Crash Course: Sex & Sexuality

What are secondary sex characteristics?

Characteristics which develop at puberty and are not directly involved in reproduction, things like pubic hair, enlarged breasts or facial hair.

How does heteronormativity view sex?

Heteronormativity is based on the idea of two opposite sexes that naturally fit together, like poles of a magnet: So by this logic, men pursue, women are pursued, men are dominant, women are submissive.

What are bisexuality & pansexuality?

Heterosexuality and homosexuality are really only poles on a continuum, with plenty of people being attracted to both their own and other genders in this sexual orientation.

What is gender expression?

The idea of gender as a performance.

How does gender stratification get misunderstood as biological differences between genders?

The reality is that minor, average, biological differences are used as the justification for widespread gender stratification, funneling males and females into different jobs, hobbies, and identity constructions. And society then points to this resulting stratification as "proof" of an underlying difference in biological reality, even though that reality doesn't actually exist.

What is gender?

The set of social and psychological characteristics that a society considers proper for its males and females. The sets of characteristics assigned to men are masculinities, and those assigned to women are femininities.

What are primary sex characteristics?

The sex organs involved with the reproductive processes and which develop in utero.

What makes the estimate of of the number of homosexual and bisexual people imprecise?

These definitions can vary from person to person, just as they vary from society to society. This, and the fact that social norms may make people wish to keep their orientation private.

What does it mean to be cisgender?

These people's gender identity matches their biological sex. Still, both trans and cis people can express their identity in a variety of ways, conventional or otherwise. And this should make it clear that gender, like sex, is not binary.

What is 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.

What is sex?

A biological category, and it distinguishes between females and males.

What is the root cause of sex?

A pair of chromosomes: XX for females and XY for males.

What is queer theory?

A perspective that challenges heterosexuality's naturalness and especially shows how gender and heterosexuality are tied together.

What is sexuality?

A shorthand for everything related to sexual behavior: sexual acts, desire, arousal - the entire experience that is deemed sexual.

How is heteronormativity's view of sex wrong?

All this is socially constructed; the sexes aren't opposites, there are just two of them at both ends of a spectrum, along with the whole array 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.

How much of the population identifies as gay, lesbian, or sexuality?

Around 4% of the American population identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. However, this increases to around 10% if we ask instead whether a person has ever experienced same-sex attraction or engaged in homosexual activity.

What is an example of the structural-functionalist perspective on sexuality?

Before contraception was widespread, it was these norms that controlled how many people were born, by determining when and how often people had sex. And by controlling who had sex with whom, they also, generally, made sure that those kids were born into families that could support them. This is one function of the universal incest taboo, the prohibition of sex between close relatives. Reproduction between family members would ultimately break down kinship relations. It would be impossible to maintain a clear set of familial obligations if, for instance, your brother could also be your father.

What is heterosexuality?

Being attracted to people of the other gender.

What is homosexuality?

Being attracted to people of your own sex or gender.

What are sexual scripts?

Cultural prescriptions that dictate the when, where, how, and with-whom of sex, and what that sex means when it happens. The idea that sex happens at home between two willing partners, for example, is part of a generic sexual script in our society.

How common is it to be intersex?

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, however - to include all of the conditions I just mentioned - intersex conditions appear in as much as 2% of the population.

How is being intersex seen?

In some societies, intersex people are accepted as just 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 rather as a deviation in need of correction.

What are examples of being intersex?

It can mean having different combinations of sex chromosomes - as in Klinefelter Syndrome, which creates chromosomes XX and Y, 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 aren't fully developed. This wide variety of intersex conditions makes population figures hard to pin down.

How does heteronormativity interact with heterosexuality?

It makes it seem like it's directly linked to biological sex, but heterosexuality is just as much a social construction as any other sexuality. It's defined by dominant sexual scripts, privileged by law, and normalized by social practices, like religious teachings, so it comes to be understood as natural in a way that other sexualities are not.

What is gender identity?

It refers to a person's internal, deeply held sense of their gender.

How does the idea of gender expression work?

It's a matter of a self-presentation, a performance that must be worked at constantly. What we wear, how we walk and talk, even our personal characteristics - like aggression or empathy - are all ways of "doing" gender. They're ways of making claims to masculinity or femininity that people will see and, hopefully, respect. We can be sanctioned if we don't do gender right, or well enough. This is precisely what's happening when a man is called a "sissy" or a woman is told she "really ought to smile more."

What is an example of gender being of social construction?

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, you'd be pretty hard pressed to explain the objective difference between a skirt and a kilt, except to say that wearing one is feminine, and wearing the other is masculine.

Are gender and sex the same thing?

No, gender is its own thing, separate from sex.

Is sex a simple fixed binary?

No. A significant portion of the population is intersex.

What does it mean to be transgender?

Nobody really, perfectly fits the cultural ideal of masculinity or femininity. And lots of people construct their gender differently from these conventional ideas. In particular, transgender people are those whose gender identity doesn't match the biological sex they were assigned at birth.

What is asexuality?

Not experiencing sexual attraction at all.

What is intersex?

People who are born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

How is sexuality 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.

What is the structural-functionalist perspective on sexuality?

Since sexual reproduction is necessary for the reproduction of society, this view says that sex has to be organized in some way, in order for society to function. And society organizes sexuality by using sexual scripts.

Do intersex conditions require medical intervention?

Some intersex conditions do require medical intervention for the sake of the patient's health, but many don't. And for years doctors performed unnecessary operations on intersex children, in order to make them acceptable according to cultural ideas about sex.

Is gender biological?

Some people don't even want to accept that gender is anything but biological, but sociology is here to tell you that it really isn't. Instead, it's a matter of social construction.

What is the symbolic-interactionism perspective on sexuality?

That sexuality, this intensely private and supposedly primeval thing, is socially constructed. You might think that sexuality is a matter of inbuilt urges. But if we actually start asking "what is sexual?" then the constructed nature of sexuality gets pretty obvious pretty fast.

What is an example of the symbolic-interactionism perspective on sexuality?

We might think, for instance, that oral sex is just sexual. But that's not necessarily true in all societies. For example, among the Sambia of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, young boys perform oral sex on, 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 this should be thought of as sexual in the way we understand it. And we might also be inclined to label this ritual as "homosexual behavior", but it's still not quite the same thing as homosexuality as we understand it in the US. So physically identical acts can have radically different social and subjective meanings.

What is sexual orientation?

Who you're sexually attracted to, or not.