Sex & Sexuality: Crash Course Sociology #31

Let's talk about sex. It's totally okay if that makes you want to cringe. After all, most people will tell you that sex is private, it's not something people generally talk about, at least not in class. Furthermore, sex is typically thought of as a deep, primitive part of ourselves. It is a question of impulses and instincts, of biology and psychology. And if sex and

sexuality

are primitive and private, can a social science tell us anything about them? Of

course

he can. Because no matter how natural and private you think they are, sex and

sexuality

are still part of every society.

And as I have seen people say since this

course

began: society gets into everything. To talk about sex, we need to understand some terms, starting with sex. Not sex the act, but sex the category. Sex is a biological category and distinguishes between women and men. And biologically speaking, the fundamental cause of sex is a pair of chromosomes: XX for women and XY for men. These chromosomes result in two types of visible differences: there are primary sexual characteristics, which appear as the sexual organs involved in reproductive processes and that develop in the uterus. And then there are secondary sexual characteristics, which develop at puberty and are not directly involved in reproduction, such as pubic hair, breast enlargement or facial hair.

Now, we tend to think of sex as a simple fixed binary system: you're either a man or a woman. But that is not the case. A significant portion of the population is intersex, meaning "people are born with sexual characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies." This can mean many different things. For example, it can mean having different combinations of sex chromosomes, as in Klinefelter syndrome, which creates XX and Y chromosomes, or in Triple-X syndrome, which results in XXX. An intersex condition can also mean that the body responds differently to hormones or that the genitals are not fully developed.

This wide variety of intersex conditions makes population figures difficult to pin down. If intersex is defined strictly in terms of having atypical genitalia at birth, then 1 in every 1500-2000 births fits that description, if defined more broadly, to include. all the conditions I just mentioned - intersex conditions appear in up to 2% of the population and of course different societies respond to intersex people differently. In some societies, they are simply accepted as natural variation. But Western society and medicine have long understood sex as an immutable binary, so intersex people were not seen as an acceptable variation, but rather as a deviation in need of correction.

Some intersex conditions require medical intervention for the sake of the patient's health, but many do not. And for years doctors performed unnecessary operations on intersex children to make them acceptable according to cultural ideas about sex. So society plays a role in the biological category of sex. But when it comes to gender, those distinctions have to do with society. Gender is the set of social and psychological characteristics that a society considers characteristic of its men and women. The set of characteristics assigned to men are masculinities and those assigned to women are femininities. Many people have a hard time understanding the difference between sex and gender, but hopefully this definition makes it clear.

Gender is its own thing, separate from sex. Some people don't even want to accept that gender is anything other than biological, but

sociology

is here to tell you that it really isn't. Rather, it is a question of social construction. To explore this idea a little further, let's go to the thought bubble: Let's start with how we dress. A business suit is considered masculine. A skirt is feminine. And it should be obvious and uncontroversial that this is a purely social convention: because, for example, it would be very difficult to explain the objective difference between a skirt and a kilt, except to say that wearing one is feminine, and wearing one the other is masculine. .

And this also applies to things that might seem more biologically determined. For example, physical work, such as construction, has typically been understood as masculine. And it might seem like there's an underlying biological explanation for this, because on average men tend to be larger and have more muscle mass than women. But even with an average difference between the sexes, there is also a lot of overlap. Many women are bigger and stronger than many men. And minor differences in average size and strength cannot explain why some occupations have become stratified by gender. The reality is that minor, average biological differences are used as justification for widespread gender stratification, funneling men and women into different jobs, hobbies, and identity constructions.

And then society points to this resulting stratification as “evidence” of an underlying difference in biological reality, even though that reality does not actually exist. Thanks thought bubble. So one way of thinking about gender is that it is a self-presentation, a performance that you have to constantly work on. What we wear, how we walk and talk, even our personal characteristics (such as aggression or empathy) are ways of "doing" gender. They are ways of making statements about masculinity or femininity that people will see and hopefully respect. And we can be punished if we don't address gender well or well enough.

This is precisely what happens when a man is called a "sissy" or a woman is told she "should really smile more." This idea of ​​gender as performance is known as gender expression. But gender is more than that; It is also a question of identity. Gender identity refers to a person's internal and deeply held sense of their gender. In reality, no one perfectly fits the cultural ideal of masculinity or femininity. And many people construct their gender differently from these conventional ideas. In particular, transgender people are those whose gender identity does not match the biological sex assigned to them at birth.

