Human Sexuality Study Guide for Exam 1
This is meant to help you focus your study efforts. It should not take the place of careful and thorough reading of the assigned materials and it may not address every possible thing you should know. Be thorough in your studying and reading! I also encourage you o go over your class notes and reading notes (resulting from your active reading of he material).
From: The ‘Orgasm Gap’:
What is the Orgasm Gap?
What causes the orgasm gap?
Important General Ideas:
What is a social construction?
What does it mean to say that sexuality is socially constructed?
From Lesson One Powerpoint slides:
• THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY and SEXUALITY
• The Social Construction of Reality
• Reality is constructed socially.
• Reify – to make real
• social construction, that is, it is an idea created by humans (i.e. doesn’t exist in the biological world but only in the social world) through social interaction and given a reality through our understanding of it and our collective actions.
• Does California exist empirically?
• Social construction: “Social constructs or social constructions define meanings, notions, or connotations that are assigned to objects and events in the environment and to people’s notions of their relationships to and interactions with these objects. In the domain of social constructionist thought, a social construct is an idea or notion that appears to be natural and obvious to people who accept it but may or may not represent reality, so it remains largely an invention or artifice of a given society.” encyclopedia.com
• Example: “Take, for example, the concept of marriage: what this term includes and doesn't include and what it means to society does not exist ‘out there’ in the world, but only in and through the social institutions that give it meaning within a culture.” wikipedia.org
• What is the social construction of love?
• Who defines it?
• How has it changed over time?
• How does this construction serve patriarchy and homophobia?
• “Natural vs Unnatural”
• “Natural” vs. “Unnatural”
• “There is no ‘natural’ human sexuality. This is not to say that our sexual feelings are ‘unnatural’ but that whatever feelings and activities our society interprets as sexual are channeled from birth into socially acceptable forms of expression.” Hubbard
• What role does power play in this process?
• Despite a popular perception that male-female pairings are the only "natural" way, the animal kingdom is actually full of examples of same-sex couples. Penguins, dolphins, bison, swans, giraffes and chimpanzees are just a few of the many species that sometimes pair up with same-sex partners. Researchers are still mulling over the evolutionary reason, if any, for gay animal sex, since it doesn't produce offspring. Some ideas are that it helps strengthen social bonds or encourages some individuals to focus their resources on nurturing their nieces and nephews, thus boosting their own genes indirectly. Or, it may simply be fun.

• Toward a nondeterministic model of sexuality
• “The society in which we live channels, guides and limits our imagination in sexual as well as other matters. Why some of us give ourselves permission to love people of our own sex whereas others cannot even imagine doing so is an interesting question…People fall in love with individuals, not with sex. Gender need not be a significant factor in our choice, although for some of us it may be.” (Hubbard, p. 68)
• "Not every sexual act has a reproductive function," said Janet Mann, a biologist at Georgetown University. Male courtships are frequent amongst these long-necked mammals. Often a male will start necking with another before proceeding to mount him. This affectionate play can take up to an hour. According to one study, one in every 20 male giraffes will be found necking with another male at any instant. In many cases, homosexual activity is said to be more common than heterosexual.
• Human Sexuality
• The capacity to have erotic experiences and responses.
• What about sexual orientation?
• Sexual interest and attraction to other people
• What does it mean to say that sexuality is socially constructed?
• gender
• Surprise! Also a social construction!
• Sex refers to an individual’s membership in one of two biologically distinct categories—male or female.
• Gender refers to the physical, behavioral, and personality traits that a group considers normal for its male and female members.
• sexuality
• You guessed it… also a social construction!
• Sexual orientation is the inclination to be heterosexual (attracted to the opposite sex), homosexual (attracted to the same sex), or bisexual (attracted to either sex).
• Sexual Orientation
• Is sexual orientation a continuum rather than a few simple categories?
• Those who are asexual may simply reject any sexual identity at all.
• Our Cultural Legacy
Two Themes
• Sex for procreation
• Definition of sex and intercourse used synonymously
• Male and female gender roles
• Sexual Attitudes
Victorian Era
• Women’s role constrained; women as asexual
• Emotional & physical distance between husband and wife
• Prostitution flourished
• Continued polarized view of women as Madonna or whore
• Mosher’s research contradicts prevailing view
-Victorian women experienced sexual desire, enjoyed intercourse, and experienced orgasm
• 20 th Century Sexuality
• The beginning of the 20 th century
• Suffrage movement
• 19 th amendment gives women the right to vote
• World War II
• Gender roles were expanded & more flexible
• Postwar return to stricter roles
• 20 th Century Sexuality
• The 1960s and 1970s
• The“sexual revolution”
• Attitudes begin to change toward homosexuality

