GSW 105 Quiz 1

Impulsive Hyperindividualism

A tendency for people to act in a highly individual way, without regard to society.

Sexual Ambiguity

Ambiguous genitalia is a rare condition in which an infant's external genitals don't appear to be clearly either male or female

Biological Determinism

Biological determinism refers to the idea that all human behavior is innate, determined by genes, brain size, or other biological attributes. This theory stands in contrast to the notion that human behavior is determined by culture or other social forces.

Hegemonic Masculinity

Hegemonic masculinity is defined as the current configuration of practice that legitimizes men's dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of women, and other marginalized ways of being a man.

Compulsive Masculinity

Parsons' theorized result of the long period of contact with femininity, characteristic of boys in modern nuclear families, which is commonly associated with hyper-masculinity and/or violent behaviour. As a result, being a "bad boy" becomes a way of establishing a masculine identity.

Differential Socialization

Social Learning theory. A view that people learn, often without realizing, by observing others.

Biological Essentialism

The belief that 'human nature', an individual's personality, or some specific quality (such as intelligence, creativity, homosexuality, masculinity, femininity, or a male propensity to aggression) is an innate and natural 'essence' (rather than a product of circumstances, upbringing, and culture).

Bem Sex Role Inventory

a measure of masculinity-femininity and gender roles. It assesses how people identify themselves psychologically.

Transvestite

a person, typically a man, who derives pleasure from dressing in clothes primarily associated with the opposite sex.

Evolutionary Success

ability to pass on genes to offspring

Castration Complex

an unconscious anxiety arising during psychosexual development, represented in males as a fear that the penis will be removed by the father in response to sexual interest in the mother, and in females as a compulsion to demonstrate that they have an adequate symbolic equivalent to the penis, whose absence is blamed on the mother.

Sociological Perspective

approach to understanding human behavior by placing it within its broader social context

Primary Sex Characteristics

body structures directly concerned with reproduction. allows us to tell males from females, such as the penis in men and the vagina in women

Alliance Theory

concerned with the ways that relationships among men come to organize social life.

Transgender

denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.

Gender Neutrality

describes the idea that policies, language, and other social institutions should avoid distinguishing roles according to people's sex or gender, in order to avoid discrimination

Reflexive Passivity

devises that we use to deflect individual accountability and responsibility ex: "its a free country and everyone is entitled to their own opinion

Emphasized Femininity

emphasized femininity is defined as the current configuration of practice that justifies the subordination of women

Ethnocentrism

evaluation of other cultures according to preconceptions originating in the standards and customs of one's own culture.

Intersexuality

existing or occurring between the sexes.

Agents of Socialization

family, schools, peers, media

Secondary Sex Characteristics

features that appear during puberty in humans, and at sexual maturity in other animals. These are particularly evident in the sexually dimorphic phenotypic traits that distinguish the sexes of a species, but unlike the sex organs, are not directly part of the reproductive system.

Sexual Psychologies

females invest more and males get away with small investment so approach sex and reproduction differently. Women choosy and hesitant. Men less discriminating and more aggressive. greater variety because less at risk

Reproductive Success

for male - depends on ability to fertilize a large number of eggs. females - extremely choosy because invest more energy.

Gender Fluidity

gender identity is not fixed. mix of both, may feel one one day and another another day.

"Doing" Gender

idea that in Western culture, gender, rather than being an innate quality of individuals, is a psychologically ingrained social construct that actively surfaces in everyday human interaction.

Sociobiology

include human behavior with evolutionary biology

Andropause

male menopause. testosterone drops

Invisibility of Privilege

privilege remains invisible. because privilege is invisible people may become defensive when confronted with facts

Gender Socialization

process of learning the social expectations and attitudes associated with one's sex.

Excision

removal

Couvade

ritual men observe when their wives are having babies. observe same food taboos as their wives, restrict their ordinary activities, and even seclude themselves during their wives delivery and postpartum period

Sex Role Theory

set of societal norms dictating the types of behaviors which are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for people based on their actual or perceived sex or sexuality.

Descent Theory

stress the invariance of the mother child bond. men form it through hunting

Sexual Terrorism

system by which males frighten, thereby controlling and dominating, females. Sexual terrorism has five components: ideology, propaganda, indiscriminate and amoral violence, voluntary compliance, and society's perception of the terrorist and the terrorized.

Expressive Roles

tend to pay attention to how everyone is getting along, managing conflict, soothing hurt feelings, encouraging good humor, and take care of things that contribute to one's feelings within the social group.

Feminism

the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes

Instrumental Roles

the semantic role of the entity (usually inanimate) that the agent uses to perform an action or start a process.

Confirmation Bias

the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.

Social Darwinism

the theory that individuals, groups, and peoples are subject to the same Darwinian laws of natural selection as plants and animals. Now largely discredited, social Darwinism was advocated by Herbert Spencer and others in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was used to justify political conservatism, imperialism, and racism and to discourage intervention and reform.

Interplanetary Theory of Gender Difference

the way we explain another universal phenomenon - gender inequality. Hierarchy, power, inequality - not just simply biological differences. Both nature and nurture.

Deceptive Distinctions

things that appear to be based on gender are actually based on something else.

Hypermasculinity

to fear and denigrate women as a way to display masculinity