Deck 9: C: Sexualities

Question 1

Discuss how sex education in Canadian schools encourages heterosexism while ignoring other forms of sexuality,and what the text suggests should be done to address this discrepancy.Do you agree? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Sex education also tends to encourage heterosexism, as it promotes, normalizes, and naturalizes heterosexuality. Sex education programs do not inform students of the wide range of sexual options available, in that they tend to ignore homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexualism. Recent Canadian guidelines by the Public Health Agency of Canada recommend including sexual diversity in school-based sexual education classes. Sex educators should expose students to alternative discourses of masculinity and femininity to promote a broader range of sexual possibilities, meanings, and relationships and to promote safer sex. Sex education should challenge gender relations, teach positive values about sex, and teach women and men that they can construct their own sexual identities—that they have agency in their sexualities. Sex education, then, can be particularly effective when it enables students to examine their sexual assumptions, attitudes, behaviours, and values.
Answers will vary by student.

Question 2

Discuss how essentialist approaches differ from social constructionist views in terms of their basic assumptions about human sexuality.Which view do you agree with more and why?

Answer 2

Answers will vary by student.
In contrast to social constructionist approaches to understanding sexuality, essentialist theorists attempt to make links between human sexuality and nature and biology. This approach takes for granted the social process of classifying particular behaviours as sexual. Also taken for granted is the categorization of some behaviours as normal and natural and other behaviours as abnormal and unnatural. Such an approach, in North America, treats heterosexuality as a natural instinct, whereby women and men are naturally attracted to each other. Essentialist theorists also assume that the primary purpose of sex is procreation. While this assumption has fallen out of favour, essentialists continue to conceive of heterosexuality as the normal and natural sexuality. This approach is also criticized for being gendered—constructing men as having high sex drives and being naturally sexually active and constructing women as sexually passive.

Question 3

Discuss how the use of the terms slut and promiscuous define women and control their sexual behaviour in today's world.

Answer 3

The term slut marks and shames women who are perceived as promiscuous or who have a casual attitude toward sex.These types of negative labels denigrate and censure active and desiring female sexualities.Contemporary uses and meanings of slut continue to reinforce the idea that men can express their sexuality but women cannot.The threat of being labelled a slut ensures that many young women come to believe that sex is bad and will lead to a bad reputation.
The culture that is created through this practice also teaches boys that there are two kinds of girls-good girls and bad girls-and hence that there are two ways to treat girls,depending on which category a girl is located in.Good girls are treated well;bad girls are expendable.
Promiscuous is a derogatory term used to describe anyone who is assumed to have had sex with an "unreasonable" number of sexual partners.Promiscuity discourses are a means of subjecting people,particularly women,to a disciplinary regime of morality.Such discourses can be damaging for women because,by rendering their actions as offensive and immoral,they constrain women's sexuality.Calling a woman promiscuous,then,is a means of regulating her sexuality and encouraging her to remain firmly located within the boundaries of the sexual double standard.

Question 4

Discuss how heterosexuality in our society is reinforced coercively through what Michel Foucault termed surveillance and normalization.Give an example from modern life.

Question 5

Discuss how masculine and feminine identities are socially constructed.Make sure you mention the sexual double standard.

Question 6

Discuss what Foucault means when he says that what we understand today as sex is a product of the discourse of sexuality.How does the development of a discourse of sexuality relate to the idea that sexuality is learned?

Question 7

Compare and contrast the essentialist,functionalist,conflict,post-structuralist,symbolic interactionist,and queer theory approaches to sexuality.

Question 8

Develop an essay that examines the phenomenon of "prostitution" from any two of the following theoretical perspectives: symbolic interactionism,conflict theory,functionalism,or post-structuralism.

Question 9

Discuss the distinction between homosexual behaviour and homosexual identities as emphasized by social historian John D'Emilio.How did social changes in society lead to the development of such identities?

Question 10

Develop an essay that explores the relationship between the sexual double standard and the politics of sexual health as it relates to STIs and HIV infection.