Sex & Sexuality: Crash Course Sociology #31

Let's talk about sex. It's totally well if that makes you want to shrink. After all, most people will tell you that sex is private, it is not something that people usually speak at least, not in class. In addition, sex is generally considered a deep and primitive part of ourselves. It is a matter of impulses and instincts, of biology and psychology. And if sex and

sexuality

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

course

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

sexuality

remain part of each society.

And as I have seen since this

course

began: society enters everywhere. To talk about sex, we need to handle some terms, starting with sex. No sex the act, but sex the category. Sex is a biological category and distinguishes between women and men. And biologically speaking, the root cause of sex is a couple of chromosomes: XX for females and xy for men. These chromosomes result in two types of visible differences: there are main sexual characteristics, which appear as the sexual organs involved with reproductive processes and that develop in the uterus. And then there are the secondary sexual characteristics, which are developed in puberty and are not directly involved in reproduction, things such as pubic hair, enlarged breasts or facial hair.

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

This wide variety of intersex conditions causes population figures to be difficult to specify. If the intersex is strictly defined in terms of having atypical genitals at birth, then 1 in 1500-2000 births conform to that description. However, if defined more widely, to include all the conditions that 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 accepted as a 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 as a deviation that needs correction.

Some intersex conditions require medical intervention for the good of the patient's health, but many do not. And for years, doctors performed unnecessary operations in intersex children, so that they are acceptable according to cultural ideas about sex. Then, society plays a role in the biological category of sex. But when it comes to gender, these distinctions are about society. Gender is the set of social and psychological characteristics that a society considers adequate for its men and women. The sets 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 yours, separated from sex. Some people do not even want to accept that gender is not biological, but

sociology

is here to tell him that he really is not. Instead, it is a matter of social construction. To explore this idea a little more, we go to the thought bubble: Let's start how we saw each other. A commercial demand is considered masculine. A skirt is feminine. And it must be obvious and not very controversial that this is a purely social convention: because, for example, it would be quite difficult to explain the objective difference between a skirt and a skirt, except to say that using one is feminine, and using the other is masculine.

And this is also true for things that may seem more biologically. For example, physical work such as construction has been typically understood as masculine. And it may seem an underlying biological explanation for that, 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 great overlap. Many women are bigger and more stronger than many men. And the minor differences in the average size and strength cannot explain why some occupations have been stratified by gender. The reality is that minor, average and biological biological differences are used as justification for generalized gender stratification, channeling men and women in different works, hobbies and identity constructions.

And society points out this stratification as "proof" of an underlying difference in biological reality, despite the fact that reality does not really exist. Thank you bubble of thought. So, a way of thinking about gender is that it is a matter of self-presentation, an action that must constantly work. What we use, how we walk and talk, even our personal characteristics, such as aggression or empathy, are all ways to "do" gender. They are ways of making statements of masculinity or femininity that people will see and, hopefully, respect. And we can be sanctioned if we do not do gender well or well enough.

This is precisely what is happening when a man is called "ladybug" or tells a woman who "really should smile more." This gender idea as performance is known as gender expression. But gender is more than that; It is also a matter of identity. Gender identity refers to the internal sense and deeply of a person of its kind. No one really, perfectly fits the cultural ideal of masculinity or femininity. And many people build their kind differently from these conventional ideas. In particular, transgender people are those whose gender identity does not match the biological sex that were assigned to birth.

On the contrary, the gender identity of the people of cisgenero coincides with their biological sex. Even so, both trans and CIS people can express their identity in several ways, conventional or other. And this should make clear that gender, like sex, is not binary. There are many ways to make feminities and many ways in which a person can be masculine. Now that we have a basic understanding of sex and gender, we can finally reach sexuality. Sexuality is basically a shorthand for everything related to sexual behavior: sexual acts, desire, excitation, all the experience that is considered sexual. A part of sexuality is sexual orientation, or who attracts you sexually or not.

