Researches on Men and Manhood

Online reviews of book: "Sex and the eighteenth-century man: Massachusetts and the history of sexuality in America" by Thomas A Foster,

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books.google.com
Book description:
"... most would assume that masculinity is the stuff of politics, commerce, or hard physical labor. But Thomas Foster turns this conventional portrait on its head. Vividly using court records, newspapers, sermons, and private papers from Massachusetts, he shows that sex—understood as a mix of behaviors, desires, and identities associated with eroticism—was a crucial component of the colonial understanding of the qualities considered befitting for a man.

Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man begins by examining how men, as heads of households, ultimately held responsibility for sex within marriage and the sexual behaviors of dependents and household members.

Starkly challenging current views, the book details early understandings of sexual orientation and a surprising number of stereotypes until now believed to originate a century later, including those of the black rapist and the unmanly sodomite—figures that underscore norms of white male heterosexuality.
Editorial review:
This compelling study of 18th-century male gender mores and sexuality is filled with engrossing historical details, demonstrating that 18th-century American ideas about masculinity were complexly tied to religion, economics and the body. For example, a 1746 newspaper article proposed a tax on single people, since they "promise no help to the future generation"; American colonists understood male effeminacy to be as much a sign of wasteful consumption as sexual deviance;

Amazon.com

"In this thoroughly researched and well-crafted book, Tom Foster shows convincingly that American notions of sexuality and manliness have long been linked in complex ways. He has uncovered a history that we need to know—a history that exposes the roots of many contemporary attitudes toward masculinity."—Mary Beth Norton, author of Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society

"Thomas Foster's intriguing book reveals what sex meant to eighteenth-century men. He argues persuasively that all matters concerning sexuality, including premarital fornication, marital sex, infidelity, same-sex intimacy, desire, impotency, sexual violence, and interracial sex, were linked to ideals of masculinity. Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man shows impressive range."—Elizabeth Reis, author of Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England

Oxford Journal of American History

Lisa Wilson

Connecticut College New London, Connecticut

Thomas A. Foster argues that sexuality and manhood were inextricably linked in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Diaries and family letters rarely elucidate that aspect of men's lives, but court records and newspapers offer some stories that are fascinating, if hard to interpret. Foster uses those sources to explore what men thought about their own sexuality as well as about the sexual lives of other men.

Oppressed and Oppressors? The Systematic Mistreatment of Men.

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Article from: Sociology | August 1, 2001 | New, Caroline | Copyright Sociology (Hide copyright information) Copyright

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ABSTRACT This paper argues for a structural definition of oppression as systematic mistreatment. Using the work of Connell and other theorists, I discuss the implications of the proposed definition for the oppression of women and suggest that men, too, are systematically mistreated and therefore oppressed in modern societies. This structural concept of men's oppression is compared with the idea developed in the men's movement of the 1970s that men are oppressed by sex roles, and with more recent discourses of masculinity. I argue that men may have conflicting interests in relation to the gender order. While men are frequently the agents of the oppression of women, and in many senses benefit from it, their interests in the gender order are not pregiven but constructed by and within it. Since in many ways men's human needs and capacities are not met within the gender orders of modern societies, they also have a latent 'emancipatory interest' in their transformation.

KEYWORDS feminism, gender order, interests, masculinity, oppression, patriarchy

Oppression as 'systematic mistreatment'

Recent disputes within feminism have produced one consensus at least: that oppression is multi-dimensional. The group of women, oppressed within the gender order, includes women who are privileged on other dimensions and in an oppressor role in relation to other, relatively disadvantaged groups of women (Bradley 1996:93). Similarly men, the oppressing group, may also be oppressed in terms of class, ethnicity and so on. (According to Hartmann (1981) patriarchy is a set of hierarchical social relations between men which enables them to dominate women.) Many studies of gender at work have recognised the oppression of men as workers, and that their attempts to make work meaningful often involve ideas and practices that are oppressive to women (for example, Willis 1978; Bradley 1999). But sociologists of gender hardly ever discuss the possibility that men are oppressed on the same dimension as women, i.e. in respect of gender relations. Almost all of those who now describe men as oppressed are part of the anti-fe minist backlash, [1] who deny the oppression of women and even see women, especially feminists, as oppressors of men (for example, Farrell 1993). In contrast, I shall argue that both women and men are oppressed, but not symmetrically. While men are positioned to act as systematic agents of the oppression of women, women are not in such a relation to men. Yet unsurprisingly, given the inescapably relational character of gender, the two oppressions are complementary in their functioning - the practices of each contribute to the reproduction of the other. In particular, the very practices which construct men's capacity to oppress women and interest in doing so, work by systematically harming men.

My argument depends on a certain way of understanding oppression, which must first be introduced and defended. Although oppression is undertheorised, we can distinguish several main approaches, often implicit in the sociology of gender. Subjectivist approaches make the group's self-concept the crucial criterion for oppression, while objectivist or realist approaches focus on whether the putative oppressed group is disadvantaged or harmed. Some realist approaches I shall call zero-sum, because they emphasise benefits accruing to an oppressor group which gains as the oppressed group loses. Others, such as the one I advocate, focus instead on the institutionalised nature of oppressive social relations, so that oppression can sometimes exist without a clear or enduring oppressor group.

'Common-sense' approaches to oppression are often subjectivist, assuming that an individual or group must be the best judges of what is happening to them. In more sophisticated versions, the meanings of social practices are seen as relative to cultural context. [2] In this view, judgements that clitoridectomy, footbinding or institutional rape are harmful or oppressive can only be validly made by 'locals'. For Laclau and Mouffe, for instance, subordination is only oppression if, under the influence of some external discourse, the subordinated see it as harmful and mobilise against it (1985:154). Actors' accounts are, therefore, our only source of knowledge of whether social relations are oppressive. Such a view is attractive to feminists who suspect realist approaches of silencing women or marginalising their experience. [3] 'It is wrong to undermine a person with the claim that she does not know what she wants or feels, or that what she wants or feels is inappropriate; and you cannot know what is wanted or felt and cannot discover oppression unless you listen to people' (Seller 1988:176).

It would be hard to justify a procedure for identifying and characterising oppression that did not see experience as significant. But oppression cannot be 'read off' experience, precisely because subjectivity is socially constructed. If we make actors' accounts key to the characterisation of social relations as oppressive, what are we to make of the conflicting accounts of the subordinated? Some women believe men are oppressed, some that the gender order is natural and non-oppressive, others that women are oppressed and so on. Subjectivist and relativist approaches reduce oppression to a rhetorical category instead of a valuable concept in critical sociology. In contrast, for realist approaches, the key criterion for oppression is not whether certain social relations are perceived as harming a particular group, but whether they do harm it, either directly or by depriving it of potential contextual resources.

A common, and 'common-sense', realist idea of oppression is the zero-sum conception. Here oppression is a relationship between groups, in which the oppressor group acts in ways that harm or disadvantage the oppressed, in order to gain corresponding benefits. Examples would be the relationship between the owners of the means of production and the wage-workers they employ (as understood in Marxist political economy), or the relationship between husbands and wives as conceptualised by Delphy (1970). While admirably clear, the zero-sum conception makes it hard to characterise some groups as oppressed, although they are systematically disadvantaged. Initially assuming a zero-sum position, Abberley (1987:7) writes:

To claim that disabled people are oppressed involves arguing... that on significant dimensions disabled people can be regarded as a group whose members are in an inferior position to other members of society... that these disadvantages are dialectically related to an ideology or group of ideologies which justify and perpetuate this situation... that such disadvantages and their supporting ideologies are neither natural nor inevitable... Finally it involves the identification of some beneficiary of this state of affairs.

But the identification of an oppressor group is tricky - the entire group of non-disabled or 'TABs' (temporarily able-bodied) can be seen as beneficiaries when considered as taxpayers, but become losers when considered as family members, potential carers and likely future members of the group of disabled people. Abberley later concludes that the main beneficiary of the oppression of disabled people is 'the present social order, or, more accurately, capitalism in a particular historical and national form' (1987:16).

Like Abberley, I do not believe we need to identify a clear-cut agent/beneficiary to speak of oppression. Sometimes there is one, sometimes not. I propose the following structural definition, which subsumes zero-sum conceptions when they are applicable, and allows us to recognise the very different, yet related, oppressions of women and of men.

A group X is oppressed if, in certain respects, its members are systematically mistreated in comparison to non-Xs in a given social context, and if this mistreatment is justified or excused in terms of some alleged or real characteristic of the group.

The key phrase, 'systematically mistreated' implies that as a result of institutionalised social practices, Xs' human needs are not met, they are made to suffer, or their flourishing is not permitted, relative to other groups and to available knowledge and resources. While human needs are culturally mediated, some basic conditions for human well-being can be specified independent of social context (Doyal and Gough 1991:chap. 4). We recognise these as needs because undesirable consequences arise from a failure to meet them, though the severity of the price paid may range from death to discomfort. Unmet needs may result in forms of development that preclude 'flourishing', the term used by ecological feminist Cuomo (1998) in her feminist ethics. For Cuomo, knowledge of a thing's nature can give rise to knowledge of what it is for it to flourish.[4]

'In comparison to non-members' means that Xs are disadvantaged in relation to non-Xs on some particular dimension or in a specific context -- …

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Conscription as manhood initiation

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Traditionally conscription has been limited to the male population, as males have been warriors. Women and handicapped males have been exempted from conscription. Many societies have traditionally considered military service as a test of manhood and a rite of passage from boyhood into manhood.68 69

References:

68 ^ Ben Shephard (2003), A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, p. 18, ISBN 9780674011199,

69 ^ Carol R. Ember; Melvin Ember (2003), Encyclopedia of sex and gender: men and women in the world's cultures, Volume 2, Springer, pp. 108-109, ISBN 9780306477706.

...

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Sexual Behavior in the Human Male: by Alfred Kinsey

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June 2003, Vol 93, No. 6 American Journal of Public Health 894-898
© 2003 American Public Health Association

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VOICES FROM THE PAST

Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell R. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin

HOMOSEXUAL OUTLET

[A] CONSIDERABLE PORTION OF THE population, perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age. In addition, about 60 per cent of the pre-adolescent boys engage in homosexual activities, and there is an additional group of adult males who avoid overt contacts but who are quite aware of their potentialities for reacting to other males.

The social significance of the homosexual is considerably emphasized by the fact that both Jewish and Christian churches have considered this aspect of human sexuality to be abnormal and immoral. Social custom and our AngloAmerican law are sometimes very severe in penalizing one who is discovered to have had homosexual relations. . . .

It is, therefore, peculiarly difficult to secure factual data concerning the nature and the extent of the homosexual in Western European or American cultures, and even more difficult to find strictly objective presentations of such data as are available. . . .

Until the extent of any type of human behavior is adequately known, it is difficult to assess its significance, either to the individuals who are involved or to society as a whole; and until the extent of the homosexual is known, it is practically impossible to understand its biologic or social origins. It is one thing if we are dealing with a type of activity that is unusual, without precedent among other animals, and restricted to peculiar types of individuals within the human population. It is another thing if the phenomenon proves to be a fundamental part, not only of human sexuality, but of mammalian patterns as a whole.

DEFINITION

For nearly a century the term homosexual in connection with human behavior has been applied to sexual relations, either overt or psychic, between individuals of the same sex. Derived from the Greek root homo rather than from the Latin word for man, the term emphasizes the sameness of the two individuals who are involved in a sexual relation. The word is, of course, patterned after and intended to represent the antithesis of the word heterosexual, which applies to a relation between individuals of different sexes. . . .

It is amazing to observe how many psychologists and psychiatrists have . . . come to believe that homosexual males and females are discretely different from persons who merely have homosexual experience, or who react sometimes to homosexual stimuli. Sometimes such an interpretation allows for only two kinds of males and two kinds of females, namely those who are heterosexual and those who are homosexual. But as subsequent data . . . will show, there is only about half of the male population whose sexual behavior is exclusively heterosexual, and there are a few percent who are exclusively homosexual. Any restriction of the term homosexuality to individuals who are exclusively so demands, logically, that the term heterosexual be applied only to those individuals who are exclusively heterosexual; and this makes no allowance for the nearly half of the population which has had sexual contacts with, or reacted psychically to, individuals of their own as well as of the opposite sex. Actually, of course, one must learn to recognize every combination of heterosexuality and homosexuality in the histories of various individuals.

It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.

PREVIOUS ESTIMATES OF INCIDENCE

Satisfactory incidence figures on the homosexual cannot be obtained by any technique short of a carefully planned population survey. The data should cover every segment of the total population. . . . In order to secure data that have any relation to the reality, it is imperative that the cases be derived from as careful a distribution and stratification of the sample as the public opinion polls employ, or as we have employed in the present study. . . .

INCIDENCE DATA IN PRESENT STUDY

The statistics given throughout this volume on the incidence of homosexual activity, and the statistics to be given in the present section of this chapter, are based on those persons who have had physical contacts with other males, and who were brought to orgasm as a result of such contacts. By any strict definition such contacts are homosexual, irrespective of the extent of the psychic stimulation involved, of the techniques employed, or of the relative importance of the homosexual and the heterosexual in the history of such an individual. These are not data on the number of persons who are "homosexual," but on the number of persons who have had at least some homosexual experience. . . .

In these terms (of physical contact to the point of orgasm), the data in the present study indicate that at least 37 percent of the male population has some homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and old age. This is more than one male in three of the persons that one may meet as he passes along a city street. Among the males who remain unmarried until the age of 35, almost exactly 50 per cent have homosexual experience between the beginning of adolescence and that age. . . . These figures are, of course, considerably higher than any which have previously been estimated. . . .

