Ch 8 - Gender

What concepts make up Freud's Male Developmental Psychology?

According to Freud's developmental psychology, girls and boys develop masculine and feminine personality structures through early interactions with their parents. - Boys have a tormented time achieving masculinity because they must resolve the Oedipal complex. - In this stage of development, around age three, every normal boy experiences heterosexual love for his maternal figure. - But he soon realizes that he will be castrated by his father if he continues to fancy his mother. - To resolve this Oedipal conflict, the boy rejects his mother, in turn emulating his emotionally distant father and developing rigid ego boundaries.

Sexual Harrassment

an illegal form of discrimination revolving around sexuality that can involve everything from inappropriate jokes to sexual "barter" (where victims feel the need to comply with sexual requests for fear of losing their job) to outright sexual assault

Navajo Society of native Americans on designating gender

In Nevajo tribes, there is not two but three genders: masculine men, feminine woman, and the nadle.

How did other feminist thinkers react to Rubin's theories?

Rubin's theory made waves. - Feminist thinkers widely agreed that the task at hand was to explain universal male dominance.

Why do men tend to fight one another, dominate the natural sciences, and outnumber women in the top political and executive offices? Why do women tend to stay more connected with their families and outnumber men and occupations that involve caring for others?

The short essentialist answer is that men and women are naturally, that is biologically different, so they behave differently

"good" or "bad" man or woman

Within aid to gender system, there is enormous variation in what counts as a "good" or "bad" man or woman.

Heteronormativity

the idea that heterosexuality is the default or normal sexual orientation from which other sexualities deviate

Intersectionality

the idea that it is critical to understand the interplay between social identities such as race, class, gender, ability status, and sexual orientation, even though many social systems and institutions (such as the law) try to treat each category on its own.

Do men disproportionately become computer scientists and financiers and women kindergarten teachers and dental hygienists because they are hardwired to do so?

we do know that cis-men and cis-women vary in thousands of major and minor measures.

What are essentialist arguments?

- Essentialist arguments explain social phenomena in terms of natural, biological, or evolutionary inevitabilities. - Essentialists often relies on biological determinism which assumes that what you do in the social world is a direct result of who you are in the natural world - If you are born with male parts, essentialist believe, you are essentially and absolutely a man, and you will be sexually attracted to women only, as preordained by nature. - As we've seen, medical experts have maintained the ideal of a dimorphic core binary model of sex by tweaking babies who blur the boundaries. - The trick is to recognize that the very boundaries separating male and female bodies are themselves contested.

Has the view of sex-reassignment surgeries changed?

- Yes, in 2017, three former surgeons general of the United States co-authored a report advocating the reconsideration of sex-reassignment surgeries. - They wrote about the emerging medical consensus that "children born with atypical genitalia should not have genitoplasty performed on them absent a need to ensure physical functioning." - They also point out that such surgeries became commonplace in the United States only as of the 1950s, and that many other governments. - Most people think that the medical construction of sex applies only to a handful of individuals. - However, Brown University researcher Anne Fausto-Sterling estimates that the number of deviations from the binary of male or bodies may be as high as 2 percent of live births, and the number of people receiving "corrective" genital surgery runs between 1 and 2 in every 1,000 births. - Just to give you an idea of what 2 in 1,000 looks like, there are now about 2 in 1,000 children born with trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome), a biological condition that is more visible than nonbinary sexual identity. - Activists argue that social discomfort and fear of difference, rather than medical necessity, may be what pushes parents and surgeons to the operating table.

Sexuality

refers to desire, sexual preference, and sexual identity and behavior.

What type of sex model dominated Western Biological thought from the ancient Greeks until the mid-18th century?

the one-sex model. - In this one-sex way of thinking, there was only one body (a male body) and the female body was regarded as its inversion that is, as a male body whose parts were flipped inside rather than hanging on the outside. - People believed that women were a lesser but not so radically different version of men-an illustration of how social relationships can shape scientific belief. - Not until the two-sex model of human bodies gained ground did women and men become such radically different creatures in the popular conception.

"Doing Gender": Interactionist Theories

- A social theory is useful only if it helps you understand the social world in which you live. - For example, Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman argue in their influential article "Doing Gender" (1987) that gender is not a fixed identity or role that we take with us into our interactions. - Rather, it is the product of those interactions. - In this framework, gender is a matter of active doing, not simply a matter of natural being. - To be a man or a woman, they argue, is to perform masculinity or femininity constantly. - In this social constructionist theory, gender is a process, not a static category. - The "doing gender" perspective is rooted in Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. - That is, West and Zimmerman argue

How many sexualities have been officially recognized?

- But it is not just straight men who have sex with other men or bisexuals that complicate the sexuality (and/or gender) binary. - There's a reason the term LGBTQIA has seemed to add letters lately—there's a growing recognition that if we look closely and without judgment, we see many forms of gender/sexuality identity that do not conform to categories that dominated discussion since, roughly, the 1850 period that Foucault marked as the start of the era of the "homosexual."

How have the ideas of what it means to be "masculine" changed over time?

