early marriages are in general less stable have a higher rate of divorce.
Sociological implications of gay and lesbian sexuality
Prior to the later part of the 19th century, there was no gay or lesbian identity. Certainly there were homosexual acts but not an identity. Moreover, there was strong, emotional friendships that existed between women that were not stigmatized. Perhaps to a lesser extent men were also allowed to express love in a friendship without stigmatization.
Stigmatization is an important sociological concept. When we encounter a person who is not as society’s norms expect and demand, that person is diminished in society’s mind from a whole and normal person, to a spoiled, incomplete one.
Then toward the end of the nineteenth century, an influential body of medical literature began to describe not merely homosexual acts but homosexual persons – distinctive individuals who were seen as suffering from a psychological illness that altered their sexual preference. They were no longer just men or women who engage in sexual acts with a same-sex partners, they began “homosexuals” – mentally ill persons. In contrast, people who engage in sexual acts with an opposite sex partner were then labeled were defined as heterosexuals and seen as mentally healthy individuals.
The Kinsey report which (1948) investigated men’s sexual behavior. The report provided evidence that sexuality was a continuum, i.e., from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. Half of all men in his sample acknowledged having erotic feelings toward other men; one-third had had at last one sexual experience with another man, one of eight had had sexual experiences predominantly with other men for at least three years, and 4 percent had had sexual experiences exclusively with other men.
Although the Kinsey report damaged the model of homosexuality as an illness, the 1950s actually saw an increase in discrimination against homosexuals. Cherlin points out that two factors contributed to this situation. First Americans turned inward toward marriage and childrearing after World War II, marrying younger and having more children than before or since in the 20th century.
Secondly, the anti-Communists extremists charged that homosexual people in government were security risks. Consequences Eisenhower signed an executive order barring homosexual men and women from all federal jobs.
The Medical model remained dominant until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The model stigmatized homosexual people as a basis for prejudice and discrimination.
But when groups of people are labeled, sometimes a group identity develops
For individuals who had previously had none. The discourse on homosexuality as an illness created conditions that ultimately provoked social and political actions by homosexuals. “Homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf,” Michel Foucault pointed out. Certainly, the political liberalism of the 1960s aided the political organizing of gays and lesbians.
Once political, the gay and lesbian community has been working to eliminate discrimination against homosexuals. But the rights of homosexuals remains a contentious political issue. For example, gays in the military, the right to marry, adopt children, etc.
Why are the origins of sexual orientation important to us from a sociological perspective? The debate about sexual orientation revolves around issue of lifestyle choice vs. biologically based. Each argument is used by subgroups to advance their own moral perspective.
Sociological implications of AIDS: As with homosexuality, the discourse regarding AIDS is an important sociological phenomena.
In the United States, AIDS was first seen as a disease of white gay men and then eventually as a disease of poor black and Hispanic intravenous drug users in United States. In the early years, people who were affected with AIDS were divided into the worthy and unworthy; the worthy were people who contracted AIDS through blood donations, through birth, and to a lesser degree through heterosexual behavior.
However, there have been positive influences as well. The homosexual community and the heal care community promoted safe sex practices which communicated by extension that sex outside of marriage is acceptable or least tolerable. It promoted more tolerance regarding gays. The health campaign also required some acceptance of teenage sexuality as well and consequently opened up more the dialogue of preventing sexually transmitted diseases.
What is the important sociological points in Schwartz and Rutter’s article, “Sexual Desire and Gender?”
Schwartz and Rutter lay out the two opposing perspectives: the sociobiological or evolutionary psychological perspective and the social constructionist perspective.
Sociobiological/evolutionary perspective – humans have an innate, genetically triggered need to pass on their genetic material through successful reproduction.
Men have the capacity to inseminate many women in a short time and their reproductive strategy is seek to maximize the number of offspring by having as many partners as possible. Women have the biological job to incubate and nurture young and therefore, seek to maximize the well-being of their children by holding on to their partners as long as possible.
Evolutionary anthropologist Helen Fisher offers a feminist perspective. According to Fisher, different male and female reproductive strategies do not necessarily imply female sexual passivity and preference for lifelong monogamy. “Men and women both seek to maximize the number of partners and quality of partners by exchanging when improved options are available.”
None the less, these theories are essentialist in perspective. Social differences are the consequences of biological difference.
The social constructionist perspective
Cues from the environment shape human beings from the moment they enter the world. The sexual customs, values and expectations of a culture are
Passed on to the young through teaching, modeling and by approbation. Compare the Swedes to the Irish.
A society creates an “ideal sexuality, but different families and subcultures have their own values. For some, sex outside of marriage is against their religious teachings.
As important as family and social background are, so are individual differences in response to that background. Sometimes individuals who are raised in sexually repressive homes grow up to be sexual libertines.
Finally, we can use symbolic interactionism to understand the social meaning behind the social interaction. We learn the appropriate gender and how to display that gender through the interaction with significant others.
For the majority of sociologists, biological impulses are subservient to the influence of social systems.
Social control of sexuality – so powerful are norms as they are transmitted through both social structures and everyday life that it is impossible to imagine the absence of norms that control sexuality. Some social theorists observe that societies control sexuality through construction of a dichotomized or gender sexuality.
Society’s rules about pleasure seeking and procreating are enforced by norms about appropriate male and female behavior. For example saying that masculinity is enhanced by sexual experimentation while femininity is demeaned by it gives me sexual privilege and pleasure and denies it to women. Foucault argues that sexual desire is fueled by the experience of privilege and taboo regarding sexual pleasure. Social control turns pleasure into a scarce resource and endows leaders who regulate the pleasure of others with power.
Finally Schwartz and Rutter put forth an integrative perspective. They say that desire is contextual and physical. The causes of our desires are own bodies, environments, relationships, families and governments.
But so what? We are all biological entities with perhaps dispositions, but what happens to that biological entity, happens in a social context. In the end Schwartz and Rutter say “the point is, everything sexual and physical occurs and achieves meaning in a social context.”
|
|