We ourselves were totally unprepared to find such incidence data when this research was originally undertaken. Over a period of several years we were repeatedly assailed with doubts as to whether we were getting a fair cross section of the total population or whether a selection of cases was biasing the results. It has been our experience, however, that each new group into which we have gone has provided substantially the same data. Whether the histories were taken in one large city or another, whether they were taken in large cities, in small towns, or in rural areas, whether they came from one college or from another, a church school or a state university or some private institution, whether they came from one part of the country or from another, the incidence data on the homosexual have been more or less the same. . . .

THE HETEROSEXUAL-HOMOSEXUAL BALANCE

Concerning patterns of sexual behavior, a great deal of the thinking done by scientists and laymen alike stems from the assumption that there are persons who are "heterosexual" and persons who are "homosexual," that these two types represent antitheses in the sexual world, and that there is only an insignificant class of "bisexuals" who occupy an intermediate position between the other groups. It is implied that every individual is innately—inherently—either heterosexual or homosexual. It is further implied that from the time of birth one is fated to be one thing or the other, and that there is little chance for one to change his pattern in the course of a lifetime.

It is quite generally believed that one’s preference for a sexual partner of one or the other sex is correlated with various physical and mental qualities, and with the total personality which makes a homosexual male or female physically, psychically, and perhaps spiritually distinct from a heterosexual individual. It is generally thought that these qualities make a homosexual person obvious and recognizable to any one who has a sufficient understanding of such matters. Even psychiatrists discuss "the homosexual personality" and many of them believe that preferences for sexual partners of a particular sex are merely secondary manifestations of something that lies much deeper in the totality of that intangible which they call the personality. . . .

The histories which have been available in the present study make it apparent that the heterosexuality or homosexuality of many individuals is not an all-or-none proposition. It is true that there are persons in the population whose histories are exclusively heterosexual, both in regard to their overt experience and in regard to their psychic reactions. And there are individuals in the population whose histories are exclusively homosexual, both in experience and in psychic reactions. But the record also shows that there is a considerable portion of the population whose members have combined, within their individual histories, both homosexual and heterosexual experience and/or psychic responses. There are some whose heterosexual experiences predominate, there are some whose homosexual experiences predominate, there are some who have had quite equal amounts of both types of experience. . . .

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex. . . .

SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS

In view of the data which we now have on the incidence and frequency of the homosexual, and in particular on its co-existence with the heterosexual in the lives of a considerable portion of the male population, it is difficult to maintain the view that psychosexual reactions between individuals of the same sex are rare and therefore abnormal or unnatural, or that they constitute within themselves evidence of neuroses or even psychoses. . . .

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not as taboo as it is in our own, suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or of the opposite sex, is basic in the species. That patterns of heterosexuality and patterns of homosexuality represent learned behavior which depends, to a considerable degree, upon the mores of the particular culture in which the individual is raised, is a possibility that must be thoroughly considered before there can be any acceptance of the idea that homosexuality is inherited, and that the pattern for each individual is so innately fixed that no modification of it may be expected within his lifetime. . . .

SOCIAL APPLICATIONS

. . . Social reactions to the homosexual have obviously been based on the general belief that a deviant individual is unique and as such needs special consideration. When it is recognized that the particular boy who is discovered in homosexual relations in school, the business man who is having such activity, and the institutional inmate with a homosexual record, are involved in behavior that is not fundamentally different from that had by a fourth to a third of all of the rest of the population, the activity of the single individual acquires a somewhat different social significance. . . .

The difficulty of the situation becomes still more apparent when it is realized that these generalizations concerning the incidence and frequency of homosexual activity apply in varying degrees to every social level, to persons in every occupation, and of every age in the community. The police force and court officials who attempt to enforce the sex laws, the clergymen and business men and every other group in the city which periodically calls for enforcement of the laws—particularly the laws against sexual "perversion"—have given a record of incidences and frequencies in the homosexual which are as high as those of the rest of the social level to which they belong. It is not a matter of the individual hypocrisy whichleads officials with homosexual histories to become prosecutors of the homosexual activity in the community. They themselves are the victims of the mores, and the public demand that they protect those mores. As long as there are such gaps between the traditional custom and the actual behavior of the population, such inconsistencies will continue to exist. . . .

The homosexual has been a significant part of human sexual activity ever since the dawn of history, primarily because it is an expression of capacities that are basic in the human animal.

Footnotes

Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia Pa: W.B. Saunders: 1948: 610-666

Sexual Orientation: Binaries, Definitions, and Research Problems

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Heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, gay, lesbian, and queer are some of words used to represent human sexual orientations. The majority of these words have been used as adjectives preceding words such as man, male, female, adolescent, student, person and so on. Their use as nouns has increased in association with the belief that homosexual individuals are more like a separate species or a distinct category in the human family. Connell (1992: 737) recognised that "[u]sing the term 'homosexuals' as a noun reified sexual object choice into a type of human being," and many others have challenged the perception of distinct entities, including Gore Vidal who has been widely quoted in this respect:

"There is no such thing as a homosexual person. There are only homosexual acts" (Martin, 1997; Bianco, 2000).

In the Foreword to The Invention of Heterosexuality by Jonathan Katz, Vidal also notes that "heterosexuality [is] a weird concept of recent origin and terrible consequences" (Vidal, 1995: vii).

To help the public better understand the concept of "sexual orientation," the American Psychological Association (APA) made available an apparently research based definition:

Sexual Orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual or affectional attraction to another person... Sexual orientation exists along a continuum that ranges from exclusive homosexuality to exclusive heterosexuality and includes various forms of bisexuality. Bisexual persons can experience sexual, emotional and affectional attraction to both their own sex and the opposite sex. Persons with a homosexual orientation are sometimes referred to as gay (both men and women) or as lesbian (women only). Sexual orientation is different from sexual behavior because it refers to feelings and self-concept. Persons may or may not express their sexual orientation in their behaviors (APA, 1999).

The APA definition of sexual orientation is based on a biological sex binary that has produced the words "homosexual" for same-sex attractions, "heterosexual" for opposite sex attractions, and "bisexual" for varying degrees of attractions to either sex. As a rule, however, sexual orientation has been perceived in the traditional form of the "binary." One was to be either homosexual or heterosexual, and all individuals claiming to have a bisexual orientation were invalidated and even abused. An increasing number of professionals are challenging this perception on the basis of observations that led Glorianne Leck, for example, to conclude: "It is obvious that categories of homosexual and heterosexual create false binaries and therefore give us inadequate information and impression" (Leck, 2000: 332; Note 1). Concerning this issue, Gore Vidal noted that once "heterosexuality" was invented,

"there had to be another word to denote the opposite, and thus 'homosexuality' was invented and Katz now shows how the words got frozen into their present usage. Good term: hetero. Bad term: homo. Straight versus gay. Either one or the other; no Mr. In-Between. The division has led to endless trouble for many men and women…" (Vidal, 1995: ix)

The binary basis of sexual orientation has meant that an individual was to be either heterosexual (often meaning "normal") or homosexual (meaning "abnormal"), with bisexuality being ignored, condemned or considered a disguise because it apparently should not exist (Note 2). By the 1980s, this binary view of human sexuality was dominant as illustrated in the title of Schneider and Tremble’s paper "Gay or straight? Working with confused adolescents" (1985-6). Placing oneself in either the gay or straight categories had acceptance and non-acceptance consequences. Those who supported the binary classification system had a history of defining homosexual individuals as "mentally disordered" in accordance with diagnostic schemes of organisations such as The American Psychiatric Association and The American Psychological Association. The removal of this politically motivated "mental disorder" label occurred in 1973-4 after protests from those who perceived themselves to be defined and targeted for abuse by these organisations of mental health professionals. Many self-identified homosexual individuals did not agree with the "mental disorder" attribute, and neither did a significant number of professionals (Bayer, 1981).

Key words used in the sexual orientation definition do not have a long history (Michel Foucault, 1976) and this fact is strongly re-emphasised by Katz (1995) in The Invention of Heterosexuality and in his 2001 book Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality. The words "homosexual" and "heterosexual" were invented at the end of the 19th century and all aspects of many aspects of 'heterosexuality' were deemed abnormal until the 1930s. In the PBS Frontline documentary, "Assault on Gays in America," in a section titled "Who’s Gay? Who's Straight? Viewing Homosexuality and Heterosexuality in the Context of Culture and History, Jonathan Katz (1995) is quoted (without the original references) as follows in a subsection:

"The discourse on heterosexuality had a protracted coming out, not completed in American popular culture until the 1920s. Only slowly was heterosexuality established as a stable sign of normal sex. The association of heterosexuality with perversion continued as well into the twentieth century...
Neither had heterosexuality yet attained the status of normal. In 1901, Dorland's Medical Dictionary, published in Philadelphia, continued to define 'Heterosexuality' as 'Abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex.' Dorland's heterosexuality, a new 'appetite,' was clearly identified with an 'opposite sex' hunger. But that craving was still aberrant. Dorland's calling heterosexuality 'abnormal or perverted' is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary's first Supplement (1933), a 'misapplied' definition. But contrary to the OED, Dorland's is a perfectly legitimate understanding of heterosexuality according to a procreative norm…
The twentieth century witnessed the decreasing legitimacy of that procreative imperative, and the increasing public acceptance of a new hetero pleasure principle. Gradually, heterosexuality came to refer to a normal other-sex sensuality free of any essential tie to procreation. But only in the mid- 1960s would heteroeroticism be distinguished completely from reproduction, and male-female pleasure sex justified for itself. ...
For in 1923 Webster's defined 'heterosexuality' as a 'Med.' term meaning 'morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex.' Only in 1934 does 'heterosexuality' first appear in Webster's hefty Second Edition Unabridged defined in what is still the dominant modern mode. There, heterosexuality is finally a 'manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality.' Heterosexuality had finally attained the status of norm."

Bisexuality is currently often spoken about in terms of "bisexualities," but the same is not true in recognising a spectrum of sexualities called "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality." The APA definition recognises bisexualities, but to be consistent, the words "homosexualities" (Bell and Weinberg, 1978), "heterosexualities," and "asexualities" should also be used to designate the diversity of sexualities that have existed in human cultures throughout history (Dorais, 1994: 135; Note 2). In addition, Dorais warned against potentially serious problems stemming from the present definition of "sexual orientation" and the varied operational definitions of homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual that are generally used to apparently "advance" the understanding of "sexual orientations." These definition problems pose serious challenges in the selection of study samples by researchers wanting to investigate genetic associations in homosexuality. To conduct research with the current definition problems, according to Dorais, would likely result in the production of "a bad piece of science fiction" (Dorais, 1994: 146). Others have articulated similar views (Dowsett,1998; Muscarella, 2000; Gallo and Robinson, 2000; Terry, 2000; Brookey, 2000; Wilson, 2001) and warnings have been issued to anthropologists about the great dangers of applying current "sexual orientation" perceptions when seeking to understand men in ancient Greece and Rome, and in other more contemporary cultures. The paper, "The myth of the heterosexual: anthropology and sexuality for classicists," begins with:

"This is not an article on ancient sexuality. It s an article on how to think about ancient sexuality. In particular, it is an article on the widely differing systems that cultures throughout time and the world have used to classify people and their sexual acts. Our own particular system divides people into two major classes on the basis of whether they have sex with others of the same sex or not (heterosexual versus homosexual). This is a surprisingly rare system anywhere in the world and a comparatively recent development in the west (1). The system shared by the Ancient Greeks and Romans was quite different and divided acts and people on the axis of active versus passive (2). Similar ways of categorizing sex are much more widely spread, both historically and anthropologically, but this system, too, is only one of the many patterns to be found (3)" (Parker, 2001: 313-4).
Notes: 1: "Foucault 1985, Greenberg 1988, Halperin 1990; McWhirter, Sanders, and Reinisch 1990. J Katz 1995 is especially refreshing." - 2: "For some overviews, see Housman 1931, 408 n.1 (= 1972.1180 n. 2); Dover 1973, esp. 148-49, 1978, 16, 168-70; Richlin 1992, esp. 131-39 (contra Richlin 1993, see n. 24 below), Veyne 1985, 29-30; Foucault 1985.46, 84-86, 210-11; Wiseman 1985.10-13; Halperin 1990, 1996; Winkler 1990, Parker 1996, 1997; Walters 1997; C.A. Williams 1999.18. Even Boswell: 'This 'penetration code' …was clearly not related to a dichotomy of sexual preferences, but to issues of power, dominance and submission' (1990.72)." - 3: "The overviews of the classical Arabic active/passive system by Schmitt 1995: 15-16 and Rowson 1991 are particularly useful in showing the close parallels to and interesting differences from Greek and Roman sexuality" (Parker, 2001: 314).