- According to Erving Goffman the masculine ideal of mid twentieth century America as a young man who is "married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and with a decent record in sports." - Today the definition has blossomed to include more forms of dominant masculine identity, including, for example common the metrosexual male, who, as described by sociologist Kristen Barber, is typically white and wealthy and spend a large amount on grooming activities, such as manicures, that would have been considered feminine in the days Goffman was writing

Examples of Bisexuality

- Other cultures' attitudes toward male homosexuality are on a whole different level. - Both the Siwans of North Africa and the Keraki, also in New Guinea, prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality, for fairly straightforward, practical reasons. - Because every male is homosexual during his adolescence and then bisexual after heterosexual marriage, limiting straight sex keeps down the birthrate. - In these cultures with scant resources, homosexuality makes practical sense to limit the chances of teen pregnancy and overpopulation

"Sex/Gender System" (Rubin)

- Rubin challenged this notion and propose the sex/gender system. - In this system, the raw materials of biological sex are transformed through kinship relations into asymmetrical gender statuses. - She used the structural perspective of Claude Levi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, to suggest that because of the universal taboo against incest women who start out belonging to one man must leave their families of origin and go belong to another man (their husband). - Woman are treated like valuable property who stray pattern strengthen relations between families headed by men. Indeed, traditional wedding vows in the Western Volvo commitment tool bay only on the part of the wife. - This traffic and woman gives men certain rights over their female kin. The resulting sex/gender system, she argued, was not a given ; it was the result of human interaction.

What are the assumed biological difference between men and women?

- We make sense of much variation between men and women by referring to their assumed biological differences. - Such differences can range from the behavioral consequences of hormones (such as premenstrual syndrome), relative physical strength of bodies (for example, women's gymnastics emphasize balance, and men's upper-body strength), brain architecture (men supposedly being more left-brain dominant), and chromosomes (XX or XY). - But in so doing, we tend to miss a crucial link between nature and nurture.

Feminism

A social movement to get people to understand that gender is an organizing principal and society and to address gender-based inequalities that intersect with other forms of social identity. - Feminism was at first embraced as a social movement to advocate for woman's woman's right to vote; it later became a consciousness raising movement to get people to understand that gender is an organizing principle of life. - One of the central ideas of the second wave of feminism is that gender is important because it structures relations between people. - Further, as gender shapes social relations, and does this on on equal ground, meaning gender is not just an identifying characteristic, but embodies real powers and privileges. - Regardless of which wave we are talking about, the basic idea behind feminism is that women and men should be accorded equal opportunity and respect.

Structural Functionalism

theoretical tradition claiming that every society has certain structures that exist to fulfill some set of necessary functions

We often operate on a what type of sex model?

one-sex model of human body types.

The Scrutinization of Surgeries Reasigning Male and Female Genitalia (Sexual Realignment)

- These practices have lately come under scrutiny, however. - Founded in 1993, the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) was succeeded in 2008 by the Accord Alliance, which has the same mission: to reduce embarrassment and secrecy over intersex conditions. - Sociologist Georgiann Davis (2015), who herself learned only as an adolescent that she had male sex chromosomes, has documented rifts within the intersex community. - Some members find comfort in the scientific, medicalizing label of "disorder of sex development," while many resist the assertion that their identity is a pathology rather than just part of natural human variation.

Talcott Pasons Sex Role Theory

According to Parson's sex role theory, the heterosexual nuclear family is the ideal arrangement in modern societies because it fulfills the function of reproducing workers. - With a work oriented father and the public sphere and a domestic oriented mother in the private sphere, children are most effectively reared in future laborers who can meet the labor demands of the capitalist system. - Sex, sexuality, gender are taken to be stable and dichotomous, meaning that each has two categories. - Each category is assigned a role in a given script that actors carry out according to the expectations of those roles, which are enforced by social sanctions to ensure that the actors do not forget their life. - Women and men play distinctive roles that are functional for the whole of society; a healthy, harmonious society exists when actors stick to their normal roles. - Generally speaking, according to parsons, social structures such as gender and the division of labor are held in place because they work to ensure a stable society

The point of all this sex talk is to challenge our tendency to think of bodies as

wholly deterministic. - That is, to acknowledge that our understanding of, categorizations of, and behavior toward bodies are not set in stone. - We are pushing back against essentialist arguments.

How do ideas of masculinity vary by class and race?

- Likewise, many men form what Tristan Bridges and C.J. Pascoe call to distance themselves from hegemonic masculinity and instead adopt aspects of African American masculinity. - They argue that white adolescent males emulate the masculine practices of other marginalized groups, this dynamic serves to mitigate the real power differences in inequalities between the groups, as of race and class for just a style one can the doctor said as one likes.

But what happens when a woman breaks into a top managerial position at Indesco?

- She becomes a numerical minority, what Kanter calls a token, a stand-in for all women. - Because tokens have heightened visibility, they experience greater surveillance and thus performance pressures. - Male peers tend to rely on gender stereotypes when interpreting a token's behavior, seeing female managers as "seductresses, mothers, pets," or tough "iron maidens." - When a token female manager botches the job, it just goes to show that women can't handle the corporate world and should be kept out of it.

The complete set of scripts is what sociologists Referred to as gender, which, broadly speaking, has divided people, behaviors, and institutions into two categories:

Masculine and feminine

hegemonic masculinity (Kimmel)

The condition in which men are dominant and privileged, and this dominance and privilege is invisible.

Gender

denotes a social position— namely, the set of social arrangements that are built around normative sex categories.

Matrix of domination

intersecting domains of oppression that create a social space of domination and, by extension, a unique position within that space based on someone's intersectional identity along the multiple dimensions of gender, age, race, class, sexuality, location, and so on.

Employee behavior tends to be determined by:

job requirements and the constraints of the organizational structure of the company. - At Indesco, secretarial positions (98.6 percent female) were based on "principled arbitrariness," meaning there were no limits to the (male) boss's discretion as to what his secretary should do (type, fax, pick up his dry cleaning, look after his dog when he's away). - Furthermore, secretarial work was characterized by fealty, the demand of personal loyalty and devotion of secretary to boss. - Under these conditions, secretaries adopted certain behaviors to get through a day's work, including timidity and self-effacement, addiction to praise, and displays of emotion—all qualities that Indesco bosses tended to think of as just the way women are.

