Section Seven: Sexualities
Learning Objectives
· To understand how sexuality is socially constructed.
· To be aware of the ways in which men and women are socialized to think differently about sexuality and relationships.
· To be familiar with the variety of ways in which women and men have expressed love and desire both in contemporary and historical times.
· To understand how the norms of heterosexuality affect men and women.
· To realize how sexuality is affected by race and class, as well as gender.
Section Summary
Sexuality is socially constructed in various ways that differ according to gender, age, class, race, and other various contexts.
· Women and men are socialized to behave and think differently regarding sexuality and relationships. This socialization causes men and women with differing resources, power, expectations, and networks which in turn lead to differing desires, needs, and obligations.
· Adolescence is a time of sexual development, but many suggest that teen sexuality, particularly among girls, should be discouraged.
· There are heterosexual norms that impinge on the free expression of many people’s love and sex lives.
· There are historical, political, and cultural factors that socially construct how people understand sexuality.
· Women and girls are often denied the expression of their desire.
· Sexuality has often been both a source of oppression and a means of expression and strength.
Reading 36: Deborah L. Tolman, “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls' Struggles for/with Sexuality”
Tolman interviewed 34 girls from many different sexual orientations and backgrounds and found that girls have been socialized to curb their desire and tightly monitor their bodies. While high school girls experience strong and pleasurable sexual desire, these girls are more likely to be afraid of their desire than to find power in this desire.
· A majority of the girls said that they had experienced sexual desire of some kind, and all of these girls monitored and feared their sexual desire because they understood that sexual experiences could have dangerous consequences.
· Girls wished to express their desire in a variety of relationships and held many different sexual orientations.
· The girls primarily feared that expressing sexual desire could lead to bodily harm from male violence or homophobia or could tarnish their “good-girl” reputations by being thought of as a “slut.” The girls also feared the consequences of pregnancy, disease, disappointing the adults in their lives, and breaking with hegemonic ideas of gendered sexuality.
· Many of these girls carefully monitored and stopped their bodies’ expressions of desire.
· Often the girls voiced an understanding of the social factors that constrained their desire. These factors must be changed so that women can gain power from their sexuality and maintain a healthy understanding of their bodies.
Reading 33: Laura Hamilton, “Trading on Heterosexuality: College Women’s Gender Strategies and Homophobia”
This article refutes the idea that women are not homophobic by using interviews and ethnographic data on a college “party dorm” at a large Midwestern university. This research demonstrates that heterosexual women intentionally distance themselves from lesbians in an attempt to increase their status in the erotic marketplace. The more involved in the college party scene, and thus more engaged in this heterosexual erotic marketplace, that women were, the more likely they were to exclude lesbians.
· The college party scene disadvantages women who are expected to compete via physical attractiveness for access to male, particularly fraternity, controlled parties and alcohol, and lesbians are further disadvantaged because only those actively engaged in the erotic market (attracting male attention) were included.
· The party scene encouraged women to dress and act in ways that garner male attention. In particular women were encouraged to flirt with men for alcohol and dress scantily.
· The importance women placed on men’s attention led to a hierarchy among the women where “the blonde” was at the top. “Blondes” were white, tan, thin, and had light colored hair and they maintained “just the right” look through a number of intentional strategies.
· Heterosexual women actively worked to avoid homosexuality, and they equated gender nonconformity with homosexuality.
· The majority (30) of the women studied were active partiers who felt that partying was central to college life. A small number of these women believed that homosexuality was never okay, and were at times openly hostile to the lesbians on their dorm floor. The “never okay” women cited religious beliefs, but were most likely influenced most by the cultural logics from their homogenous hometown communities. The other active partiers felt that homosexuality was “okay for others but not in my space.” These women described beliefs in college values of openness and diversity, but avoided the lesbians in their dorm and expressed misgivings about living near lesbians.
· A smaller portion of this dorm floor were critical partiers(5) and nonpartiers (11).These women were willing to have lesbian friends or to consider public lesbian identities for themselves. The women who identified as lesbians felt shunned because of their sexuality.
· Many of the active partiers engaged in same-sex sexual behaviors such as kissing and fondling in public. These actions were aimed at attracting male attention and were not seen as homosexual. These performances further marginalized lesbians because it made lesbian desire invisible and because heterosexual women felt they could invade lesbian spaces to perform these acts.
Boxed Insert: Robin Givhan, “Hillary Clinton’s Tentative Dip Into New Neckline Territory”
This box describes reaction to Senator Hillary Clinton’s wearing of a V-neck that showed a minor amount of cleavage while speaking on the United States Senate floor (and thus captured by C-Span). This act was surprising because women have had to conservatively dress in the Senate and because Clinton has had a long history of being ambivalent about style and wearing clothes that were not sexy. While other women could wear more daring and even sexy clothes as politicians, Clinton’s lack of style and confidence in her appearance meant that this incident caused people to feel uncomfortable.
Reading 34: Patricia Hill Collins, “Black Sexual Politics”
Racism is organized differently today, but modern racism incorporates elements of past racial formations. The problem for the 21st century is not the “color line” of segregation, but the seeming absence of the colorline or a pseudo-colorblind society. While Blacks are incorporated into American culture today, they are done so in ways that replicate older racial hierarchies. Black people remain economically disadvantaged on a global scale and the idea that Black sexuality is “wild” continues to construct racial difference.
· Black women’s public presence is expected to titillate and excite white males while black males’ sexuality evoked fear of violence. From colonization until now, the Black female body has been a source of entertainment and a symbol of animalistic sexuality. Although Black males’ sexuality was similarly seen as “wild” and animalistic, it evoked fear, particularly fears related to “defending” white females who were symbols of national identity.