Holt Parker's paper ends with a piece of wisdom for all seeking to understand human sexualities cross-culturally, and historically as based on the information now available on the subject:

"Our division of hetero versus homo then, however vital to our society, to our visions of ourselves, is a parochial affair. To return to the linguistic model, if we impose our [sexual orientation] categories on another culture, we are making a crude mistake. When it come to 'talking sex,' we are at best speaking with an atrocious accent. At worst, we are speaking incomprehensible gibberish" (348)

A major problem in all sexual orientation research and genetics research in particular is related to specifics in the "definition of homosexuality" that also has been problematic in many fields of study, including psychology as noted by Madson (2001: 12-13), when teaching about the history of human sexuality as reported on by Pete Segal (2002), and for all who have been attempting to speak about same-sex sexual behaviours in South Asia (Khan, 1995, 1999, 2000, 2001). For example, in some animal research, male animals are defined to be homosexual only if they accept to be mounted by another male, this being the female behaviour required for insemination. In sheep research, however, the homosexual label has been given only to the rams seeking to mounts other rams (Terry, 2000: 179). In human research, Billings highlighted the "definition" problem in an informed evaluation of the methodological problems associated with various types of genetic research seeking to explain homosexuality in humans:

"[Although] traditionally genetics has been most successful in explaining dichotomous traits, sexual orientation is a continuous characteristic of human populations. Males and females can be defined as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual or otherwise. The range of behaviours within any two groups created for research purposes will either reflect selection (and thus not be representative), or will overlap substantially... Thus, it may be impossible to conduct research on homosexuality using genetic methods, or to genetically analyze any human characteristic, when the studied traits cannot be reliably ascertained in a large number of individuals, across a broad range of environments" (Billings, 1993: 36).

Given the highly problematic situation associated with the definition of human sexualities, as well as other problems, Billings' conclusion was prophetic and timely related to the highly publicised results of finding the elusive "gay gene" supposedly located in the X-linked DNA segment (Hamer et al., 1993). He predicted that "this site will likely be eliminated as the location for the 'gay gene' by further experimentation, conducted on different subjects, by other interested researchers" (Billings, 1993: 37). Within two years, support for his prediction was reported by Canadian researchers (Rice et al. 1995; Finn 1996) at the same time that the Hamer team published a second study apparently replicating earlier results (Hu et al., 1995). The Canadian study was finally published (Rice et al., 1999) with considerable media coverage given to the results negating the "X-linked DNA segment" hypothesis. The research carried out by McKnight and Malcolm (2000) has also challenged the results of the Hamer research group:

"At this preliminary stage we have not found support for Hamer's suggestion that a gene on the X chromosome is associated with having more gay male relatives in your immediate family, or more likely to be on your mother's side… We have found a strong effect for gross reproductive rates and given the excess of aunts in the gay sample, and in the straight sample who have a gay relative, this argues that what we are seeing is most probably a maternal line fecundity effect rather that maternal-line homosexuality effect" (p. 237).

Concurrent with the research for a gay gene, considerable attention was given to the negative implications for the postulated "gay gene" that many gay-identified males believed to exist (Chamberlain, 1999). Over the years, comments such as "I have been gay ever since I can remember" have been endlessly stated to justify "essential" thinking. Yet, I have also been French Canadian "ever since I can remember" and none of it is biological, except for having a biological system that made the acquisition of my cultural attributes possible, including the French language. By 1999, however, papers were still being published (e.g. Rahman, 1999) that emphasised the apparently considerable evidence that gay males were biologically more like females, all based on unreplicated research results, and continued reference to Hamer’s results as a good explanation for this phenomenon. No one has noted, however, that if some males are more like females biologically, would this not imply that two such males in a relationship would be genetically quite similar and therefore be more like a third sex? The implications here would be that they are not homosexual given the male-male / female-female definition of homosexuality, unless the definition was expanded to now include a shemale/shemale definition. Furthermore, given their similarity, it is also possible that such relationships may not work if the Bem (1996) theory, "Exotic becomes erotic: a developmental theory of sexual orientation," is correct. That is, we are sexually attracted to the ones "perceived" to be different from oneself. In the paper, "Exotic Becomes Erotic: Interpreting the Biological Correlates of Sexual Orientation," Bem presents an interpretation that challenges the genetic underpinning for one's sexual orientation.

"According to the theory, biological variables such as genes or prenatal hormones do not code for sexual orientation per se but for childhood temperaments, such as aggression and activity level" (Bem, 2000)

There are many problems with genetic research on male homosexuality, and especially the aspect of this research that commonly report that parts of homosexual male brains are more like the corresponding parts in female brains, with Brookey (2002) noting that "most biological research begins with the assumption that male homosexuality is a state of physical effeminate pathology." Rarely mentioned in association with such conclusions are the results of the research that has sought to credibly identify differences between the brains of males and females:

"But the anatomical work [on male homosexuality] has come under heavy criticism by William Byrne, director of the neuroanatomy laboratory of neuropsychiatric disease at New York's Mount Sinai Medical Center. 'A general problem with this work is that there have been dozens and dozens of reports of sex differences in the human brain since the middle of the last century. But not a single one of these has been corroborated, except for the one that men tend to have slightly larger brains than women'" (Finn, 1996).

Another significant problem in the gay gene debate is related to the current world view that "100% heterosexuality" is the majority "sexual orientation" given the evidence of exceptionally common manifestations of bisexuality in the Ancient World (Cantarella, 1992). The Ancient Greek practice of pederasty is of special significance given that all boys, in a certain social class, were expected to have loving relationships with older males who also enjoyed more than "sexual" relationships with their boys. However, some commentators have suggested otherwise, indicating that the boys may not have enjoyed any aspect of these relationships. "In the case of classical Greek practice there is a strong current of scholarship which sees the same-sex relations as pretty well universal in the male population, but limited in time and context: the relic of an initiation rite. (One detects a sense that being an initiation rite somehow makes homosexuality acceptable - boys will be boys, and moreover, they'll get over it!)" (Thorp, 1992, p. 59).

This highlighted thought was nonetheless contradicted by Thorp's citations indicating that, as a rule, love without a hint of abuse was a major attribute in these relationships. The Sacred Band of Thebes illustrates this fact (Carpenter, 1917) and also challenges the idea that these highly venerated "love" relationships were just an initiation rite, or maybe a form of child sexual abuse (Note 3). These pairs of lovers went into battle together and thereby negates the often assumed highly vulnerable and naïve nature of these boys. They were not the equivalent of the modern "feminine" (fragile) stereotypical gay male (containing some truth) reflecting the 20th century professional and social belief that homosexual males are inverts, meaning "like women" (Ellis, 1906; Hekma, 1994). This perception, often propagated at the end of the nineteenth century by influential effeminate homosexual males such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (Hekma, 1994), became the dominant belief in the American military by the early 1940s (Purkiss, 1997). The inversion theory continued to be taught well into the 1960s as the title of Judd Marmor's 1965 book indicates: Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality.

Thorp argued that, in addition to the universal expression of male homosexuality in the form of pederasty in Ancient Greece, there were apparently some males who preferred other males all their lives, and they were perceived to have accepted a role "analog[ous] with the role of women in copulation" (p. 61). Given their description, it is possible that these men were similar to present-day transsexual males and, if this applies given the rarity of these males, they should probably not be called "homosexual." Later, I will address this common perceptual link between modern homosexual males (males sexually attracted to other males) and males having a high degree of femininity, but an important realisation must be made at this point. On the basis of the Ancient Greece fact of life for male citizens, it is apparent that human males have the potential to not only greatly enjoy same-sex sexual activity, but they may also experience great love for another male in association with their sexual attractions.

Some individuals today also appear to have acquired this knowledge as implied in a report on some individuals by Kenji Yoshino, the author of the paper, "The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure" (Note 2):

"Some people have this really utopian vision of bisexuality: Twenty years from now, we're all just going to wake up and realize that we're all bisexual" (Bass, 1999).

The words "bisexual" and "bisexuality," however, embody the belief that there are only two sexes, but this is not quite true. Given the reality of intersexed people and that five sexes have been proposed (Fausto-Sterling, 1993, 2000, 2000a), problems with current definitions for "sexual orientation" are evident, compounded also by some human realities related to sexual attraction as noted by Kessler (1998) and quoted by Fausto-Sterling (2000):

"The limitation with Fausto-Sterling's [1993] proposal is that ... [it] still gives genitals ... primary signifying status and ignores the fact that in the everyday world gender attributions are made without access to genital inspection.... What has primacy in everyday life is the gender that is performed, regardless of the flesh's configuration under the clothes."

Fausto-Sterling then states: "I now agree with Kessler's assessment. It would be better for intersexuals and their supporters to turn everyone's focus away from genitals. Instead, as she suggests, one should acknowledge that people come in an even wider assortment of sexual identities and characteristics than mere genitals can distinguish." Unfortunately, a word is not yet available to designate individuals who would be sexually attracted to other humans whether they are deemed to be male, female, or intersexed. It would appear, however, that the average ancient Greek and Roman males did have such a sexual orientation, even though socially imposed behavioural restrictions applied.

NOTES

Note 1

All binaries have increasingly been questioned as illustrated by Englert (1995) quoting Robyn Wiegman, a co-editor of the 1995 book, Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical Identity: "Wiegman points out. The current concepts of heterosexuality/homosexuality, black/white, male/female, are artificial binaries: 'The more you think about this, the more you realize that these binaries cannot hold up. The actual multiplicity and variety of humans on the planet is absolutely non-binary, yet we're so wed to the binary concept and it scares us to think otherwise…" Challenges to the binary concepts have been reflected in titles of books such as Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history (Herdt, 1994) andBeyond Gay or Straight: Understanding sexual orientation (Clausen, 1996), and in essays such as The five sexes: why male and female are not enoughThe five sexes, revisited (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). In a study of working class males from the Australian city of Nullangardie, Dowsett (1994) not only placed current concepts of sexual orientation in question on the basis of the evidence, he also stated "the usefulness of the now-classical concepts of sexual identity and gender identity will be questioned as being too narrow and locked into questionable binary oppositions" (p. 11). In Bangladesh and India, Khan (2000) emphasised that "[c]ontemporary research on sexuality and gender have clearly shown that bipolar categories, such as man or woman as gender categories, and heterosexual or homosexual as sexual categories, are "not useful to describe the range of identities, desires and practices" (personal discussion with Carol Jenkins, Care Bangladesh, 1999) existing in South Asia. The terms "gay" or "homosexual" are also too constricted by a specific history, geography, language and culture to have any significant usefulness in a different culture from their source. In this we should be talking about sexualities, genders, and at the least, homosexualities and heterosexualites."
(Fausto-Sterling, 1993) and

Note 2

Tremblay (1998) summarised the status of bisexuality in the research world by stating that, even though Kinsey's 1948 research indicated significant bisexuality in males, it was only as the result of AIDS-related research that the concept began to surface again in discourses by researchers. "Essentially, sexual orientation has been presented as a homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy, with nothing in between. For too long bisexuality has been perceived as a transition and, by definition, unstable, linked to adolescence, to the absence of a female partner (as in the case of prisoners), or to economic reasons (as with prostitutes)." (Translated by Pierre Tremblay.) This rejection of bisexuality was also highlighted in an analysis of papers published in 17 family therapy journals from 1975 to 1995. The study reported that only .006% of the articles (n = 77) focused on homosexuality issues, and that "only two [of these] studies included bisexuals, indicating a dearth of knowledge in this area" (Clark et al., 1997: 248), with a corresponding absence of "bisexuality" from the consciousness of family therapists. This fact was witnessed in 1994 when I attended a meeting of professionals concerned about homosexually oriented youth and their problems. Calgary's leading expert on "homosexual orientation" issues (a family therapist of high stature who headed the list for related referrals by my family doctor) reported that, in his practice, bisexuality was responded to as a non-existent entity. One's clients were to be either homosexual or heterosexual and 'therapy' would proceed accordingly so that the results, even if some clients were being harmed, would not be in conflict with the therapist's beliefs about the binary nature of sexual orientation. Some of these problems have begun to be addressed in papers such as "Working With the Bisexual Client: How Far Have We Progressed?" by Hayes (2001).

In gay and lesbian communities, the general response to bisexual individuals has been to negate their existence because they were perceived to challenge the belief that only heterosexual and homosexual people existed. Tisdale (1998) writes: "Many gay activists see any talk of bisexuality as diluting the coherence of the community, particularly damaging in a time of attack... Others simply don't believe in bisexuality, seeing through the lens of their own difficult coming-out experience... Bisexuals hear the same things from straights and gays, friends, lovers and perfect strangers: You can't be both. You can't be neither. You just haven't faced the truth. You're secretly wishing for A or B. Insert gay, insert straight, and it comes out the same - something essential is denied." Button (1998) reports similar experiences: "As a bisexual woman... I have been called a fence-sitter, disease-carrier, AC/DC, confused, etc. by gay and lesbian communities."

Bowers (2000) describes his experiences in the San Francisco gay and lesbian community: "GAY INTOLERANCE. Sound contradictory? It's not. And I'm not talking about so-called heterophobia, the mainstream's latest claim to victimhood. I'm talking about real prejudice from parts of the gay and lesbian establishment, right here in the Sexual Mecca. Even more surprising? It’s aimed at another queer population: bisexuals. About two years ago, I came out as bisexual. I anticipated many hurdles, but I could never have predicted this one… Biphobia creates ugly stereotypes: We're confused. It's just a phase. We're harbingers of disease. We're really gay, but we're in denial. We're really straight, but we want to experiment. We can't be trusted, because we'll desert same-sex partners for 'heterosexual privilege.' It's telling that these bisexual 'facts' don't come from bisexuals. Reminds me of Jerry Falwell or Anita Bryant telling gay men and lesbians the 'right' way to live." Concerning such widespread abuses of others, Glorianne Leck wrote: "It is my intention in this writing to show that homosexual and heterosexual (i.e., gay and straight) is a limited classification that, although indicating that there are sexual diversities, has also led to an oversimplified misunderstanding of sexual social oppression and sexual confusion. Those confusions are clearly destructive for those individuals who are caught up in the politicization, the oversimplification, and the embedded misunderstandings about adolescent sexualities" (Leck, 2000: 332).