In a hook-up culture, what might determine whether a pair continues to hook up or moves on to new partners?

England has a theory that goes like this: Partner-specific investment may well be important. In other words, ... our ability to please partners may not just be generally what have we learned from a lifetime of experience but what have we actually learned about this particular partner and what works for them and what they like and what they need. ...If it's hook-up number two, she's more likely to have an orgasm than if it's one, and if it's three more likely, and if it's four even more likely. - She also noted that these hook-ups rarely produce babies—but nearly 14 percent of students still did not use any method to prevent pregnancy the last time they had sex.

Who developed Psychoanalytic Theories?

Sigmund Freud - Where functionalism focuses too much, perhaps, on society as a whole, Freudian theorist have provided an overly individualistic, psychoanalytic account of sex roles. - Although biological determinism plays a major role in Freudian theory, so does the idea that gender develops through family socialization.

Functionalist Sex Role Theory on why structures change throughout history

The functionalist sex role theory also does not explain how and why structures change throughout history. - If traditional husband-and-wife sex roles were so functional, why did they change drastically in the 1970s? - In Parsons account, gender roles appeared to be a matter of voluntarism, as if women and men choose, independently of external power constraints, to be housewives and bread-winners, respectively. - Of course, this is a myopic you will rolls since woman of color and immigrant women had always worked outside the home at high rates. - Finally sex and gender Are regarded as being composed of dichotomous roles, when these categories are, in fact, fuzzy, flexible, and variable combination with other social positions, such as race and class

What is the difference between transgender and cisgender?

Transgender describes people who is gender does not correspond to their birth sex. - cisgender describes people whose gender corresponds to their birth sex

What is sexism?

Sexism occurs when a person's sex or gender is the basis for judgment, discrimination, or other differential treatment against that person

What is sexuality, and how has it been patterned historically and culturally?

- Among the ancient Greeks, relationships between two men were accepted as normal. - Engaging in same-sex acts did not confer a particular identity as the practice varied in frequency across the population among those who did and those who did not also participate in opposite-sex sexual relations. - Rather, the socially important distinction revolved around active-passive dichotomy (although historians have shown that many exceptions existed). - The active partner was supposed to be older or higher in status than the passive partner. - To flip the rules was a violation, and it was considered shameful for a master or noble to be penetrated by a younger man. - A more extreme and brutal example of sexual relations founded on power relations can be found today in the social orders in US prisons, where it is easy to see that rape is about power: who is in charge, who is being penetrated, and who is normal versus deviant. - Prison rape, like any rape, may not be primarily about seeking sexual gratification; indeed, it is reported that few prison rapists climax during the act. - In prison, the same-sex sex act is often seen as something altogether distinct from gay identity - Or, consider sexual normality among the Sambia, a mountain people in Papua New Guinea. - Anthropologist Gilbert Herdt (1981) reported that fellatio played a significant role in a boy's transition into manhood. - Young boys are initiated into manhood by a daily ritual of fellatio on older boys and men. - By taking in the vital life liquid (semen) of older men, boys prepare themselves to be warriors and sexual partners with women. - Fellatio, for Sambia boys, then, is the only way to become "real" men

Baby Names and the Power of Gender.

- Analysis by Stanley Lieberson, Susan Dumais, and Shymon Baumann Shows that means flow from male to androgynous to female but never in reverse. - If you know, for example, a male named Kim, chances are he was born before 1958, the year that Hitchcock's movie Vertigo was released, making the actress Kim Novak a household name. - The number of boys named Kim dropped to almost zero the next year. - Carol, Aubrey, and Lindsay started as male names and became feminized. - The fact that there is a one-way flow from male to female in terms of child naming tells us something about gender norms and inequality (Mainly that masculinity dictates culture more than femininity does, or that femininity six to emulate masculinity for the masculine season feminine as corrupting).

Why woman typically on the bottom of stratification systems? That is, why do women in almost every society seem to get short shrift?

- Anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo answered that it must be women's universal association with the private sphere. - Because woman gives birth and then rear children, they become identified with domestic life, which universally is accorded last prestige, value, and rewards then men's public sphere of work and politics. - Meanwhile, anthropologist Sherry Ortner claimed that women are identified with something that every culture defines as lower than itself. - Hey woman, she reason, comes to be identified with the chaos in danger of nature because of bodily functions like lactation and menstruation.

Matrix of Domination Link to Intersectionality

- As illustrated by the concept of intersectionality, "woman" is not a stable or obvious category of identity. - Rather, women are differentially located in what Collins calls a matrix of domination. - A 40-year-old poor, black, straight, single mother living in rural Georgia will not have the same conception of what it means to be a woman as a 25-year-old professional, white, single, lesbian in Chicago. - More fundamentally, Collins (1990) argues, black women face unique oppressions that white women don't. - For instance, black women experience motherhood in ways that differ from the white masculinist ideal of the family, as "bloodmothers," "othermothers," and "community othermothers," thus revealing that white masculine notions of the world do not capture daily lived experiences of many black women.

Postmodern and Global Perspective

- As perspectives have expanded and previously rigid categories have begun to crumble, the validity of the woman question is itself now in question. - For instance, anthropologist Oyèrónké Oyeˇwùmí argues that the woman question is a product of uniquely Western thought and cannot be applied to African societies. - In The Invention of Women (1997), she presents ethnographic research of Yoruban society in West Africa, which she claims was once a genderless society. Among the Yoruba, before the arrival of anthropologists, villagers did not group themselves as men or women or use body markers at all. - Rather, they ranked themselves into strata by seniority. - When Western feminist scholars arrived on the scene, presuming the preexistence of gender relations, they, of course, found a system of gender. - But this system of categories—distinct males and females—indicates a Western cultural logic, what Oyeˇwùmí has termed biologic.