On the contrary, the gender identity of cisgender people coincides with their biological sex. Still, both trans and cis people can express their identity in various ways, conventional or not. And this should make it clear that gender, like sex, is not binary. There are many ways to do femininities and many ways a person can be masculine. Now that we have a basic understanding of sex and gender, we can finally get to sexuality. Sexuality is basically shorthand for everything related to sexual behavior: sexual acts, desire, arousal - the whole experience that is considered sexual. One part of sexuality is sexual orientation, or who you are or are not sexually attracted to.

Most people identify as heterosexual, meaning they are attracted to people of the other gender. While this is the most common orientation, a significant number of people are homosexual: they are attracted to people of their own sex or gender. But in reality these are just poles on a continuum, in which many people are attracted to both their own gender and others, such as bisexual or pansexual. And some people are asexual and don't feel sexual attraction at all. Now, these definitions can vary from person to person, just as they vary from society to society. This, and the fact that social norms may cause people to want to keep their orientation private, makes estimates of the number of gay and bisexual people necessarily imprecise.

That said, according to the surveys we have, about 4% of the American population identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. However, this figure increases to around 10% if we ask whether a person has ever experienced same-sex attraction or participated in homosexual activities. So what can each of the three sociological paradigms tell us about sexuality? We will begin with symbolic interactionism, because its perception is the most fundamental: and that is that sexuality, this intensely private and supposedly primitive thing, is socially constructed. One might think that this statement goes too far, because sexuality is a matter of innate impulses. Some things are just sexual.

But if we really start asking "what is sexual?" so the constructed nature of sexuality becomes quite obvious quite quickly. We might think, for example, that oral sex is only sexual. But that is not necessarily true in all societies. For example, among the Sambia of the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea, young men perform oral sex and ingest the semen of older men, as part of a rite of passage to adulthood. Oral sex is definitely happening, but it's not clear that it should be considered sexual in the way we understand it. And we might also be inclined to label this ritual "homosexual behavior," but it's still not the same as homosexuality as we understand it in the United States.

So physically identical acts can have radically different social and subjective meanings. We can explain this, in part, with the concept of sexual scripts. These are cultural prescriptions that dictate the when, where, how, and with whom of sex, and what that sex means when it occurs. The idea that sex occurs at home between two willing partners, for example, is part of a generic sexual script in our society. Likewise, sex that occurs between two people who met in a bar may have a different script (and therefore different shared expectations) than sex between two people who have known each other for a long time.

This brings us to the structural functionalist perspective. Since sexual reproduction is necessary for the reproduction of society, this view says that sex must be organized in some way for society to function. And society organizes sexuality using sexual scripts. Before contraception became widespread, it was these rules that controlled how many people were born, determining when and how often they had sex. And by controlling who had sex with whom, they also generally made sure that those children were born into families that could support them. This is a function of the universal incest taboo, the prohibition of sex between close relatives.

Reproduction between family members would end up breaking kinship relations. It would be impossible to maintain a clear set of family obligations if, for example, your brother could also be your father. But, seen from the perspective of social conflict theory, regulating sexuality is also a matter of creating and reinforcing inequalities. In particular, our society is traditionally built around heteronormativity. This is the idea that there are only two genders, that gender corresponds to biological sex, and that the only natural and acceptable sexual attraction is between these two genders. Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality appear to be directly related to biological sex, but heterosexuality is as much a social construct as any other sexuality.

It is defined by dominant sexual scripts, privileged by law, and normalized by social practices, such as religious teachings, so that it comes to be understood as natural in a way that other sexualities are not. Queer theory challenges this naturalness and especially shows how gender and heterosexuality are linked. Heteronormativity is based on the idea of ​​two opposite sexes that fit together naturally, like poles of a magnet: thus, according to this logic, men pursue, women are pursued, men are dominant, women are submissive. But all this is socially constructed; The sexes are not opposites, there are only two at either end of a spectrum, along with the full range of variations between them.

But the idea of ​​opposite sexes helps make heterosexuality seem natural to us. And so you can see how sex, gender, and sexuality are all linked and all socially constructed. And you can see how society reaches everywhere, even among these seemingly private and primitive things. And in turn, these things help structure society, creating and maintaining inequalities and giving them the veneer of the natural. But

sociology

can help us differentiate them. Today we learned what sociology can tell us about sex and sexuality. We talked about the biological classification of sex and how it is more complicated than we usually think.

And we discussed the social construction of gender and a little bit about how it works. Finally, we talk about sexuality and sexual orientations, and what the three paradigms of sociology can tell us about them. Crash Course Sociology is filmed at the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney studio in Missoula, MT, and made with the help of all these kind people. Our entertainment team is Thought Cafe andCrash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud. If you want to keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can support the series on Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.

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