The situation for bisexual individuals is summarised by McLean (2001) in an Australian study of bisexual youth and their problems: " Traditionally, Western society has divided sexuality into two categories-homosexual and heterosexual. This binary insists that heterosexuality and homosexuality are mutually exclusive categories, and supports the belief that anyone whose sexual identity falls outside of these categories is psychologically maladjusted, confused about their sexuality, or unwilling to commit to one sexual identity category or the other. Dominant public discourses endorse heterosexuality and homosexuality as legitimate sexual identities, but do not recognise that some people are neither exclusively heterosexual nor exclusively homosexual… [Bisexuality] is understood as a number of stereotypes, images of the bisexual as promiscuous, needing multiple relationships in order to feel satisfied, untrustworthy in relationships, or as 'fence-sitters, traitors, cop-outs, closet cases,' reinforce the legitimacy of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and ensure the difficulty of publicly identifying as bisexual… The awareness that bisexuality was not recognised as a legitimate sexual identity was exhibited by the young bisexual people interviewed in two ways; in their persistent need for secrecy about their bisexual identity, and in their perceived discrimination for being bisexual from both the straight world and the gay and lesbian community… Many of the young bisexual people I interviewed said they felt pressure to not identify as bisexual, but to lie and pretend to be heterosexual, and sometimes as gay or lesbian."

In an interview, Kenji Yoshino, the author of "The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure" published in the Stanford Law Review (Yoshino, 2000), summed up the situation for bisexual individuals: "Advocate: It's a conspiracy. Yoshino: Yeah. My theory is that both gays and straights have agreed that, no matter what else they disagree on - they disagree on a lot - they'll both agree about this one thing, which is that bisexuals don't exist. Because they have different but overlapping interests in erasure. If the realm of bisexual possibility exists, it becomes impossible to actually prove that you're straight or you're gay. If you're straight in a world where bisexuality doesn't exist, then you can prove you're straight simply by adducing cross-sex desire: like, 'I have a wife, I have a girlfriend' - if you're a man - kind of thing. Right? Whereas, once you introduce a bisexual possibility, the fact that you have cross-sex desire does not [prove] that you don't have same-sex desire. Given that same-sex desire is stigmatized, people who want to identify as straight are going to have a lot invested in making sure that they can prove that they're straight. Because otherwise they'll lose heterosexual privilege... One of the things that both straights and gays, according to their own accounts, feel [is] threatening about bisexuals is that bisexuals are seen to be gender-blind" (Bass, 1999).

The elimination of bisexuality began in the professional world with individuals such as Sandor Rado (1940). He was quoted in the following way: "...biologically speaking, 'there is no such thing as bisexuality either in man or in any other either vertebrate,' except for developmental disturbances that are clearly recognizable as 'inconsistencies of sex differentiation' (p. 464)" (Quoted by Marmor, 1981: 14) Many in gay communities and professional worlds bought into a generalised view of this ideology (written to invalidate Freud's belief in an innate human bisexual nature), to the point that bisexuality was widely given a non-existent status by the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, there were great abuses by gay and lesbian identified individual (and professionals with similar beliefs, including therapists) of individuals daring to assert that their sexual attractions included both sexes.

Individuals who are well versed on issues related to sexual orientation as represented by the Kinsey (1948) 7-point "homosexual to heterosexual" scales for behaviour and fantasy, Klein's sexual orientation scale or grid (Weinrich et al., 1993; Keppel and Hamilton, 1998), and especially contemporary and historical cross-cultural anthropological knowledge of human sexualities (Carrier, 1981; Murray et al., 1992; Werner, 1998; Murray and Roscoe, 1998; Halperin, 2000) are likely to begin acquiring perceptions similar to the one presented by Peter Voeller (1997). After attending comprehensive lectures on sexual orientation given by Lois McDermott, Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Voeller summarised the thoughts he took from the lectures. "The idea of sexualities and the fluidity of human sexual experience, shown by her figure of a total of as many as 400 homosexualities, heterosexualities, and bisexualities. This theory has unfolded in order to capture not only the well-established and clear-cut distinctions like gay and straight, but also newer distinctions, like transsexuality and transvestism, in order to distinguish more of the variety within the broader rubric of sexual orientation."

Note 3

Enid Bloch (2001), in his paper's "Sex between men and boys in Classical Greece: was it education for citizenship or child abuse" generally used suppositions, as oppose to evidence, to propose that all the Ancient Greek men involved with pederasty were child sex abusers. His major focus was on Athens, noting here that the institution of pederasty varied in Ancient Greek city-states (Murray, 2000: 34-42, 99-110). Block therefore uses Socrates words as made available by Plato in Phaedrus: "Eros is 'inspired madness,' it is 'the greatest of heaven's blessings,' and the soul possessed of it flied heavenward… Most significant, not just the man, but also the boy has erotic feelings. ' His desire is as the desire of the other, but weaker.' Socrates claims. The boy wants to use and touch and kiss his lover and go to bed with him. He is 'burning with passion which he understands not,' and in that state he can refuse his love nothing. If the lover is a virtuous man, and self-control and philosophy prevails, together the souls of man and boys can reach Olympian heights" (192). Although Block attempts to turn such a description into a 'child sexual abuse' situation, or more like into a sex abuse possibility, Phaedrus was written in a world where the men involved with adolescent males had, themselves, once been in the boy's situation. Therefore, they would know best (or much better than Block or ourselves) what they had felt as boys in a love relationship with an older male, and later as young men who would then have the welfare and education of boy entrusted to them. These facts also greatly inform us about the concept of "sexual orientation," given that most males can grow up to greatly enjoy relating sexually with another male (with associated strong love responses) in one society, and that most males in North America now grow up to be quite different generally. This knowledge almost precludes the conclusion that same-sex desires, or even opposite sex desires, including related love responses, are innate in nature. That is, this knowledge makes suspect all claims that same-sex desires are related to genetic anomalies, or even to the effects of hormones on male/female human development, including the proposition that same-sex desires are associated with males who have female-like brain parts as some genetic researchers have proposed.

The socialization of homosexuality and heterosexuality in a non-Western society

2009-04-30T10:30:00.003+05:30

Journal	Archives of Sexual Behavior
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
ISSN	0004-0002 (Print) 1573-2800 (Online)
Issue	Volume 18, Number 1 / February, 1989
DOI	10.1007/BF01579288
Pages	13-29
Subject Collection	Behavioral Science
SpringerLink Date	Monday, May 16, 2005

John D. Baldwin¹ and Janice I. Baldwin¹

(1)	Department of Sociology, University of California, 93106 Santa Barbara, California, USA

Abstract Data on the Sambia—a tribe living in Papua New Guinea—are presented to demonstrate how Sambia males develop a homosexual orientation in boyhood and adolescence, then switch to become heterosexuals in adulthood. Social learning theory is used to explain how sexual orientation in the Sambia change from homo- to heterosexual during the transition to adulthood. Whereas most learning analyses of sexual orientation are based on data from Western cultures, this manuscript extends that literature to deal with a non-Western culture. While including Pavlovian and operant conditioning, which is stressed in many learning analyses of sexual learning, the present analysis also includes detail on the social and cognitive learning principles that are important in understanding the learning of sexual orientation and behavior.

Key words homosexuality - bisexuality - heterosexuality - learning theory - non-Western culture

Note from Reclaiming Natural Manhood site:

The only problem with this paper is their assumption that the men become exclusively heterosexual after marriage. The Western 'experts' can't help expolating their values on the non-western subjects, often forcefully and without any evidences.

How Bonds between Men Shape Their Sexual Relations with Women

2009-01-19T17:04:00.002+05:30

This version was published on April 1, 2008
Men and Masculinities, Vol. 10, No. 3, 339-359 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287761

Men, Sex, and Homosociality

How Bonds between Men Shape Their Sexual Relations with Women

Michael Flood

Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University

Male-male social bonds have a powerful influence on the sexualrelations of some young heterosexual men. Qualitative analysisamong young men aged eighteen to twenty-six in Canberra, Australia,documents the homosocial organization of men's heterosexualrelations. Homosociality organizes men's sociosexual relationsin at least four ways. For some of these young men, male-malefriendships take priority over male-female relations, and platonicfriendships with women are dangerously feminizing. Sexual activityis a key path to masculine status, and other men are the audience,always imagined and sometimes real, for one's sexual activities.Heterosexual sex itself can be the medium through which malebonding is enacted. Last, men's sexual storytelling is shapedby homosocial masculine cultures. While these patterns wereevident particularly among young men in the highly homosocialculture of a military academy, their presence also among othergroups suggests the wider influence of homosociality on men'ssexual and social relations.

2009-01-19T17:04:00.001+05:30

...

Narrating Masculinity: Gender, Identity Work, and Heterosexual Male Sex Stories

2009-01-19T11:03:00.003+05:30

Authors: Kelly, Brian.

[Working Draft – Conference Paper Format, 2007 ASA Annual Meeting] Brian C Kelly, PhD Purdue University, Dept of Sociology & Anthropology Keywords: masculinity, sex, young men 1

Introduction:

