Women's Studies 2163A/B Study Guide - Winter 2019, Comprehensive Midterm Notes - Sex Education, Masturbation, Desire
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14 Feb 2019
School
Department
Course
Professor
Women's Studies
2163A/B
WS 2163B
1
Marking Criteria for Discussion Post
- Engagement with reading and depth of understanding
- Connect reading to broader topic
- Analysis and evaluation
- Clarity of expression (style and grammar)
A Brief History of Sexuality
What Counts as Sexuality?
- When we talk about sexuality we are talking about the relationships/interactions between;
identity, actions, desires…
- Similarly, what counts as sex education is just as wide-ranging in definition
- Ex. should sex-ed be in schools?
Historically:
Ask the sexperts
- Role of religious discourse (role of the church)
- Church operates through a moral outlook on the world
- Manages sexuality from angle of family (Christian) morality
- Heterosexual marriage blessed by the Church
- Remains intact through powerful idealogies like monogamy, reproduction, purit,
sinfulness
- Folks are policed by the role of the church
- Role of medical discourse
- 18th, 19th century includes medical intervention into family life and the home
- Encyclopedic-style pamphlets/books are inteded for family
- Ex. little books intended for heterosexual, monogomous families that allowed
them to look up questions
- Even within marriage manuals, sex was presented as risky
- The role of medical discourse are still taking up some of the role of religious
discourse (moral ground) but claiming a scientific world view
Scientifics of Sex: Early Sexology
- Late 19th century sex researchers became known as sexologists
- Approving certain sexual discourses
- Magnus Hirschfeld, Richard Von Kraft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis (1897) - early key thinkers
- Engage in projects of mass categorization for sexualities, sexual identities, and types
- ‘Preversions’ were pathologized - S/M, fetishism, exhibitionism, homosexuality, cross-dressing
- In turn, heterosexuality - monogamy sex for reproduction, etc. - rmained to focus of what was
‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ behaviour
- Sexology is often criticized for being deeply rooted in power relations - not just descriptive but
prescriptive (‘you should like this” - here’s what you shouldn’t be doing and what you should)
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WS 2163B
2
- Sexuality is often regulated through institutions like the law, the state, media, education, family
- All play important roles in our live, particularly in regulating our sexuality
- Was once illegal to be homosexuality
- State attempts to regulate through:
- Marriage equality
- Access to abortion
- Media attempts to regulate through:
- Viewing reality TV, social media
- Education:
- What is the curriculum trying to hide from people?
- Institutions lay out what ‘normal’ sex/sexuality is, what is ‘appropriate’, what sex should
and shouldn’t include in a given time and place
- There exists a range of activities and desires that society values through a system of
punishments (legal sactions, social stigma, etc.) and rewards (privilege, rights, benefits, etc.)
- Ex. BDSM, Kink → was a preversion and now through pop culture (50 Shades of Grey)
have now been normalized
- Ex. Cohabitation before marriage - living with a man before marriage used to be
unheard of
- People use these discourses laid out by institutions to direct their practices - these scripts help
us make sense of, disrupt, resist, or inform our own sexuality
- Power relaitons almost always involved, where controlling and goerning sexuality can take
centre stage
Enter: Alfred Kinsey
- Referred to as a sexologist
- PhD in Biology from Harvard - studied the life of gall wasps
- Focused on how diverse the wasps were and questioned that it must persist in human
sexuality
- Interests in human sexuality requres belnding scientific and biological discourses with sociology
and psychology
- Looking for information on how to expand his activites and knowledge
- Wants to figure out whether humans are sexually diverse
- Kinsey believed that previous research on sex all hung on morality and not facts or evidence
- No empirical evidence that heterosexuals was the only way to have sex (norms)
- This narrow view of sexuality was at odds with his beliefs…
- 1938 - invited to teach new course on marriage (had to be married to sign up for the class for
the sole purpose of learning about sex)
- People would come to him to ask personal questions about masturbation…
- People learned that these non ‘normalized’ ways of having sex were not appropriate
- 1939 - given ultimatum by University of Indiana - stop teaching and commit to sex reserach by
getting it formally and ethically approved by the University
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WS 2163B
3
- Shortly after, starts collecting the sexual histories of Americans. By early 1940’s, funds the
Institute for Sex Research at Indiana, hireas a staff o researchers, goes all across America
collecting sexual histories (estimates suggest around 18,000)
- Kinsey and team believed they were part of a crusade - sexual ignorance and lack of knowledge
must come to an end
- 1948 publishes Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male - Within 7 months, over 200,000 copies
sold - biggest book of that year, biggest science book ever sold
- #1 best seller list for many year
- Scientists, house wives, young adults were picking up the books
- Proving that no one was giving the general public information on sexuality
- Silence around sex is suddenly shattered - implicit in the report of over 18,000 interviews was a
simple principle - there is no good or bad, normal or abnormal
- Three main finding that challenged cultural beliefs about sex at the time
1) Homosexuality,
2) Extramarital affairs, and
3) Premarital sex
- REven more revolutionary? We don’t fit into neat categories, sexuality operates on a sliding
scale
- One of the most famous/talked about findings:
- 37% of men achieved orgasm in a homosexual experience
- Only 4% of those men cliaimed a homosexual identy
*Sexual identity and sexual behaviours and not mutually exclusive things
- “The development of a homosexual identity is dependent on the meaning the person attaches
to the concepts of homosexual and homosexuality”
- Desire is one thing, identifying with a particular social identity
- Different meaning can attach themselves to the same acts
- “Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separted pigeon-holes”
- Human mind as an institution
- “The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform”
- Encouragement of sense of exploration
Sexual Behaviour in Human Female (1953)
- Idea that women are not sexual beings
- Kinsey believed that female sexual appetite were repressed
- Who were the women invluded in Kinsey’s female report?
- All of the 5940 women in the female report were white
- Excluded 934 histories of non-white women, and 915 white women who had served prison
sentences
- Diverse in other aspects like age, education, amrital status, religion, class, geographic region
- Attempt to justify excluding diversity of racial backgrounds
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