1. Gender Intimacies: Gendered Sexuality
Lecture 5
Gender Intimacies: Gendered Sexuality
Look at NYT article…

2. What are the roles that are expected of men in relationships? Women?
I think men talk to women so they can sleep with them and women sleep with men so they can talk to them.  ~Jay McInerney
Do you think sex means different things to men and women in relationship? Why?
What are the roles that are expected of men in relationships? Women?
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

3. Gendered Sexuality
Sexual ideology supports the idea that men and women have naturally different:
sexual desires – sexual urges and sexual pleasure.
sexual roles – in the private and public realm
and sexual practices – appropriate sexuality
Femininity and sexuality
passive, emotional/irrational, monogamous, vaginal, penetrated
Masculinity and sexuality
aggressive/assertive, unemotional/rational, multiple partners, penal, penetrate

4. Constructing Heterosexuality
Historical, political, and cultural factors have shaped the way we understand sexuality
Idea of sexual identity emerged in late 1800’s
Modernization and Industrialization affected ideas of sexuality
Heteronormativity: culture where heterosexuality is accepted as the “normal” mode of sexual expression
Gender and sexuality are linked through the nuclear family ideal

5. Gender and Learning Sexuality
Men and women are socialized to think differently about sexuality and relationships
Men and women experience different paths to sexual orientation
How are gays and lesbians affected by the sexual ideology?
Gay men associate sexual identity with erotic experiences
Lesbians associate identity with relationships

6. Slut-bashing: Good Girl Vs.Bad Girl

7. Language and Sexual Politics
Sexual Politics: the exercise of power through sexuality
How does language control our behavior?
“Slut” and “Fag”
Structures adolescent sexuality
Sexual Double-Standard
Slut – Stud Dichotomy

8. Developing our Gendered Sexuality
According to Freud, Children’s sexual pleasure derives from the same erotoenic zone – penis or penis equivalent (clitoris)
“With the change to femininity the clitoris should wholly hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time importance, to the vagina…[however] the man has only to continue the activity that he previously carried out”

9. “Female Hysteria” 25% of women were diagnosed with hysteria
Over 75 possible symptoms
Nervousness, insomnia, or a "tendency to cause trouble"
Women went to the doctor for “pelvic stimulation” until the home vibrator emerged
1902 electric vibrator was for sale in home catalogs like Sears

10. “Vibration promotes life and vigor, strength and beauty “

11. Masturbation: Creating Hysteria Today
In 1994 the surgeon general under the Clinton administration was fired for saying that a safe alternative to sexual intercourse & a way to stay safe against HIV is ….masturbation
Joycelyn Elders: "masturbation is something that is a part of human sexuality, and is a part of something that perhaps should be taught."