Gender and sexuality have been shown to be linked in profound ways. In their negotiation of everyday life, men and women act out sexual scripts in their expressions of erotic desire and engage in certain sexual behaviors shaped by culturally prescribed conceptions about masculinity and femininity (Simon & Gagnon, 1986). Conceptions of masculinity circulate within society such that they create normative expectations of behavior for both men and women (Deaux, 1984). These expectations profoundly influence sexual interactions and often operate in such a hegemonic fashion that people often unknowingly conform to dominant norms. Research suggests that men are even more likely to conform to social pressures around masculinity than women are to femininity norms (Martin, 1995). Yet, men are not simply passive victims of this process. They actively construct and reproduce norms of masculinity in ways that display and enact their conceptions of gender and sexuality. This occurs in the context of our social relationships, as gender is produced and reproduced within the confines of everyday social transactions. Yet, although men may conceptualize a similar idealized masculinity, they deploy or enact masculinity in different ways (Connell, 1995). I set out to explore the ways in which men deploy these masculinities in the course of discussing their sexual lives. To situate this exploration within a theoretical framework, I draw upon the sociological concept of “identity work.” Within every social encounter, individuals subtly assert elements of their identity (Goffman, 1959). Identity work refers to a “range of activities individuals engage in to create, present, & sustain personal identities”, both Narrating Masculinity as individuals and as parts of collectivities (Snow & Anderson, 1987; Einwohner, 2006). In other words, identity work refers to the practices that construct & negotiate identity while nested within a social context. Individuals may engage in a variety of forms of identity work through their actions, habits, posture, and talk (Snow & Anderson, 1987). It is this discursive identity work that I explore among young men. Identity work becomes a means by which men “do gender” (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Through it, gender is produced and reproduced in our social relationships in dynamic and dialectic fashion. Thus, men will deploy masculinity in some contexts but not others (Connell, 1995). In this case, the discursive identity work entails masculinity assertions of gender identity within the context of discussing sexual experiences. I look at how these young men use discursive identity work to harmonize their social roles, identities, and self-concept within the context of describing their recent sexual experiences. In the ensuing paper, I explore how men construct various forms of masculinity and how these enactments of gender inform sexual interactions with female partners, conceptions of intimacy, and sexual behaviors. In particular, this paper provides an analysis of how idealized masculinity is expressed via sexual narratives. Methods A diverse sample of young heterosexual men completed qualitative in-depth interviews with trained staff as part of the Club Drugs and Health project – a study designed to examine a range of health issues among 400 young adults (ages 18-29) who participate in club subcultures. Each of the subjects enrolled in the project participated in a qualitative interview at baseline and then+ once every four months for a one year period. Baseline interview transcripts were coded and analyzed to further understand conceptions of masculinity among heterosexual men and how it relates to male sexual activity. Qualitative interviews were conducted using Critical Incident Measures to elicit sexual narratives. These qualitative narratives described recent sexual encounters – consisting of narratives relating both sober sexual activity and sexual activity under the influence of alcohol and/or club drugs – and were analyzed for assertions of masculinity within the language used in discussing sexuality, the concordance/discordance of behavior and identity, and reasons for engaging or not engaging in certain sexual activities. Emphasis was placed on how men describe their sexual encounters with women in narrative form. Prior to discussing to the qualitative data I want to discuss the interview context as a social transaction. After coding the data for masculinity assertions, I began to think about my use of the framework of identity work. Since each interview can be thought of as a social transaction, I began to think about the interview context as a determinant of identity work. Given the contestation of gender norms within same-gender circumstances, I hypothesized that the subjects would make more masculinity assertions in the presence of other men. I took the coded data and categorized the interviews into 3 categories: no masculinity assertions, lone masculinity assertion, and multiple masculinity assertions. I dropped the lone masculinity assertions out of the analysis because it was a 50/50 split between interviewer gender. As shown in Table 1, the instances of multiple masculinity assertions were significantly more likely to be concentrated in the interviews conducted by male staff. Results The first element of masculinity assertions that I’d like to highlight revolve around assertions of sexual identity. When starting off the sexuality component of the in- depth interview, we asked everyone their general feelings about their sexuality. Many men were quick to assert their heterosexual identity despite that the question did not relate to sexual identity. For instance, a typical question by an interviewer was, “Can you tell me generally how you feel about your sexuality?” Amongst other things their responses included, “Um… I’m straight.”, “Completely straight. I like girls a lot.” and, “How do I feel about it? … I’m straight and I really don’t think about it too much.” These men asserted their masculinity through adhering to dominant heteronormative prescriptions for making it clear that they are not gay. Discussions of male and female wiring became a means for constructing masculinity by drawing clear distinctions between themselves and their feminine counterparts. Men, themselves included, are discussed as sexual animals with appetites, whereas women operate differently in both desire and function. For instance a young man said, “Everything makes me want sex. I’m a guy. C’mon, guys think about sex every 6 seconds.” Another echoed these sentiments saying, “Isn’t that the typical modus operandi for anything with a Y chromosome?” Another young man contrasted male and female sexuality saying, “It’s not that hard to get a guy off. Insert, somewhere preferably moist, repeat. To get a girl off is a fuckin’ art form.” It is well known that men in many societies consider it normative for men to be the active partner in the sexual interaction. But the ways in which men construct this activity can serve to further assert their masculinity. Besides simply characterizing their active role in the sexual interaction, some men draw upon imagery of a machine to further assert a masculine identity. One exchange between the interviewer and respondent was: I: What kind of sex did you have that night? R: “Jackhammer sex. I pounded the hell out of her.” Another young man said, “I’m there for one purpose only and that’s to get off. So, if I’ve got to pound the hell out of her or flip her upside down, I’ll do what I have to do to get the mission done.” Another described a sexual experience in a club and said, “So, I bent her over the fuckin’ sink. It’s plowing time.” The young man providing this first quote likens himself to a jackhammer. Men often discussed “plowing,” “pounding,” or “banging” women. Such mechanical assertions served to further deploy their masculine identities. The discussion of a lack of male expressivity or emotion may further serve as a means to construct masculinity. “I’ve had girlfriends who like it when I talk dirty, but I could never keep it up for more than a couple of sentences because I lose my train of thought. I don’t want to talk. If I wanted to talk to you, I wouldn’t have sex with you. I’d sit down and talk to you. The reason I’m having sex with you is because I don’t want to talk, I want to have sex. If I wanted to have a conversation, I’d go down to Starbucks and get a cup of coffee.” In this quote, this young man discusses a disinterest in talking during sex. This coheres with the stereotypic conception of the male as disinterested in communication and concerned with physicality. This focus on physicality is at the core of this man’s masculinity assertion. He ultimately mentions that if he wanted conversation, he’d go down to the Starbucks and get a cup of coffee. Also related to the active nature of men however is their ambivalence towards performing oral sex. Some of this indirectly relates to how men construct their masculinity through a desire to perform with their penis. Some viewed oral sex as unnecessary or others as dirty, sloppy, and gross. The following exchange was but one example: I: “Did you give your girl some oral action too?” R: “Yeah, I definitely hooked it up. I put on my bib and went to work.” Another young man said, “I tell you, some guys say they like it, but they’re lying. They only do it because…” And another admitted to an oral sex double-standard among men. “It’s just that it kind off grosses me out, but I don’t mind them doing it to me.” The first man refers to putting on his bib, which draws in imagery of messiness and creating a barrier between himself and this messiness. Other men simply refuse stating that it is “gross”, yet of course they do not mind receiving oral sex themselves. This is fundamentally about an expression of power and male privilege. Further related to the issue of gendered power relations and male privilege is that many men assert their masculinity through the objectification of women. We came across the use of the word “slam whore,” which is likened to a “fuck buddy” – a woman who will have sex with a man without the “hassle” of a relationship – yet the image of a slam whore evokes a sense of domination. Other men objectify by merely treating their sexual partners as objects for their own pleasure. “I was happy ‘cause if she wasn’t here, I would have been smackin’ it to some friggin’ magazines. So, I was glad it was a person.” Another young man said, “You just want a girl in the club if you’re piss drunk. You might not care about condoms. I don’t know this girl, throw a bag on her head, you know?” Some men are simply glad they had a woman, regardless of who it was, suggesting a detached sex of intimacy and raw sexual physicality. Objectification continued with men discussing women as sexual conquests, such as saying “I was like, ‘Wow, I did that? Great!” “That” being a woman and not even dignifying her with the appropriate pronoun. Other forms of objectification came with referring to women as bitches, whores, or simply pussy. The following exchange was typical: R: Well, once I had sex with two whores, so I don’t know. I: Once you had sex with two horses? R: (laughs) No, I mean two bitches. Another young man succinctly stated, “All I can think about is pussy when I’m drunk.” In this respect, men constructed their masculinity through a portrayal of women serving the function of fulfilling male needs. Distancing is a classic form of discursive identity work. Distancing from sexual dysfunction was a concern for many men given that dysfunction is perceived to be in direct conflict with their masculine identities. These issues of dysfunction were particularly germane within the context of sex under the influence of alcohol or drugs. One young man asserted his masculinity through the following quote: “I don’t know if you know, but doing a lot of coke, it’s a little hard to get hard. But then I persevered through it.” Another young man said, “Coke can go one way or the other. Coke can make me fuckin’ limp as a ramen noodle or make me a fuckin’ porn star.” In discussing dysfunction, men often hedged their bets in a variety of ways in attempts to preserve their masculinity. Some men discussed issues of perseverance, as if connected to the ideal of rugged individualism, through which they could prove their masculinity by overcoming the dysfunction. Other men leave themselves a way out, by acknowledging the dysfunction but by asserting that they still performed on other occasions. Other men constructed their masculinity by distancing themselves from dysfunction simply by making it clear that they do not have a problem. “It takes longer to reach orgasm. Not that I feel I have any performance problems.” Another said, “I’ve never gotten to the point that I cannot get an erection.” The following exchange ended with the respondent barking at the interviewer in their discussion of dysfunction. I: A lot of guys report having problems performing when using coke. It doesn’t sound like an issue for you. R: NO! In some cases men had to contend with the issue of female sexual agency. These often led to dismissals of female agency in a means to juxtapose their own masculine identity through identifying gender non-conformity among their partners. One young man said, “Girls who approach guys usually tend to so that more than once and if she has a history… I don’t really talk to her much to know about that but if she has a history, I don’t want to get anything from her.” Such men were often dismissive suggesting that women who expressed sexual agency were potentially disease carriers or had problems with nymphomania. Another said, “She might be a nympho.” In other instances, women who were expressing sexual agency were described as begging for it, which of course evokes a sense of these men having unbearable desirability. Typical of such assertions was the young man who said, “She was basically begging for it.” Of course a fundamental means by which men constructed their masculinity was by discussing their sexual prowess. Some men liked themselves to athletes or champions connecting their sexual exploits to physical feats. One man noted, “It’s pleasurable because you’re having so much of it and it kind of turns into a sport, you know? You feel like an Olympic athlete. So that’s fun.” Another young man touted his one night stands saying, “I loved it. I never did the one night stand thing, so every time I did it I felt like a champ.” Others likened themselves to masculine animals, such as bulls, in order to assert their masculinity. “I was fucking like a bull.” Such assertions evoked images of virility and ruggedness. Others discussed their prowess by asserting that they could do things that other men couldn’t, most commonly being that of brining female partners to orgasm. One young man touted his ability to provide women with pleasure by saying, “I can make them like twenty, thirty orgasms. I work as a bartender so the women talk to me sometimes. They tell me they don’t have orgasms… so, you know, I can make it… ten or fifteen.” Another said, “For instance some women don’t have orgasms. Some of them have their own partners but they don’t please them, so sometimes I please them, you know what I mean.” Despite that some expressions of prowess border on the implausible, such instances of fictive expression still account for how men conceptualize themselves and assert their masculinity. Discussion Men engage in “identity work” to construct various masculinities when discussing sex in an attempt to harmonize them with their sexual self-concepts. Though this identity work occurs in a variety of forms, discursive identity work is a key mechanism to construct masculinity in sexual stories. The identity work involved in interviewing will yield a particular type of gendered data. I suggest that the practice of gender matching should be re-examined as the social transaction will yield a particular type of data. Assertions of masculinity should not be blindly considered to be a better type of data, simply a different type of data. The dynamics of gender power can be seen in the sexual narratives of heterosexual men. Many men asserted their masculine dominance in a variety of ways from the objectification of women, to male sexual privilege, to discounting female sexual agency. Even the tempered nature of the discussion of sexuality by men in relationships about current romantic partners suggests an element of protection and control by these men. These constructions of masculinity are discursively reproduced by heterosexual men and provide a means for them to harmonize their masculine identity with their sexuality, social roles, and self-concepts. In sum, the telling of sexual stories provides a forum for young men to engage in identity work as a means of harmonizing their sense of self with their performance of gender. Table 1. Masculinity Assertions Interviewer Gender No Masculinity* Assertions Multiple Masculinity* Assertions Female 8 (66.7%) 4 (33.3%) Male 2 (9.5%) 19 (90.5%) * Statistically significant diff at p < .001 level

Accounts of sexual identity formation in heterosexual students

2009-01-18T14:46:00.002+05:30

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, June, 1995 by Michele J. Eliason

Very little research has focused on the ways that heterosexual people perceive their sexual identity. This paper explores heterosexual identity from the standpoint of an established identity model, that of James Marcia. Twenty-six heterosexual undergraduate students (14 men: 3 African-American, 1 Latino, and 10 White, and 12 women: 3 African-American, 1 Latina, and 8 White) wrote two-three page essays on how their sexual identities formed and how they influence their daily lives. Students could be categorized into all four of Marcia's identity statuses Additionally, six common themes were noted in their essays: had never thought about sexual identity; society made me heterosexual; gender determines sexual identity; issues of choice versus innateness of sexuality; no alternative to heterosexuality; and the influence of religion.

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The vast majority of literature on sexual identity has taken one of two forms: studies of gay or lesbian identity development or studies of heterosexuals' attitudes about lesbian, gay, or bisexual people. These studies often assume that heterosexuals are a monolithic, stable group with predictable attitudes about nonheterosexuals and a consistent and clear sense of their own (hetero)sexual identity. Rarely has research addressed the question of how heterosexuals achieve a sexual identity, or questioned the stability or homogeneity of this identity, or indeed, asked whether most heterosexuals experience themselves as even having a sexual identity.

One of the earliest theoretical models of heterosexuality comes from Freud. Weeks (1985) described the evolution of Freud's theory of sexuality as follows. Freud ultimately felt that a sexual identity was a precarious construct, always threatened by repressed desires. Sexual identity formation begins shortly after birth, as the child progresses through psychosexual stages. Freud felt that a key component of sexuality was the early assumption of the child that all humans are genitally alike, with a penis. When faced with people without penises, boys could develop castration anxiety and girls could develop penis envy. These emotions paved the way for the Oedipal complex of the phallic stage, whereby the child learns to repress sexual desire for the mother and to identify with the same-sex parent. If the conflict is successfully resolved, at maturity the individual will select partners of the other gender. Freud thought that humans were born "polymorphously perverse" or capable of sexual attractions to anyone (or thing), and only by a complex and traumatic psychic family drama, did heterosexual identity emerge. In his three essays on sexuality in 1905, Freud follows a discussion of homosexuality with this statement. "Thus, from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature" (p. 11). Interestingly, homosexual desire is a key component of early sexuality, as the lines of desire and identification blur. de Kuyper (1993) suggested that "normal" resolution of the Oedipal complex results in male homophobia (fear of one's own homosexual desires). Freud is one of the few theorists of this century to point out the constructedness of heterosexuality, but few who followed him pursued this point.

Erik Erikson (1986) was among the first of contemporary theorists to stress the importance of identity development. He suggested that personal identity leads to individuality and consists of authentic truths about one's self. In his developmental stage theory, Erikson proposed that identity is the major crisis of the adolescent (at least for males; Erikson thought that identity and intimacy were achieved more or less simultaneously for women, since he thought that a woman's identity depended on a relationship to a man). In Erikson's scheme, adolescence or young adulthood would be a crucial time of achieving identity, unlike Freud, who thought that events in early childhood most strongly influenced the emergence of an identity in adolescence. For Erikson, heterosexuality is assumed and no alternative models of sexual identity are available. Yet, his theory is significant, as he proposed that the adolescent identity crisis must be resolved before healthy intimate relationships are possible.

James Marcia (1987) proposed that identity could exist in different states or statuses, depending on whether exploration and commitment were present. The four identity statuses that he described were:

1. diffusion--the person has no active sense of identity and there has been no exploration and no commitment to any identity.

2. foreclosure--the person has accepted an identity imposed by another or by societal expectations. This person accepts the identity without critique and without exploring options.

3. moratorium--the person is in the active stage of exploring an identity, but has not yet made a commitment.

(to read more click on the site here)

Reversible switches between male–male and male–female mating behaviour by male damselflies

2009-01-09T20:40:00.002+05:30

For many animal groups, both sexes have been reported to attempt to mate with members of their own sex. Such behaviour challenges theories of sexual selection, which predict optimization of reproductive success. We tested male mate choice between opposite- and same-sex members in the damselfly Ischnura elegans. Binary choice experiments were conducted following exposure periods in insectaries with only males or with both sexes present. We show that switches in choice between the opposite sex and the same sex can be induced and reversed again by changing the social context. We argue that the observed reversibility in male–male- and male–female-directed mating behaviour is maladaptive and a consequence of strong selection on a male's ability to alter choice between different female colour morphs.

Note from Reclaiming Natural Manhood site: Interesting research, but still has several loopholes resulting in imperfect and misleading results.