· The public focus on the body of Sarah Bartman, Josephine Baker, Destiny’s Child, and Jennifer Lopez demonstrate the history of using Black (or anyone tinged with Blackness) women as sexual spectacles. These women were seen in a context where their “hypersexuality” contrasted with the sexuality of white females. However, as time has past women in these spectacles have received an increasing amount of power and money.
· Although legal segregation no longer exists in the United States, racial hierarchies still exist worldwide with people of African remaining in poverty. Patterns of desegregation and then resegregation in the United States resemble patterns of decolonization and recolonization worldwide.
· The new racism involves new forms of global capitalism where power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of a few corporations. Within global capitalism it is minorities, particularly Black people, who face the devastating consequences when corporations move, but the workers cannot.
· Although Black people can vote and appear to be included in modern political structures, they are excluded from exerting real influence because political influence is primarily exerted by the economic and corporate elite.
· The new racism relies heavily on mass media to justify racism by making it appear natural, as though Blacks have consented to the racist messages. The mass media packages Black sexuality in ways that whites can enjoy from a “safe distance” from actual Blacks.
· American society is sexually repressive, but at the same time, sex is everywhere in American media.
· The repressive attitude tends to censor public discussions of sex and nonmarital sexual behaviors. In fact, conservative and heterosexist assumptions are embedded in most research and education programs, and they negatively affect all students.
· Although the mass media is saturated with sexual imagery, the public dialogue around these portrayals is censored. The media’s sexual spectacles titillate more than instruct, and they often include depictions of “deviant” Black (poor and minority) sexuality as examples of what not to do. Collins describes how television talk shows package many racist stereotypes of promiscuity among minorities and the poor that suggest cultural, rather than biological, explanations for economic hierarchies.
Reading 35: Leila J. Rupp, “Loving Women in the Modern World”
The term lesbians a recent phenomenon, and doesn’t accurately cover the full range of ways that women have engaged in same-sex sexuality or loved each other around the world throughout history. Rupp describes how women from the 19th century to the present made sense of their lives before and after the development of the term lesbian, describing women who married, desired women, and/or claimed diverse identities.
· Women who crossed gender lines to live as men and marry other women is one of the most common patterns seen among women who may be said to exhibit same-sex sexuality. Western cultures often described these women as mentally ill, though in other cultures these women are accepted, sometimes as separate genders. In some Native American cultures these women are called “two spirit” manly females. Woman-woman marriage has also been found in over thirty African groups.
· “Boston marriages” and “romantic friendships” that involved intense and passionate relationships among women developed out of the sex-segregated culture of Euro-America in the late 18th and early 19th century. These relationships often involved women of high-class status whom were expected to lack sexual desire.
· Today women may marry in Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and in the U.S. state of Massachusetts (also California after the writing of this piece). Also, in some parts of India women are allowed to marry.
· The writings of women involved in romantic friendships often describe desire for women and intense feelings. We also see this desire manifested in the court trial of Scottish schoolteachers Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods as well as the sexually explicit diaries left by Anne Lister who had many female lovers. The idea that prostitutes made love to each other (not just for the pleasure of men) is found in a number of societies at this time.
· Sexologists believed that women engaging in same-sex sexual behaviors and prostitutes as suffering from hypersexuality and other mental diseases. These sexologists began to name and define people according to the kind of people they loved and desired.
· Some women, such as Anne Lister, believed that their desire for women in part defined who they were. Others, such as the women of Lesotho, did not see their actions and relationships with women as involving sex or as a separate identity. Some women ran away from sexologist descriptions of their behavior as lesbian (and thus mentally ill), while others began to embrace and be open about their lesbianism (though they did not see it as a mental defect).
· While vibrant lesbian communities were rare, ones thrived in Paris and Berlin in the early 1900’s among those who had economic independence. In many cultures such as China, Japan, Latin America women had little option but to participate in heterosexual marriages.
Reading 36: Michael A. Messner, “Becoming 100% Straight”
Messner describes how many men use sports to create and maintain their heterosexual and masculine identities. While sports are not only played by heterosexuals, sports provide a forum where men perform masculinity and heterosexuality.
· Research is needed to question the dominance of heterosexual and masculine norms in male sports.
· Messner’s personal story and Tom Waddell’s experience as an athlete reveal the way men use aggression and sports to cover their own homosexual desire by engaging in hegemonic masculinity.
· Dominant definitions of masculinity are narrow and focus on heterosexuality; those men who perform these in a culturally acceptable way receive power and privilege, while those who do not are ridiculed and stigmatized.
· In institutions such as sports, power is at work in shaping people’s relationships and their gender and sexual identities.
Discussion Questions
Reading 36: Deborah L. Tolman, “Doing Desire: Adolescent Girls' Struggles for/with Sexuality”
1. What factors constrain the expression of desire by girls? Why do they fear sexual desire? [Discuss the roles of social institutions, parents, peers, school, religion, etc.]
2. What was common to the experiences of all the girls? How were these girls different?
3. When do the girls cover up their feelings of desire and when do they express their desire?
4. How can the girls’ idea that the expression of their sexuality leads to danger be changed? What consequences might these fears have for the girls? How does Tolman suggest that feminism could help these girls?
Reading 33: Laura Hamilton, “Trading on Heterosexuality: College Women’s Gender Strategies and Homophobia
5. What is the erotic marketplace? Who is privileged in this arena?
6. Describe the varied relationships to the Greek party scene that the women in this study had. How did one’s relationship to partying correspond to attitudes toward lesbians?
7. How did most of the heterosexual women believe they could identify lesbians? How did the lesbians feel about their treatment within the party scene?
8. Is there a similar party scene on this campus? Describe what is similar or different.