What does the phrase "the woman question" mean, and how does patriarchy help in understanding this question?

- At the start of the second wave of the feminist movement in the 1960s, dearest some scrambled to find an answer to the woman question: What explains the nearly universal dominance of men over women? What is the root of patriarchy, a system involving the subordination of femininity to masculinity? -

Biologic (Postmodern and Global Perspective)

- Bio-logic runs deep in our cultural experiences and understandings of gender. It acts as a sort of filter through which all knowledge of the world runs, though there may be different ways of knowing outside such a paradigm. - But if "woman" is such an unstable, fragmented category—one that is merely "performed" through discourse, as postmodern and queer theorist Judith Butler (2006) suggests—how are we supposed to study it? - Feminists must have some sturdy ground on which to unite, build coalitions, and tackle injustice. - Philosopher Susan Bordo provides a pragmatic buoy by arguing that there are hierarchal and binary power structures out there that do still oppress women and are handy when it comes to addressing issues such as the wage gap, eating disorders, or rape.

Sex as an Either/or Binary

- Bodies are, so we often think, natural, God- (or evolution-) given, sacred, hardwired. - Human babies come equipped with a set of male or female organs, hormones, and chromosomes—what we might call "the plumbing" determined by our DNA. - We usually think of sex as an either/or binary. - You're either male or female. - But in fact, there are some exceptions and blurred lines that have led sociologists to view this model of "natural" sex as more of an approximation than an absolute.

Conflict Theories

- By the 1980s, another wave of thinkers began to tackle an issue missing from earlier discussions of the woman question: power. - Conflict theorists mixed old-school Marxism with feminism to claim that gender, not class, was the driving force of history. - Socialist feminists, also known as radical feminists, claimed that the root of all social relations, including relations of production, stemmed from unequal gender relations -

The Social Construction of Sexuality

- By treating sexuality as a social construction—that is, as always shaped by social factors—the sociologist would argue that the notion of normal, especially pertaining to what happens behind closed bedroom (or bathroom or car) doors, is always contested. In other words, there is no natural way of doing it. - If an essentially right way existed, we wouldn't be able to find such wild and woolly variation throughout history and across cultures. - Starting from the view that sex itself is a social creation, sociologists tend to argue that humans have sexual plumbing but no sexuality until they are located in a social environment. - The range of normal and abnormal is itself a construction, a production of society. - The study of this range can lead the willing sociologist into an exploration of the social relations on which sex is built.

So what's a public health officer to do about the rise in teenage sexual intercourse?

- During its years in office, the Bush administration (2001-9) advocated a "virginity pledge" and other abstinence policies, and the abstinence advocacy group True Love Waits says that 2.5 million young people have made the virginity pledge since 1993 (Herbert, 2011). - As it turns out, the pledge does, on average, delay the onset of sexual activity as well as reduce a teenager's number of sexual partners, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health—particularly when it occurs in a school context where a sizable number of students take the pledge, creating a meaningful identity of sorts through collective abstinence. - That said, most pledgers (about 60 percent) break their pledge. - And when sex happens, it's much more likely to come in a rush of surprisingly strong, unfettered desire. - Among the pledgers, only 40 percent ended up using a condom during sex—why would they have a condom if they were planning to be virgins until marriage?—compared with 60 percent of teens who had not pledged. - The end result was a net higher rate of HPV infection and pregnancy among the pledgers

Examples of Conflict Theories

- Economist Heidi Hartmann (1981) and legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon (1983), for example, both analyzed how capitalism combines with patriarchy to make women economically dependent on men's incomes. - This means that in a capitalist society, women have a disadvantaged position in the job market and within the family. - Capitalists (that is, men) in turn reap all the benefits of women's subordination. When women are subordinate, men benefit. - To radical feminists, gender inequality is first and foremost about power inequalities, and gender differences (as in personality development) emerge from there. - However, what lies beneath these conflict theories is yet another variant of essentialism. - Radical feminists basically posited that the world is divided into two groups: men and women (red flag number one). - These two groups are necessarily pitted against each other in a struggle for resources (red flag number two). - Again, men and women are reduced to automatons in a static battle, which women always lose

What accounts for the wide range of statistical differences that exist between men and women?

- Essentialists might refer to natural sex differences, but as we saw earlier, sociologists are apt to call these same differences "deceptive distinctions," those that arise because of the particular roles individuals come to occupy. - Why might some people believe men to be more capable of logic, abstraction, and rationality? - Perhaps because their employment possibilities are more likely to include jobs with these demands—a circular argument. - Why do women seem to be so good at parenting? - Maybe because their weaker employment prospects encourage them to accept domestic roles and rely on a male's salary. - Who is more relational and who is more rational? - Anthropologists Jean O'Barr and William O'Barr find that the true test of what type of language an individual uses during testimony in court is the witness's occupation, not gender - Physicists tend to speak in more abstract terms, teachers in more relational ones, regardless of gender. - Once such deceptive distinctions are revealed, it is easy to flip the essentialist rhetoric to see that gender differences may be a product of gender expectations, rather than the cause. - Physicists speak in more abstract terms, teachers in more relational ones, because their jobs demand it.