2009-01-09T20:38:00.001+05:30

......

Sex as Male Bonding

2008-12-11T21:47:00.003+05:30

(p. 205-208)

In some ways, "hooking up" (with girls) represents the ... general aversion of young men to adulthood. They don't want girlfriends or serious relationships, in part, because they don't feel themselves ready, and in part because they see relationships as "too much work". Instead they want the benefit of adult relationships, which for them seem to be exclusively sexual, with none of the responsibility that goes with adult sexuality - the emotional connection, caring, mutuality, and sometimes even the common human decency that mature sexual relationships demand. Simply put "hooking up" is the form of relationship guys want with girls.

Yet its a bit more complicated than simple pleasure-seeking on the part of guys, because as it turns out pleasure isn't the first item on the hookup agenda. In fact, pleasure barely appears on the list at all. If sex were the goal, a guy would have a much better chance of having more (and better) sex if he had a steady girlfriend. Instead, guys hook up to prove something to other guys. The actual experience of sex pales in comparison to the experience of talking about sex.

When I've just got laid, the first thing I think about -- really, I shouldn't be telling you this, but really is the very first thing before I've even like "finished" -- that I can't wait to tell my crew who I just did. Like, I say to myself, "Omigod, they're not going to believe that I just did Kristy!" -- Ted, a 21-year old junior at Wisconsin University.

Hooking up may have less to do with guys' relationships with women and more to do with guys relationships with other guys. "Its like… the girls you hook up , they're, like a way of showing off to other guys," says Jeff, a proud member of a fraternity at the University of Northern Iowa. I mean you tell your friends you hooked up with Melissa, and they're like 'whoa, dude, you are one stud!' so I'm into Melissa because my guy friends think she is so hot, and now they think more of me because of it. It’s totally a guy thing."

He looks a bit sheepish "don’t get me wrong," he adds, with little affect "I mean Melissa is nice and blah blah blah.. I like her yeah."

"But," he lights up again: "The guys think I totally rule."

Jeff's comments echo those I heard from guys all across the country. Hooking up is not for whatever pleasures one might derive from drunken sex on a given weekend. Hooking up is a way that guys communicate with other guys - its about homosociality. Its a way that guys compete with each other establish a pecking order of cool studliness and attempt to move up in the rankings.

"Oh definitely," says Adam , a 26-year old Dartmouth graduate now working in financial services in Boston. "I mean why do you think its called scoring? It’s like you’re scoring with women, but your scoring ON the other guys. Getting over on a girl is the best way of getting your guys approval.

His friend, Dave, 28, sitting next to him at the bar is also a Dartmouth graduate. He nods, "Its not ... a simple tally, ... Its like WHO did you get? That’s how my guys, well... That's how we evaluated you for membership in the worldwide fraternity of guys."

They both laugh.

References for "Sexual Orientation" is a Western and invalid Concept

2008-11-21T15:51:00.001+05:30

^ The Psychology of Sexual Orientation, Behaviour, and identity By Louis Diamant, Richard D. McAnulty;Published by Greenwood Publishing Group, 1995; ISBN 0313285012, 9780313285011; 522 pages; Quote from page 81: Although sexual orientation is a loaded Western concept, the term is still a useful one, if we avoid imposing Western thoughts and meanings associated with our language on non-Western, noncontemporary cultures.
^ The Handbook of Social Work Direct Practice By Paula Allen-Meares, Charles D. Garvin; Contributor Paula Allen-Meares, Charles D. Garvin; Published by SAGE, 2001, ISBN 0761914994, 9780761914990 733 pages; Quote from page 478: The concept of sexual orientation is a product of contemporary Western thought.
^ Sexual behavior and the non-construction of sexual identity: Implications for the analysis of men who have sex with men and women who have sex with women. Michael W. Ross & Ann K. Brooks; Quote from Page 9: Chou (2000) notes in his analysis of the lack of applicability of western concepts of sexual identity in China, just because a person has a particular taste for a specific food doesn’t mean that we label them in terms of the food that they prefer. A similar approach to sexual appetite as not conferring identity may be operating in this sample. McIntosh (1968) has previously noted that people who do not identify with the classic western, white gay/lesbian role may not necessarily identify their behavior as homosexual
^ Transnational Transgender: Reading Sexual Diversity in Cross-Cultural Contexts Through Film and Video; Ryan, Joelle Ruby; American Studies Association; Quote: Many of the projects which have historically investigated sex/gender variance in non-Western contexts have been ethnographies and anthropological studies. Due to strong and lingering problems with ethnocentrism, many of these research studies have attempted to transpose a Western understanding of sex, gender and sexuality onto cultures in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Terms such as “homosexual,” “transvestite,” and “transsexual” all arose out of Western concepts of identity based on science, sexology and medicine and often bear little resemblance to sex/gender/sexuality paradigms in the varied cultures of the developing world.
^ Sexual Orientation, Human Rights and Global Politics Matthew Waits, Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, United Kingdom; email: m.waites@lbss.gla.ac.uk; web: http://www.gla.ac.uk/departments/sociology/staff/waites.html ; Quote from the Abstract: The paper problematises utilisation of the concept of 'sexual orientation' in moves to revise human rights conventions and discourses in the light of social constructionist and queer theory addressing sexuality, which has convincingly suggested that 'sexual orientation' is a culturally specific concept, misrepresenting many diverse forms of sexuality apparent in comparative sociological and anthropological research conducted worldwide. I will argue in particular that 'orientation' is a concept incompatible with bisexuality when interpreted within the context of dominant dualistic assumptions about sex, gender and desire in western culture (suggested by Judith Butler's concept of the 'heterosexual matrix'). I will discuss the implications of the this for interpreting contemporary struggles among competing social movements, NGO and governmental actors involved in contesting the relationship of sexuality to human rights as defined by the United Nations.
^ [1] McIntosh argues that the labelling process should be the focus of inquiry and that homosexuality should be seen as a social role rather than a condition. Role is more useful than condition, she argues, because roles (of heterosexual and homosexual) can be dichotomised in a way that behaviour cannot. She draws upon cross-cultural data to demonstrate that in many societies 'there may be much homosexual behaviour, but there are no "homosexuals"' (p71).

Dude you're a fag

2008-10-10T20:31:00.002+05:30

High school and the difficult terrain of sexuality and gender identity are brilliantly explored in this smart, incisive ethnography. Based on eighteen months of fieldwork in a racially diverse working-class high school, Dude, You're a Fag sheds new light on masculinity both as a field of meaning and as a set of social practices. C. J. Pascoe's unorthodox approach analyzes masculinity as not only a gendered process but also a sexual one. She demonstrates how the "specter of the fag" becomes a disciplinary mechanism for regulating heterosexual as well as homosexual boys and how the "fag discourse" is as much tied to gender as it is to sexuality.
Contents
Acknowledgments

1. Making Masculinity: Adolescence, Identity, and High School
Revenge of the Nerds
What Do We Mean by Masculinity?
Bringing in Sexuality
Rethinking Masculinity, Sexuality, and Bodies
Methodology
Organization of the Book

2. Becoming Mr. Cougar: Institutionalizing Heterosexuality and Masculinity at River High
River High's Gender and Sexuality Curriculum
Pedagogy: The Unofficial Gender and Sexuality Curriculum
School Rituals: Performing and Policing Gender and Sexuality
Gender and Sexuality Regimes

3. Dude, You're a Fag: Adolescent Male Homophobia
What Is a Fag? Gendered Meanings
Becoming a Fag: Fag Fluidity
Embodying the Fag: Ricky's Story
Racializing the Fag
Where the Fag Disappears: Drama Performances
Reframing Homophobia

4. Compulsive Heterosexuality: Masculinity and Dominance
A Stud with the Ladies
Getting Girls
Touching
Sex Talk
Girls Respond
I'm Different from Other Guys
Females Are the Puppets

5. Look at My Masculinity! Girls Who Act Like Boys
Tomboy Pasts
Rebeca and the Basketball Girls
The Homecoming Queen: Jessie Chau
The Gay/Straight Alliance Girls
Embodying Masculinity

6. Conclusion: Thinking about Schooling, Gender, and Sexuality
Masculinity at River High
Theoretical Implications
Practical Steps

Appendix: What If a Guy Hits on You? Intersections of Gender, Sexuality, and Age in Fieldwork with Adolescents
Notes
References
Index
About The Author
C.J. Pascoe is Postdoctoral Scholar with the Digital Youth Project at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley.
Awards
Outstanding Book Award, American Education Research Association

Men, Sex and Mateship: How homosociality shapes men's heterosexual relations

2008-10-10T18:48:00.002+05:30

Dr Michael Flood

Abstract

Cutting-edge scholarship in Women’s Studies and Sexuality Studies recognises that gender and sexual relations are organised in part by local contexts and communities, personal and social networks, and other axes of social differentiation. Yet these insights only rarely have been applied to or tested among heterosexual men. This paper extends contemporary theorisations of gender, sexuality, and social life by examining the homosocial organisation of men’s heterosexual relations. Qualitative research among young straight men finds that their sexual relations with women are structured and given meaning by their social relations with other me n. Homosociality organises the male- female sociosexual relations of some young heterosexual men in at least five ways. First, male- male relations take priority over male-female non-sexual relations, and platonic friendships with women are dangerously feminising and rare if not impossible. Second, sexual activity is a key path to masculine status. Third, other men are the audience, always imagined and sometimes real, for one’s sexual activities. Fourth, heterosexual sex itself can be the medium through which male bonding is enacted. Lastly, men’s sexual storytelling is shaped by homosocial masculine cultures. Assessing the workings of male homosociality is significant in theorisations of both heterosexuality and masculinity.

Bionote
Dr Michael Flood is a Lecturer in the Centre for Women’s Studies at the Australian National University. His research interests include feminist scholarship on men and masculinities, sexualities and especially heterosexuality, interpersonal violence, sexual and reproductive health and HIV/AIDS, and boys and youth cultures.

Citation
Flood, Michael (2003) Men, Sex and Mateship: How homosociality shapes men’s heterosexual relations. Paper to (Other) Feminisms: An International Women’s and Gender Studies Conference, University of Queensland, 12-16 July.

2008-10-10T18:47:00.001+05:30

.....

Marriage reduces dementia risk

2008-08-02T11:09:00.002+05:30

The Times of India
New Delhi
Saturday, Augurst 02

Being single in middle age might increase risk of dementia. But being married halves the chance of developing Alzheimer's disease, says a study. A team at Karolinska Institute in Sweden has carried out the study and found the imporance of clse comapanionship in midlife -- and in fact, those who stay alone after divorce have a threefold risk of suffering Alzheigmer's in later life. According to researchers, the study has highlighted a higher risk of developing memory and cognitive problems for all those who live alone, whether single, divorced or widowed -- the reason to a great extent being social isolation.

Men just tuned to lust: Study

2008-07-21T13:54:00.001+05:30

20 Jul 2008, 2359 hrs IST,PTI

TOI

LONDON: Men are tuned to lust, irrespective of whether they found the women next to them attractive or not, a study has suggested.
Men have for long been seen as judging women on looks alone, but a study has now shown that the increase in male sex hormone level was not influenced by the perceived attractiveness of the women.

Human testosterone triggers an automatic reaction which has evolved in man when faced with a woman, to look for mating opportunities, and it does not matter if the woman is not attractive, the research reveals.

The research, published in the journal Hormones and Behaviour , suggested that the levels of their testosterone surged to the same extent whether they were talking to an attractive woman or someone they may not fancy at all.

The research involving 63 male students aged 21 to 25 found that their testosterone levels increased by an average of around 8% after just 5 minutes exposure to a stranger from the opposite sex and in some cases to women they not find particularly attractive.

"We found a testosterone increase after only five minutes of exposure to a woman. Our results suggest that the increase in testosterone levels that we found, may be an automatic male response that activates receptors in organs and the nervous system to prepare the human body for mate attraction," said Leander van der Meij, who led the study at the University of Groningen in Holland.

He said with the increase in testosterone levels males tend to display more dominant behaviour.

"They talk more with their hands, there is more eye contact, their posture is more upright, and they are more likely to tell stories designed to impress the woman. We know that women can be attracted by these kinds of things. All this, we believe, may be fuelled by the rise in testosterone that we have found," said der Meij.

Aggressive males showed greater rise in testosterone levels, an idea supported by research that men who exhibit more dominant-like behaviour tend to make more frequent successful contact with females.

In Brief Rams Will Be Rams

2008-05-16T23:27:00.000+05:30

By Rams Will Be Rams

Sunday, July 4, 2004; Page BW07

Joan Roughgarden is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford Univeristy -- and a woman who was once a man. As such, she has a keen interest in sexual variation, a subject she addresses in Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Univ. of California, $27.50). One of the many surprising scientific findings she reports is that exclusively straight male bighorn sheep -- those who do not engage in sex with other males -- are, from many points of view, "effeminate." "These males are identical in appearance to other males," she writes, "but behave quite differently. They differ from 'normal males' by living with the ewes rather than joining all-male groups. These males do not dominate females, are less aggressive overall, and adopt a crouched, female urination posture." Meanwhile, most male bighorn sheep are busy having intercourse with both females and other males. "This case," as Roughgarden adds, "turns the meanings of normal and aberrant upside down."

Today's youth has no time for love

2006-09-17T23:36:00.000+05:30

Love Takes Time. Singles Say They Don't Have Any.