• The Media and Sexuality
• The Media and Sexuality
• Television
• News, advice, and educational programs
• Increased access to sexual material
• Percentages of sexual content
• Cable and music videos
• Video games
• Determining of social norms
• Advertising
• Magazines
• Sexual Taboos and Television
• Sexuality
Where the Personal is Political
• Impact of social norms
• Freedoms and responsibilities today
• Controversies facing human sexuality
Readings:
PART I. 1. Constructing Sex, the Sexual, and the Erotic.
What does it mean to ‘construct the erotic’?
What is social constructionism?
What is Essentialism?
'Doing it/Defining it' The Social Construction of S-E-X (Tracey Steele:)
What does how we define it have to do with ‘it’?
What is ‘it’?
Unnatural Acts (Leonore Tiefer).
What are the “unnatural acts’ Tiefer speaks of?
Why are they ‘unnatural’?
How do they vary?
Why do they vary?
Breastfeeding and the Good Maternal Body (Cindy Stearns).
Why is there a conflict with breastfeeding?
What are the conflicting values placed on breasts in our culture and how do they lead to issues regarding breastfeeding?
2. Constructing and Critiquing Sexual Categories.
The Invention of Heterosexuality (Jonathan Ned Katz).
When and why was heterosexuality ‘invented’?
To what end has these constructions been used?
Bisexuality in an Essentialist World: Understanding BiPhobia (Amanda Udis-Kessler).
What is essentialism?
What is bisexuality?
What is Biphobia?
Who are fence-sitters and why?

Where does the conflict arise and why?
A Queer Encounter (Steven Epstein).
What is queer theory?
What does it mean?
Who uses the term ‘queer’? Why
3. Conflated Constructs: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality.
Beyond the Binaries: Depolarizing the Categories of Sex, Sexuality, and Gender (Judith Lorber).
What does Lorber mean by Sex, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, sexual identity, sexual preference?
What does she mean by deconstructing the categories?
Why is this important?
How Men Have (A) Sex (John Stoltenbergm).
How do men have sex?
What does he mean by this?
How does the sex act produce a gendered identity?
Is this problematic and why?
Who are the creatures he discusses? How do they relate to us? Are they oblivious to reproduction? Are we?
What is the relationship between sexuality and gender?
The Myth of the Latin Woman: I Just Met a Girl Named Maria (Judith Ortiz Cofer).
Who is Maria?
What are the concerns of the author?
What are the indignities she suffers?
How does race, ethnicity and class intersect with sexuality?
4. What's Love Got to Do With It? Constructions of Desire, Love, and Intimacy.
The Feminization of Love (Francesca M. Cancian).
What does the author mean be feminization of love?
What is characteristic of a masculine style of love? Feminine style?
Is there such thing as an androgynous style of love?
What does she mean by instrumental and expressive?
Who is (is anyone) better at love?
What re the negative consequences of the feminization of love?
The Sexualization of Love (Steven Seidman).
What does the author mean by sexualization of love?
How has love changed through time?
What about eroticization?
What did all this change in love make possible?
What are the different time periods that characterized love and what are they all about?
Women and Heterosexual Love: Complicity, Resistance, and Change

What did the author analyze?
Whom did she study and why?
What did she discover? How did she discover it?
What does the author mean by complicity, resistance and change? complicity, resistance and change in what?
What is love?
What are the contradictions?