College Enrollment By Gender

- Fifty-six percent of college students in 2015 were women. - However, despite their increased enrollment, women remain overrepresented in traditionally feminine fields of study: the arts and the humanities. - Men also outnumber women at elite colleges, where they are groomed for high-power professions in finance, law, or politics

Manhood in America (Kimmel)

- In Manhood in America by Michael Kimmel he traces the development of hegemonic masculinity In the west and find that in the 19th century, the ideal man was not associated with physical fitness, moneymaking endeavors, or sports. - Business endeavors were the boorish concerns of the room trade classes, and physical strength undermine one's gentlemanly dispositions. - Ideal masculinity in the 1700s one hand in hand with kindness and intellect and preferably a little poetry a very different image from the modern-day idea of the "man's man."

Why so many short-lived hook-ups instead of longer-term relationships?

- For one thing, the students are not looking to begin families anytime soon. - For another, relationships are just more work—for the men, at least. - England found that heterosexual males are not necessarily expected to sexually satisfy the women they hook up with, but the opposite is true when they are in relationships. - This has led to what they call "the orgasm gap." - England and co-authors' analysis shows "that specific sexual practices [such as oral sex or genital stimulation], experience with a particular partner, and commitment all predict women's orgasm and sexual enjoyment"— all conditions less present in hook-ups than in relationships. - For example, with respect to oral sex, England explains that in a hook-up "it's much more likely that the woman is servicing the guy than vice versa. So it seems like the hook-ups are prioritizing male pleasure"

Criticism of Freud's theories

- For starters, Freud's theories lacked empirical evidence and assumed a heterosexual, two parent nuclear family. - Since only about 48 percent of American children live in households headed by two married biological parents most of you reading this probably did not grow up in the nuclear family setting that Freud and Chodorow describe. - Sociologist Carol stack underscored this point in her ethnography of a poor black community. - In All Our Kin (1974), she finds that the division between male and female roles and attitudes is not as clearcut as Freud or Chodorow would have us think. - In the community Stack studied, caregiving was a valued responsibility for both men and women. - Moreover, these early cycle analytics theorists took for granted a binary sex/gender system, whereas we now know that those categories are much more fluid in real life.

How did people react to Parson's Sex Role Theory?

- Functionalism was a hit in the 1950s; after all, it makes an intuitive sense that there must be a good reason for the way things happen to be, some internal logic. - But Parsons sex role theory falls short on several points. - For starters, the argument is tautological - that is, it explains the existence of a structure in terms of its function, essentially claiming that things work the way they do because they work. - In explaining a phenomenon in terms of its function, functionalists relied on the presumption that the need for the function preexists the phenomenon, a tricky leap of logical faith. - Furthermore, they glossed over the possibility the other ways of organizing society than the structures of gender, race, and so on that we currently have could fulfill the same functions, and the question of whether those "functions" are themselves legitimate or ultimately desirable. - The end result is a theory that tends to justify or naturalized existing forms of social relationships - such as Gender wage gap and the unequal division of labor and housework.

When does gender socialization begin?

- Gender socialization begins at birth when parents dress their children differently by sex. - It continues through school—where boys and girls are treated differently such that boys are called on by teachers more often. - And it is apparent in family life, where even though women's roles have expanded in the formal labor force, men's have only slightly budged toward more involvement in the domestic sphere

Thomas Laqueur

- He showed us that this differentiation of bodies prompted changes in ideas about the female orgasm. - In the one-sex model, it was believed that both a man's orgasm and a woman's were requirements for conception. (There is new medical evidence, that dual orgasms do increase the chance of conception.) - But in the mid-1800s, around the time the two-sex model was gaining ground, female orgasm was considered unnecessary. - Whereas 17th century (female) midwives advised would-be mothers that the trick to conceiving lay in an orgasm, nineteenth-century (male) doctors debated whether female orgasm was even possible.

According to Judith Lorber, what does it mean that gender is a social institution?

- If gender is a human invention, we have to take it as seriously as we would any other institution, as Judith Lorber argues. - In Paradoxes of Gender (1994), Lorber claims that gender is a social structure that "establishes patterns of expectations for individuals, orders the social processes of everyday life, is built into the major social organizations of society, such as the economy, ideology, the family, and politics, and is also an entity in and of itself." - Although gender is a social construction, it matters in the real world, organizing our day-to-day experiences and having profound and unequal consequences for the life chances of people—effects that themselves vary by the other social categories to which an individual belongs. - Gender is not just about people—institutions, occupations, and even nouns (in some languages) can all be gendered. - In this way gender ultimately embodies power struggles and how they organize daily life, from household economies and wage labor to birth control and babies' names.

Relationship Between Gender, Race, and Class

- If gender is a performance, it is much more than a set of neutral scripts that we "voluntarily" follow. - Our actions are influenced by structural forces that we might not even be aware of, such as class or race privilege. - As Patricia Hill Collins (1990) claims, we "do" a lot more than gender; gender intersects with race, class, nationality, religion, and so forth. - Black feminists have made the case that early liberal feminism was largely by, about, and for white middle-class women. - In trying to answer the woman question and explain women's oppression, early feminists assumed that all women were in the same oppressed boat. - In so doing, they effaced multiple lines of fragmentation and difference into one simple category: woman. - For example, by championing women's rights to work outside the home in The Feminine Mystique (1997), leading second-wave feminist Betty Friedan ignored the experiences of thousands of working-class and women of color who were already working, sometimes holding down two jobs to support their families. - Indeed, a third wave of feminism focuses on how the identities surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality intersect with other meaningful social categories like race or class in a process called intersectionality, as articulated by critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw and sociologist Beatrice Potter Webb back in 1913.

What concepts make up Freud's Female Developmental Psychology?