By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 26, 2006; D02

Think romance is alive and well among young singles? That twenty-somethings are checking each other out in the office and cruising the bars at night, looking for someone to love? You might want to think again.

The major love story these days is this: maybe later.

It's not that they take relationships lightly, or that they don't want to become attached -- eventually. It's just, who has the time? They're working their butts off at college or in jobs that barely cover the rent and feel obligated to find fulfilling, well-paid careers. It will be easier to make their marks, they think, unfettered by relationships that, let's face it, can be so distracting.

This came as something of a surprise to researchers Lee Rainie and Mary Madden at the Pew Research Center when, in going over data in a larger dating survey, they discovered that among 18-to-29-year-olds, only slightly more than a third said they were in committed relationships. Among the remaining, more were not looking than looking.

The numbers do not astonish Pouya Dianat, 20, or Montana Wojczuk, 26, however.

"My job here is the most important thing I do," says Dianat, a staff photographer for the Diamondback, the student newspaper at the University of Maryland in College Park. A junior workaholic who has been known to sleep overnight in the office, he says, "I want to be the best. Any girlfriend would have to put up with that. . . . If she stumbled in front of me, I might get interested. Otherwise, no."

Wojczuk breezed through jobs in advertising, retail sales and grant-writing before ending up as an assistant in a talent and literary agency in Manhattan. "A relationship takes so much time and energy, and there's so much stuff I want to do with my career," she says. "I'm not that interested in looking."

Are they saying there's no use in starting to look until they're ready to stop looking? Not exactly, says Philip Morgan, professor of sociology at Duke University. They're simply being strategic: "Active looking requires altering their routine in some way, and they're not willing to do that yet."

Even flirting with the idea of a relationship requires effort, sometimes more than they're willing to give. "Sometimes I make plans to have a drink with someone, but I'm too tired," says Tiffany Sharples, 24, who works at a travel magazine in Manhattan. "Or a press event comes up at the last minute, so I cancel. Things get stymied before they get off the ground."

All of this raises questions among those a generation or two older. Are our grown children simply afraid to love? Afraid of the potential for either being hurt or hurting someone else? Maybe. Many of them have been in at least one relationship that ended badly or dragged on longer than it should have. They've also observed a fair number of marriages fall apart, from those of their parents or friends' parents to their own friends.

Instead, their friends are their partners. "I go into most social situations just wanting to expand my circle of friends," says Kate Campbell, a senior and 21-year-old reporter for the Diamondback. "I'd rather do that than troll for guys."

Relationships, they say, imply commitment, and commitment can consume too much personal space and time. College students talk about couples they know who take courses together, eat all their meals together and sleep together. That togetherness continues after college, says Matt McFarland, a 25-year-old sales rep who lives in Rockville. "I have guy friends who can't go out on Friday nights, or have to leave parties early. Who needs that?"

McFarland works 65 hours a week. He also goes to the gym three or four times a week and spends Friday and Saturday nights in bars or clubs. He and his buddies aren't lonely, he says. "There's a lot of casual hooking up."

Hooking up, an uncommitted sexual encounter, has become synonymous with dating, says Ele Izadi, a 21-year-old senior and Diamondback writer. Easy to do and carrying no obligations, it's a convention that is tailor-made for the time-pressed. And it has turned Izadi off to any relationships at this time. "All guys want is the physical," she says.

Some singles still date occasionally. But after the second or third date -- or hookup -- with the same person, they find they must confront a question: "What are we?" Leah Veneziano, 25 and a sometime TV guest host in Philadelphia, is in that situation with a guy whom she has seen four times. "He's moving toward a relationship, and I don't want those restraints." She is about to call it off.

"Why start something now that has no destination?" asks sophomore Brendan Lowe, 20, the Diamondback's deputy news editor.

Could it be that this generation takes relationships too seriously?

If so, we shouldn't be surprised. From their preschool days on, they've heard messages of boundless opportunity and high expectations: First the perfect school record, then the perfect job. Why settle, then, for anyone but the perfect mate?

The phrase "in time" is key, says Jeffrey Arnett, a research professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., who has spent much of his career studying what he calls "emerging adults."

"We've given them the freedom to take their time to decide what their adult life is going to look like. We don't have the expectations anymore that they should be married at 21 and have their first baby at 22. Fifty years ago, that would have been normal, but now, what's the hurry?"

The researchers at Pew, a nonprofit initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts, were pursuing a larger project about online dating when they came across the young-singles data: 38 percent in committed relationships and 38 percent neither in committed relationships nor looking for them. Twenty-two percent were not in relationships but looking.

Wojczuk, the agent's assistant in New York, is certainly in no hurry. "I aspire to have it all," she says, "and not just in my career but my appearance, my activities and, at some point, a partner who reflects my best self."

And what kind of man would that be?

"Someone who's really smart and driven, but leaves work at work. Someone who goes out in the world, who likes the arts and doesn't take himself too seriously. Someone who gets my jokes, has a sense of humor and can get me out of my worry."

She admits she has "a lot of expectations. I'm sure I'll come to the point where I'm willing to compromise."

Until then, she's enjoying her girlfriends. "It's a lot safer just to hang out with them."

(Source: The Washington Times)

Studies on Sexuality are misleading

2006-09-16T11:45:00.001+05:30

New York Times, May 11, 2006

"Patterns of Deceit Raise Concerns About Teenage Sex Surveys"
by Eric Nagourney.

New York, May 10: Does signing a virginity pledge after you have had sex make you a virgin
again?

It hardly seems likely. But how else to explain a new study in which teenagers who said they had had sex in one survey then signed a pledge and told a different story in a survey a year later?

The study, which appears in the June issue of The American Journal of Public Health, was based on surveys by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development involving more than 13,000 students in grades 7 to 12.

The students were questioned two times, a year apart.

The most delicate questions were given through headphones, and the
students typed their answers into a computer.

Among the questions students were asked: "Have you taken a public or written pledge to remain a virgin until marriage?" They were also asked if they had had sexual intercourse.

In the first survey, about 13 percent of the students said they had taken a pledge of virginity. In the second survey, the study found, more than half of that group denied having taken one.

Those who reported having sexual relations for the first time in the second survey were three times as likely to retract a virginity pledge as those who did report having had sex then.

About a third of the students said in the first survey that they had had sex, but about 10 percent of them denied it when asked the second time.

Those who had newly made a pledge were four times as likely to retract reports of sexual activity.

Why did so many students change their stories? "We can't really get inside their heads and know what they're thinking," said the study's author, Janet Rosenbaum, a doctoral student at the Harvard School of Public Health. But the study raises questions about how much reliance
should be placed on surveys about sexual activity among teenagers, and how accurately experts can measure the results of programs that encourage them to abstain from sex to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

"Survey respondents typically reconcile their memories with their present beliefs," the study said. "Respondents may recall only memories consistent with their current beliefs or report actions that did not occur but are consistent with their current beliefs."

Such behavior is not unheard of when it comes to surveys. Studies have found, for example, that people who tell survey takers before an election that it is important to vote are more likely to claim falsely later that they did.

But there is a big difference between what happens in the voting booth and what happens in the bedroom or the car.

"Self-reported voting can be verified with official voting records," Ms. Rosenbaum wrote, "but self-reported sexual abstinence cannot."

Apart from what it says about the reliability of the pledges and abstinence programs, the study also raises concerns about whether they may make tracking sexually transmitted diseases more difficult.

"I think all of this has public health implications, particularly with respect to S.T.D.'s, insofar as we are not getting a clear picture from teens' own report of their sexual activity," said Cynthia Dailard, a public policy analyst at the Guttmacher Institute, a research and advocacy group that studies reproductive rights.

Science and Crime, They're Young Men's Pursuits

2006-09-15T13:49:00.000+05:30

Nature reports that scientist, like criminals, do their best work when they are young and single. Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science found that 65% of eminent scientists published their most significant work before they were 35. Similarly, criminals, do their most audacious crimes when they are younger than 30.

It seems that once you get a wife and settle down that old fire in the belly tends to reduce to a bit of a smoulder.

Of course this research has limited credibility as Satoshi Kanazawa was 40 at the time it was published.

(Source, the green man)

Men and Women Really Do Think Differently

2006-09-15T13:26:00.007+05:30

Live Science

By Bjorn Carey, LiveScience Staff Writer

20 January 2005

Men and women do think differently, at least where the anatomy of the brain is concerned, according to a new study.

The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance.

Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine led the research along with colleagues from the University of New Mexico. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men.

"These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior," said Haier, adding that, "by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas, the study has the potential to aid research on dementia and other cognitive-impairment diseases in the brain."

The results are detailed in the online version of the journal NeuroImage.

In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers.

The results from this study may help explain why men and women excel at different types of tasks, said co-author and neuropsychologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, Jung said, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills.

Scientists find it very interesting that while men and women use two very different activity centers and neurological pathways, men and women perform equally well on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as intelligence tests.

This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84 percent of gray matter regions and 86 percent of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these regions in a man’s frontal lobes are 45 percent and zero, respectively. This matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.

Both Haier and Jung hope that this research will someday help doctors diagnose brain disorders in men and women earlier, as well as provide help designing more effective and precise treatments for brain damage.

(Source: Live Science)

Men more fashion-conscious than women

2006-09-15T13:26:00.006+05:30

Hindustan Times, January 27, 2003

HT Youth Survey

Namita Bhandare

Young Indians in cities across the country are extremely conscious about the brands they wear. Individualism has hit a low and Generation Now would rather wear the latest fashion and be part of a group than rebel and stand alone outside the circle of their peers, finds a five-city survey.

The survey commissioned by Hindustan Times and conducted by Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) Mode of young Indians in the age group 16 to 24 finds that Generation Now is anything but a bindaas, anything-goes generation.

On the contrary, this generation is concerned about the impression it makes on others and in being part of a group.

Contrary to general perception, men are actually more fashion-conscious than women. Predictably younger age groups (16 to 18 years) are the most fashion-conscious.

Where brands go, men are just as brand-conscious as women. Cutting across the age divide too, those in the 16 to 18 years age bracket said they were as brand-conscious as those in the 19 to 21 years age bracket.

Forty-seven per cent of our respondents in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chandigarh said it is important for them to be part of a group. Another 32 percent said it was "somewhat important" to belong to a group and only seven percent said it wasn't at all important to them.

A fourth of our respondents believe that you can tell a lot about a person by the brand he or she wears. Another 27 percent "agreed somewhat" with the statement. When we asked how important it was to wear the latest fashion, 32 percent said it was very important and another 30 percent said it was "some what important". Only 13 percent said it wasn't important at all.

We also asked young Indians how concerned they were about the impression they made on other people: 53 percent had no qualms admitting they were terribly concerned about the impression other people formed about them and another 29 percent said they are "somewhat concerned".

This generation is equally concerned about family and staying at home. Over half --- 59 percent --- said they'd rather live at home with their families than on their own.

For 32 percent of our respondents, spending a quiet evening at home with their family was more important than going out to party. However, given a choice, 30 percent said they'd opt to go to a party.

And, Generation Now certainly isn't short on ideals. A vast majority believes that job satisfaction is more important than making money.

While nearly 80 percent believe the standard of living is higher in other countries, only 54 percent would, given an opportunity, rather settle down abroad.

In a country where global brands are now readily available, perhaps there isn't as much need.

A friend can mend a broken heart

2006-09-15T13:26:00.005+05:30

James Meikle, health correspondent
Thursday April 15, 2004

Guardian

Love seems to help mend a broken heart. Having a really close relationship with another person, whether they be close friend, lover or relative, can halve the risk of suffering ongoing heart attacks, researchers suggest today.

Doctors in Manchester who monitored 600 people for a year after they suffered a heart attack found patients with someone they could confide in were only half as likely to have another heart attack as those with no one close to turn to.

The link remained after taking account of the severity of the original heart attack, the previous history of heart disease, and age.

Those without a close relationship were more likely to drink heavily, use illegal drugs, and to have had a previous heart attack, suggested the research, reported in the medical journal Heart. They were also more than twice as likely to have been separated from parents during childhood.

The screening of the patients, three-quarters of them men and with an average age of 60, included patients' assessments of their mental health before their heart attack as well as their personal histories.

About one in four of those screened had been depressed before their heart attack, but, in contrast to the findings of some previous research, they were no more likely to have another attack or die.

The authors speculate that the loss of parents early in life may reduce the chances of forming intimate relationships in adulthood.

"Alternatively, those who do not have a close confidant may delay seeking treatment for myocardial infarction [heart attack] or may be less likely to adhere to treatment afterwards," the authors say.

However, heart specialists should not ignore depression, they say. Other research had shown that depressed people were less likely to give up smoking after a heart attack.

The researchers, from Manchester royal infirmary and Manchester University's department of psychiatry, were supported by the Medical Research Council and the British Heart Foundation.

Belinda Linden, head of medical information at the BHF, which provided £160,000 for the study, said: "A close relationship, whether it be lover, friend or relative, is obviously a potentially vital source of social support, which can play an important role in both preventing coronary heart disease and enhancing recovery from attack."

The Physics of human behaviour

2006-09-15T13:26:00.004+05:30

What does this mean for the adoption of a new economics and complementary currencies?

FADS, fashions and dramatic shifts in public opinion all appear to follow a physical law: one of the laws of magnetism.

Quentin Michard of the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris and Jean-Philippe? Bouchaud of the Atomic Energy Commission in Saclay, France, were trying to explain three social trends: plummeting European birth rates in the late 20th century, the rapid adoption of cellphones in Europe in the 1990s and the way people clapping at a concert suddenly stop doing so. In each case, they theorised, individuals not only have their own preferences, but also tend to imitate others.