Most people identify as heterosexuals, which means they are attracted to the people of the other genre. While this is the most common orientation, a significant number of people are homosexual, attracted by people of their own sex or gender. But these are really only Poles in a continuum, with many people attracted to both their own and other genres, as well as in bisexual or pansexual. And some people are asexual and do not experience sexual attraction at all. Now, these definitions may vary from person to person, as they vary from society to society. This, and the fact that social norms can make people wish to maintain their private orientation, makes estimates of the number of homosexual and bisexual people necessarily inaccurate.

That said, according to the surveys we have, around 4% of the American population is identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual. However, this increases to about 10% if we ask if a person has experienced an attraction between people of the same or has participated in homosexual activity. So what can each of the three sociological paradigms about sexuality tell us? We will begin with symbolic interactionism, because your idea is the most fundamental: and that is that sexuality, this intensely private and supposedly primitive thing is socially constructed. It may think that this is a claim too far, because sexuality is a matter of incorporated impulses.

Some things are sexual. But if we really start asking "What is sexual?" Then the constructed nature of sexuality becomes quite obvious quite fast. 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 lands of Papua New Guinea, young children 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 is not clear that this should be considered sexual in the way we understand it. And we could also be inclined to label this ritual as "homosexual behavior", but it is not yet the same as homosexuality as we understand in the United States.

Therefore, physically identical acts may have radically different social and subjective meanings. We can explain this, in part, with the concept of sexual scripts. These are cultural recipes that dictate when, where, how and with sex, and what that sex means when it happens. The idea that sex occurs at home between two couples arranged, for example, is part of a generic sexual script in our society. Similarly, the sex that occurs between two people who met in a bar could come with a different script, and therefore, different shared expectations, than sex between two people who know for a long time.

This leads us to the structural functionalist perspective. Since sexual reproduction is necessary for the reproduction of society, this point of view says that sex must organize in some way, so that society works. And society organizes sexuality using sexual scripts. Before contraception was generalized, it was these norms that controlled how many people were born, determining when and how often people had sex. And when controlling who had sex with whom, also, in general, they made sure that these children were born in families that could support them. This is a function of the universal incest taboo, the prohibition of sex in nearby relatives.

Reproduction between family members would finally break down kinship relations. It would be impossible to maintain a clear set of family obligations if, for example, his brother could also be his father. But, as seen from the perspective of social conflict theory, sexuality regulation is also a matter of creating and strengthening inequalities. In particular, our society is traditionally built around heteronormativity. This is the idea that there are only two genres, that the genre corresponds to biological sex, and that the only natural and acceptable sexual attraction is between these two genres. Heterosativity causes heterosexuality to seem that it is directly linked to biological sex, but heterosexuality is both a social construction and any other sexuality.

It is defined by dominant sexual scripts, privileged by law and normalized by social practices, such as religious teachings, so it is understood as natural in a way that other sexualities are not. Queer theory challenges this naturalness and shows especially how gender and heterosexuality are united. Heteronormativity is based on the idea of ​​two opposite sexes that naturally fit, such as the posts of a magnet: therefore, for this logic, men persecute, women are persecuted, men are dominant, women are submissive. But all this is socially constructed; The sexes are not opposite, there are only two of them at both ends of a spectrum, along with all the variation of variations between them.

But the idea of ​​opposite sexes helps heterosexuality seem natural to us. And then you can see how sex, gender and sexuality are all linked, and all socially constructed. And you can see how society enters everywhere, even among these seemingly private and primitive things. And in turn, these things help structure society, create and maintain inequalities and give them the sheet of the natural. But

sociology

can help us separate them. Today we learned what sociology can tell us about sex and sexuality. We talk about the biological classification of sex and how is more complicated than we tend to think.

And we discuss the social construction of gender and a little 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 in the study Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney in Missaula, MT, and is made with the help of all these good people. Our animated team is thought of coffee and Crash Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud. If you wantKeeping the Crash free course for all, forever, can support the series in Patreon, a crowdfunding platform that allows you to support the content you love.

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