- In Freud's view, girls do not experience quite the same resolution to their analogous "penis envy." - When a little girl realizes that she lacks the plumbing to have sexual relations with her mother, she experiences penis envy toward her father, according to Freud. - However, she ultimately realizes that one day she too can have a baby, thus providing feminine gratification. - Girls end up identifying with their mothers, growing up with less rigid ego boundaries and more easily connecting with others than boys do.

The Wage Gap Among Genders and Race

- In addition to sometimes having to work in hostile environments, women have consistently been paid less than their male peers, earning about 81 cents to every $1 of a man's wage. - This overall gap obscures stark racial differences, however. - Black women earn 87 cents to the black male dollar (but only 66 cents to the white male dollar). - Meanwhile, white women have similar earnings to black men, yet only earn 78 cents to the dollar of white men. (In some large, economically successful cities, however, the gender gap may be shrinking or even reversing among young adults). - The media touted women's gains in the 1970s and 1980s, when masses of women entered the US labor force. - Yet women disproportionately entered the lower rungs of the occupational hierarchy. These feminized jobs, what Louise Howe (1977) calls "pink-collar" jobs, are low-paid service industry jobs. - Cleaning buildings, filing papers, and making coffee are hardly what women imagine when they dream of independence. - Caring work tends to be feminized as well—think home health aides, nurses, or child-care workers. - Meanwhile, "purple-collar" labor—a name giving to occupational niches typically filled by transgender individuals—often involves trans women performing emotional work to reduce tensions in high-stress environments, such as one Philippine call center that was studied by Emmauel David.

Jennifer L. Pierce Study of Law Firms

- Jennifer L. Pierce's (1995) study of law firms showed that sexual stereotypes, as much as organizational structure, are underlying causes of job segregation. - Paralegals—who are 86 percent female—are expected to be deferential (that is, they should not stick up for themselves), caring, and even motherly toward the trial lawyers for whom they work. - Given the adversarial model of the US legal system, trial lawyers, in contrast, perform what Pierce calls masculine emotional labor. - To excel in the job takes aggression, intimidation, and manipulation. - Even though almost half of law school graduates are female, women make up only 16 percent of partners at firms. - When a woman joins the higher ranks of trial lawyering, she's likely to face exclusion from informal socializing with her colleagues (no drinks after work), deflation of her job status (frequently being mistaken for a secretary), and difficulty bringing clients into the firm. - Thus female litigators find themselves in a double bind not experienced by their male counterparts. - When deploying courtroom tactics of aggression and intimidation—the very qualities that make a male lawyer successful and respected—women litigators find themselves being called "bitches," "obnoxious," and "shrill." - But when they fail to act like proper "Rambo litigators" in the courtroom, women are equally chided for being "too nice" and "too bashful." - The trade-off between being a good woman and being a successful lawyer adds yet another obstacle for women to make it to the top in male-dominated jobs—and that's not even taking into account the added burden of sexual harassment in the workplace

Glass Escalator

- Just as the odds are stacked against female tokens, they tilt in favor of men in female-dominated jobs. In Still a Man's World (1995), Christine Williams found that male nurses, elementary school teachers, librarians, and social workers inadvertently maintain masculine power and privilege. - Specifically, when token men enter feminized jobs, they enjoy a quicker rise to leadership positions on the aptly named glass escalator. - These escalators also operate in law firms, where male paralegals, themselves tokens in the overwhelmingly female semi-profession, reap benefits from their heightened visibility. - Male paralegals are said to enjoy preferential treatment over their female peers, such as promotions and even the simple (but substantial) benefit of being invited to happy hour with the litigators. - Recent research finds, however, that the glass escalator is racialized: men of color do not ascend within their occupations at the same rates as their white counterparts

How does this occupational segregation happen?

- Many new women workers find themselves shuffled into occupations dominated by other women, and women who go into a male-dominated field often find that, soon enough, they are surrounded by women. - Like names, jobs become feminized when too many women hit the scene. - This has happened in fields such as real estate sales, clerical work, pharmacy, public relations, bartending, bank telling, and more recently, the academic disciplines of sociology and biology. - In Job Queues, Gender Queues (1990), sociologists Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos argue that women end up in lower-paid jobs because these occupations lose (or have lost) their attractiveness for white men. - When a job becomes deskilled and less autonomous—such as secretarial work, which way back when was men's work—earnings decline, routes of upward mobility close off, work conditions in general deteriorate, and men flee to better positions, leaving (typically white) women next in line to shuffle into the ranks of men's cast-off work.

How have thinkers incorporated Freudian ideas?

- Many thinkers have picked up and used Freudian ideas to theorize differences between men and women. - For example, feminist psychoanalyst Nancy Chodorow modified Freud's theory to answer a particular version of the women question: Why are women predominantly the caregivers? - She reasoned that parents' unequal involvement in child rearing was a partial cause for the universal oppression of women. - Her answer was that mother by women is reproduced in a cycle of role socialization, in which little girls learn to identify as mothers and little boys as fathers. - Chodorow concluded that egalitarian relations between the sexes would be possible if men shared the mothering.