"Imitation is deeply rooted in biology as a survival strategy," says Bouchaud. In particular, people frequently copy others who they think know something they don't.

To model the consequences of imitation, the researchers turned to the physics of magnets. An applied magnetic field will coerce the spins of atoms in a magnetic material to point in a certain direction. And often an atom's spin direction pushes the spins of neighbouring atoms to point in a similar direction. And even if an applied field changes direction slowly, the spins sometimes flip all together and quite abruptly.

The physicists modified the model such that the atoms represented people and the direction of the spin indicated a person's behaviour, and used it to predict shifts in public opinion.

In the case of cellphones, for example, it is clear that as more people realised how useful they were, and as their price dropped, more people would buy them. But how quickly the trend took off depended on how strongly people influenced each other. The magnetic model predicts that when people have a strong tendency to imitate others, shifts in behaviour will be faster, and there may even be discontinuous jumps, with many people adopting cellphones virtually overnight.

More specifically, the model suggests that the rate of opinion change accelerates in a mathematically predictable way, with ever greater numbers of people changing their minds as the population nears the point of maximum change. Michard and Bouchaud checked this prediction against their model and found that the trends in birth rates and cellphone usage in European nations conformed quite accurately to this pattern. The same was true of the rate at which clapping died away in concerts.

(From issue 2498 of New Scientist magazine, 06 May 2005, page 15)

Expert fears problem for 1 in 3 couples fertility

2006-09-15T13:26:00.003+05:30

James Meikle, health correspondent
Tuesday June 21, 2005

The Guardian

Couples in Britain and across Europe are facing a fertility time bomb which would see as many as one in three unable to conceive without treatment in 10 years' time, a fertility expert forecast yesterday.

Bill Ledger, who runs a clinic in Sheffield, warned that a combination of women delaying having babies, a rising tide of sexually transmitted diseases, huge increases in childhood obesity and a decline in male fertility were ingredients for an alarming situation. Professor Ledger said that the infertility problem would double within a decade from its already significant levels.

About one in seven couples have problems with fertility now, and that would rise to as many as one in three to four "depending on what the population does".

About 6% of girls are thought clinically obese, a figure expected to grow unless action to improve exercise and diet is stepped up.

That could lead to problems years later when the women fail to ovulate or fall more prone to conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome.

Chlamydia cases among young women have doubled in England and Wales in recent years. This could lead again to reproduction problems 10 to 15 years down the line.

A woman's fertility plummets after the age of 35. Prof Ledger, from the University of Sheffield and the Jessop hospital in Sheffield, said France had begun to reverse the trend by offering tax breaks to encourage women to have children earlier.

The government in Britain had said "some good things about improving the quality of childcare and extending school hours" but some southern European countries might face problems as the traditional family unit broke up without the infrastructure to support single mothers or working parents.

Countries still needed the political will to allow women to have babies earlier by taking a break from their careers, and help them and their families look after their children. "This is part of a civilised society I think we should aspire to."

Prof Ledger, speaking to journalists attending the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, said: "Senior members of the Labour party have clearly agreed fertility is an illness and should be treated as that."

Fertility clinics saw the problems infertility brought on couples, including unhappiness and marital breakdown. Treatment was, he accepted, a luxury "compared with horrid cancers and heart disease but in a wealthy society, it is a luxury we can afford".

The one in seven statistic related to Britain, but Prof Ledger believed the picture was broadly the same across Europe.

Since April, the NHS in England has promised women under 40 one free cycle of IVF, which when offered privately can set couples back as much as £5,000 to £6,000 when all the costs are taken into account.

Thousands of people are travelling within Europe and going to places such as South Africa and Barbados in search of treatments.

A fertility clinic in Barbados offers holiday packages in addition to IVF treatment, which itself costs around £3,300 before the necessary drugs are taken into account.

Restrictions on fertility treatment in Italy are also thought to be encouraging women to seek help in places such as Spain, where egg donors can be paid, and eastern European countries, where costs are cheaper.

Claire Brown, the chief executive of Infertility Network UK, said the numbers of those seeking fertility treatment abroad were "increasing for a number of reasons, including waiting lists in the UK, shortage of donors and the fact donor anonymity was removed.

"The treatment is extremely stressful and a holiday gives you something to get your mind off it a bit more and gives you the opportunity to relax a bit more."

Jean Paul Maytum, a spokesman for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, said: "In the UK you are going to walk into a clinic and get a reasonable level of service, you are not going to get ripped off. If you are going to another country, you don't know what you are going to get." He added that there could be problems "if you are unhappy with how the treatment is done".

Professor Guido Pennings, professor of ethics and bioethics at Ghent University, Belgium, said people were already voting with their feet.

Reproductive tourism was not a problem but "a safety valve that allows some degree of personal freedom for dissenting individual citizens on the one hand and democratic decision-making on the other hand. It contributes to a peaceful co-existence of different ethical and religious views in Europe".

(The Guardian)

Plastic may cause defects in baby boys

2006-09-15T13:26:00.002+05:30

Hindustan Times, Saturday, May 28, 2005

Scientists in

America

have found the first evidence that common chemicals used in products as diverse as cosmetics, toys, Clingfilm and plastic bags may harm the development of unborn baby boys.

Researchers have long known that high levels of substances called phthalates have gender-bending effects on male animals, making them more feminine and leading to poor sperm quality and infertility. The new study suggests that even normal levels of phthalates, which are ubiquitous, can disrupt the development of male babies' reproductive organs.

The discovery poses a huge problem for the chemical industry, which is already embroiled in a battle with the government over EU proposals on chemical safety.

Several types of phthalates, which are used to make plastics more pliable, and have been around for more than 50 years, have been banned, but many are still produced in vast quantities.

The study was carried out by scientists from centres across the US, including the University of Rochester and the National Centre for Environmental Health.

The researchers measured the levels of nine widely used phthalates in the urine of pregnant women and compared them with standard physiological measurements of their babies.

Tests showed that women with higher levels of four different phthalates were more likely to have baby boys with a range of conditions, from smaller penises and undescended testicles to a shorter perineum, the distance between the genitals and the anus. The differences, say the authors, indicate a feminisation of the boys similar to that seen in animals exposed to the chemicals.

Shanna Swan, an obstetrician at the University of Rochester, and lead scientist on the study, said researchers must now unravel what kinds of products are most to blame. One way that phthalates get into the bloodstream is when they seep into food from plastic packaging.

"It's going to take a while to work out which of these sources is most relevant to human exposure," she said.

Although the observed differences in body measurements were subtle, they indicate that what is generally regarded as the most ubiquitous class of chemicals is having a significant effect on newborns.

"Every aspect of male identity is altered when you see this in male animals," said Fred vom Saal, professor of reproductive biology at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Levels of aggression, parenting behaviour and even learning speeds were affected, he said.

Andreas Kortenkamp, an expert in environmental pollutants at the School of Pharmacy in London, said: "If it's true, it's sensational. This is the first time anyone's shown this effect in humans. It's an indicator that something's gone seriously wrong with development in the womb and that's why it's so serious."

He added: "These are mass chemicals. They are used in any plastic that is pliable, whether it's clingfilm, kidney dialysis tubes, blood bags or toys. Sorting this out is going to be an interesting challenge for industry as well as society."

The work, which is to appear in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, is due to be presented at the Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals Forum in San Diego on June 3.

Gwynne Lyons, toxics adviser to the WWF, said: "At the moment regulation of the chemicals industry is woefully inadequate."

She added: "Right now the government is looking at how the regulation of hormone disrupting chemicals could be made more effective under new EU chemicals law, but the chemicals industry is lobbying very hard to water down this legislation.

"Political agreement on this legislation is not expected until later this year so it remains to be seen whether the UK government has the guts to stand up to industry lobbying. If they don't, wildlife and baby boys will be the losers."

Movies move hormones towards romance

2006-09-15T13:26:00.001+05:30

26^th July, 2004,

The next time you want your partner to feel more romantic, try watching a romantic movie with them. This is likely to send their progesterone levels, the hormone which controls the romantic feelings, soaring.

A study in an upcoming issue of Hormones and Behaviour says a person's hormones respond while they are watching movies and whereas a romantic movie makes you progesterone levels rise, an action movie like The Godfather will affect your testosterone levels.

Women and men reacted differently to the Godfather. After watching the movie, high-testosterone men saw their power motivat5ions and testosterone levels jump as much as 30 percent as their need for affiliation dropped.

High-testosterone women saw their testosterone fall.

ANI, Washington

Train your brain and help it grow

2006-09-15T13:26:00.000+05:30

The New York Times

January 25, 2004

If you hit the weights at the gym with iron regularity, your arms may get to look a little more impressive. The right kind of training, it now appears, can do much the same for the brain, though unfortunately the enlargement can be shown off only to observers with magnetic resonance imaging machines.

In a study conducted by Dr. Arne May and colleagues at the University of Regensburg in Germany, people who spent three months learning to juggle showed enlargement of certain areas in the cerebral cortex, the thin sheet of nerve cells on the brain's surface where most higher thought processes seem to be handled. They were then asked to quit juggling completely, and three months later the enlarged areas of the cortex had started to shrink.

The finding, which was reported in the current issue of the journal Nature, is similar to one in a study of London cab drivers four years ago. Unlike their colleagues in New York, London cabbies must memorize the entirety of their city's streets. If some Sunday morning in London you should see a group of men on bicycles, maps balanced on the handlebars, those are apprentice cabbies, acquiring "the knowledge," as the two-year memorization of London's many small, winding streets is called. The 2000 study, also done with M.R.I. scanners, found a change in the shape of the cabbies' hippocampus, the brain module where new memories of place are stored.

Both studies show how malleable the brain is under training, a finding already hinted at by the brain's own internal representation, or mapping, of body parts. In monkeys trained to use their fingertips for some task, the areas of the brain devoted to mapping the fingertips will enlarge, suggesting that the brain's various maps of the body are "plastic," in the parlance of neurology, not hard-wired.

The M.R.I. scans of jugglers and cabbies showed an enlargement of the gray matter, the brain areas rich in neurons, as opposed to the white matter, which consists mostly of the biological wiring that connects neurons. But the scanning machines can't see down to the level of individual neurons, so it's unclear what is causing the enlargement. Whether new neurons are ever generated in the adult brain has been a matter of fierce contention, the present consensus being that new neurons are created in the hippocampus and olfactory bulb but nowhere else.

Dr. May said the enlargement in the jugglers' cortex could be caused by new cells, whether created at the site or recruited from other areas, or by new interconnections. He favors the interconnection idea, he said via e-mail. Pasko Rakic, a brain expert at Yale University, said the study was interesting and confirmed that the brain is not structurally static. But no conclusion can be drawn as to what may be going on at the cell level, Dr. Rakic said.

The brain has about 100 billion neurons, each of which makes on average 1,000 connections with others, for some 100 trillion interconnections in all, none of them color coded. Learning to juggle, or navigate London streets, must involve a horrendous rewiring job. But the brain's electricians seem to know what they are doing, and no doubt it's good to keep them exercised.

(Source: Gene Expression)

Viagra's rival claims quicker effect

2006-09-15T13:25:00.002+05:30

February 03, 2003

London, Feb 3 (ANI): To enhance men's sexuality, a new sex drug, called Cialis, which claims better sexual stamina and prolong arousal then existing drugs, has now been launched.

According to its developers, the effect lasts 24 hours. More interestingly, some patients who tested it stayed aroused for 36 hours, reports The Sun.

They also say that where Viagra can take over an hour to work and usually allow users to manage sex only once, the new drug gets men ready straight away.

Dr Richard Petty, an impotence specialist at the London Wellman Clinic, said: "My patients are over the moon about a pill that lasts so long. The main complaint about Viagra has been the lack of spontaneity."

"With Cialis a man takes his pill and knows there is a long period in which he can have sex. He can do it before he goes to sleep and again in the morning."

The launch comes amid an ongoing legal row in the US between Viagra's makers Pfizer and Eli Lilly, which developed the yellow, almond-shaped Cialis pills. (ANI)

(websource: allrefer.com)

Men are better at driving!

2006-09-15T13:25:00.000+05:30

The Sun, August 2, 2004

BY VIRGINIA WHEELER

MALE motorists are miles ahead when it comes to passing their driving test — needing 16 fewer hours in lessons than women.

Girls spend 40 per cent more time learning and pay £360 extra on tuition — but even then are more likely to fail.

Forty per cent of women slip up because they cannot reverse properly, an AA survey reports.

In fact, the only manoeuvre they perform better is checking their mirrors, the study shows.

Female learners take an average of 52 hours driving tuition over 14 months before qualifying behind the wheel — compared to 36 lessons in 12 months for men.

Men are also more likely to pass their test first time, with 46 per cent ripping up their L-plates after one attempt. Only 40 per cent of women manage the same.

Linda Hatswell, of the AA driving school, said: “Men have the edge when it comes to the number of hours they spend learning to drive before they pass their tests.

“They are also more likely to pass first time. But women prove safer drivers in the long run.”

Linda added: “Men are more technically minded and pick up practical skills more easily.

“Women interpret what they’re taught and develop their own technique when putting it into practice. This may take longer.”

Celebrity Driving School star Paul O’Grady, 49, describes claims that men are better than women behind the wheel as “rubbish”. The Lily Savage comic said: “Women are much more courteous drivers.”

(Source: The Sun)