Sexuality and Power

- Marxist feminists, for instance, argue that sexuality in America is an expression of the unequal power balance between men and women. - Catharine MacKinnon (1983) argued that in male-dominated societies, sexuality is constructed as a gender binary, with men on top and women on the bottom (literally and figuratively). - To MacKinnon, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality, an expression of male control. - Some feminists also argue that our experiences of what is titillating are shaped by the fetishization of male power. - So being "taken" is exciting and pleasurable to women, revealing that even those things we think of as the most personal of experiences are shaped by social arrangements of power. - Adrienne Rich (1980) called sexuality in America a "compulsory heterosexuality." - This "political institution," at least for some, is not a preference but something that has been imposed, managed, organized, and enforced to serve a male-dominated capitalist system in which women's unpaid domestic work is required to support men's paid work outside of the home. - Because her work is unpaid, the woman in this situation is unable to leave a bad husband. - According to Rich, people come to see heterosexuality as the norm, when it is, in fact, a mechanism integral to sustaining women's social subordination.

non-monogamy

- One form of nonheteronormativity that has garnered a lot of attention of late is non-monogamy. - Non-monogamy is not just having sex with multiple people (because, for example, people can be in monogamous relationships and cheat on their partners). - Rather, it is the practice of having multiple sexual (or intimate) relationships (or merely the desire to) with the full knowledge and consent of all the people involved. - Polyamory is a particular form of non-monogamy. - While there is no agreed on, universal definition of polyamory, it usually involves intimate relationships with more than one partner (again, with knowledge and consent of all involved). - So a couple who agrees that they can have one-night stands with other people are non-monogamous but not polyamorous. - Mimi Schippers finds that some forms of polyamory subvert gender/sexuality norms more than others. - For example, a relationship including a woman and two men challenges heterosexual norms and gender power relations more than a relationship among one man and two women, since the latter more easily allows for male dominance and because female bisexuality is more socially acceptable than male bisexuality.

what does it mean that gender is fluid?

- Overtime and from place to place, or ideas about gender are fluid, changing, and context specific. - Many of the differences we observed between men and women do not have much to do with individual gender differences at all. - Instead, the behaviors arise as a result of the different positions men and women occupy. - Sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein calls these "deceptive distinctions" which grossly exaggerated actual differences between men and women. - To illustrate her idea, here's a quick thought experiment: Imagine a doctor and a nurse. - Did you assume the doctor was A man and a nursing woman? - Tied up in these cuff exceptions are other ideas, Such as the stereotypes that women are nurturing or men are analytical. - The main difference between the doctor and nurse isn't gender, the power and social status. ** While Gender norms can be fluid, one constant across time and culture is that men have held more power than woman the question that has preoccupied social thinkers for a long time.

Elizabeth Grosz

- Proposes that we review the relationships between the natural and the social as akin to Mobius strip. - The Mobius strip isn't old math puzzle that looks like a twisted red and blue, yet it has just one side and one edge. - Biological sex makes up the inside of the strip, whereas a social world makes up the outside. - But as happens in the contours of gender,The inside and outside surfaces are inseparable. - In thinking or talking about sex and gender, we often switch from one to the other without even noticing that we've changed our focus.

What does the letter "Q" in LGBTQIA represent?

- Queer is a derogatory term, reclaimed by those it was originally intended to wound, to become a broader, encompassing term for nonheteronormative sexual behaviors/identities. - That is, when someone self-identifies as queer, they may be a lesbian looking for a broader, more inclusive umbrella that is not already overly associated with, say, white middle-class people. - Or they may be someone who participates in what might be called "kinky" sexual practices, such as BDSM (a term meant to capture bondage/discipline/submission/sadomasochism and related practices). - Or they may simply be someone who does not feel comfortable in and wishes to reject other aspects of heteronormativity. - For instance, some queer people reject the notion of same-sex marriage. - They reject what they see as assimilation into heteronormative culture, and instead prefer to organize their lives differently in terms of kinship, sexuality, and so on

Sometimes the policies meant to achieve one end backfire and cause the ________ outcome

- Sometimes the policies meant to achieve one end backfire and cause the opposite outcome, despite the best intentions. - Government efforts to influence healthy teen sexuality provide one example. - Recent studies have described the blasé attitude that contemporary American teenagers supposedly bring to their love lives. - When sociologist Paula England surveyed students at one midwestern university about their sex lives, half reported that their previous sexual partner was someone they had slept with only once. - Here's how she explained hook-up culture, which has replaced dating as the route to romance on college campuses around the country. - She did her first surveys at Northwestern, where "before people ever go on a date, they hook up." - Lest there be any confusion: a hook-up is not sex ... unless it is. - A hook-up means "something sexual happens, that 'something sexual' is not always intercourse, often in fact [in] the majority of cases it isn't, and there is no necessary implication that anybody's interested in a relationship, but they might be interested." - Dating is infrequent, but it is not dead. - It is "charged with more meaning now, and it's more likely to be leading to a relationship." - Furthermore, "there's a strong norm that relationships should be monogamous and marriages should be monogamous and that people eventually want to get to monogamy and a marriage. They're just putting it off a lot longer. That's really what's changed, I think"

The Changes in Femininity Over Time

- Specifically, ideal feminine beauty has been a continuous sight of change and contestation. - Look at the 17th-century Rubenesque women, the voluptuous beauties Who by today's high fashion standards or simply overweight. - In traditional economies or food was scares a plump woman was a sign of good health, wealth, and attractiveness. - The long-standing preference for a robust female body has changed as industrialized society moved from relative scarcity of food to plenitude. - Today the cheaper foods or the fattening ones, and only people with enough disposable income can afford gym memberships and healthy diets. - So we can see dominate or emphasize definitions of femininity are always undergoing change, from the hysterical Victorian housewives to the sporty working girl of the 1980s to today's heroically perfect in always supermom.

Example of Occupational Segregation

- Take book editing, which changed from a "gentlemen's profession" for most of its history to a virtual female ghetto by the end of the twentieth century. - Formerly the high-cultural mission of men with elite academic records, book editing evolved into a more commercial enterprise in the 1960s and 1970s. - The result was that editorial work took a downturn in autonomy, job security, and importance. - As the job lost its attractiveness to male candidates, the female labor supply was increasing on the crest of second-wave feminism. - Thus book-editing jobs, like the other fields that optimists point to as women's inroads into traditionally male-dominated work, became resegregated and ghettoized as women's work. - And anything categorized as women's work tends to yield lower pay, prestige, and benefits such as health coverage than men's

Example of Sex as an Either/or Binary

- Take, for example, people who are born with both male and female genitalia, neither, or ambiguous ones that do not conform to the gender binary (also included in this category are those whose sex chromosomes do not match up in the normative way to outward sexual appearance). - The medical industry used to refer to such children as "intersex"; these days, they refer to a "disorder of sex development." - Most doctors today still typically recommend secretive surgery during infancy to make nonbinary children conform to a preconceived notion of what "unambiguous" genitalia should look like. - About 90 percent of these surgeries reassign an ambiguous male anatomy into a female one because, in the disquieting (and offensive) phrase of the surgical world, "It's easier to make a hole than build a pole"

The Effect of Gender Norms on Workers

- That's not to say that gender norms do not exact a cost on workers in male-dominated jobs as well. - Take for example, the construction industry: In an era of weak worker protections and declining male job prospects, one study has found that men who work in construction feel a need to demonstrate their masculinity through sexist, homophobic, and racist comments and through displays of physical strength. - The consequences are not just cultural, however. - Such displays of masculinity often involve bodily risk-taking with respect to occupational safety that serve to prove workers are "man enough" to perform and keep their jobs in this era of stiff worker competition. - The end result is higher rates of worker accidents (and disability), acceleration of the decline of union power, and an overall loss of social status for the workers themselves

The "doing gender" perspective and Goffman's Dramaturgical Theory

- The "doing gender" perspective is rooted in Erving Goffman's dramaturgical theory, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. - That is, West and Zimmerman argue that people create their social realities and identities through interactions with one another. - Unlike the structural functionalists, psychoanalysts, and conflict theorists, however, social constructionists view gender roles as having open-ended scripts. - Perhaps individuals come to the stage situated differently according to their place in power hierarchies or personality development, but their lines and gestures are far from being predetermined. - Regardless of social location, individuals are always free to act, sometimes in unexpected ways that change the course of the play. - For example, the presence of openly transgender people has been said to "undo" or "redo" gender by subverting the binary norms. - But by and large, as a result of doing gender, people contribute to, reaffirm, and reproduce masculine dominance and feminine submissiveness in the bedroom, kitchen, workplace, and so on.

Nadles

- The Nadle might be born with ambiguous genitalia or they may declare a nadle identity later on regardless of genitalia. - The needle perform both masculine and feminine tasks and dressed for the moment, according to what ever activity they're doing. - Although they're often treated like women, they have the freedom to marry people of any gender, "with no loss of status."

Statistics About How Males and Females Differ

- The average male newborn weighs two ounces more than the average female newborn. - For infant death rates, however, the disadvantage is tilted against males, who are at higher risk of death than females. - Psychologist Carol Gilligan (1982) contends that by adolescence, the disadvantages are stacked against girls, who "lose their voices" as they suffer blows to their self-confidence. - Depending on the study, eating disorders may be up to twice as likely to affect adolescent and teen girls compared with their male peers. - More than half of teenaged girls are on diets or think they should be. - What's more, girls more frequently report low self-esteem, more girls attempt suicide, and more girls report experiencing some form of sexual harassment in school

Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

- The greater number of women entering the labor force has not catapulted them to equality with their male peers in the workplace. - Despite the passage of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which declared it unlawful for employers to discriminate on the basis of a person's race, nationality, creed, or sex, women have continued to fare much worse than their male counterparts in the workforce. - Although legally entitled to enter all lines of work, women routinely face sexual harassment, an illegal form of discrimination that runs the gamut from inappropriate jokes on the job to outright sexual assault to sexual "barter," in which sexual favors are extracted from victims under the threat of punishment. - Intended to make people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome, sexual harassment occurs across many settings and in all kinds of relationships; walking down the street and having to listen to "Whooo, baby!" is just one annoying everyday example. - In the workplace, some argue, sexual harassment is one of the chief ways in which men resist gender equality. - In 1982, the US Court of Appeals ruled that sexual harassment is a violation of the Civil Rights Act, because it is a form of discrimination against an individual on the basis of sex. - But even though sexual harassment is illegal, it often takes insidious forms not easily detected by everyone or verifiable in court. - Most commonly, sexual harassment takes the form of "hostile environments" in which individuals feel unsafe, excluded, singled out, and mocked.

Inequality at Work

- The past few decades have brought arguably the biggest change in American gender relations—in the world of paid work. - Since the 1970s, almost 43 million more women have entered the labor force, from 31.5 million in 1970 to 74.4 million in 2016. - Of course, the overall population has increased by 50 percent in that period as well, accounting for part of the rise, but the percentage of women ages 16 to 64 who are in the workforce has risen from approximately 43 to 57 percent in 2016. - Because the Great Recession of 2008-9 hit male-dominated industries the hardest (such as construction), it helped accelerate the trend toward gender equality in labor force participation; in fact, there was a brief period at the depth of the economic crisis during which women's totals exceeded those of men in the workforce. - However, men have since caught up and reclaimed their majority position: men's labor force participation is at 69 percent compared to women's 57 percent. - Because women are disproportionately employed in the public sector, and state governments have yet to recover from the twin challenges of economic woes and ballooning budgets, it may be some time before women once again approach parity

The study of gender boils down to:

- The study of gender boils down to seeing how the two spheres, nature and nurture, overlap, penetrate, and shape each other. - The biological world of sex and bodies does not exist outside of a social world, and the social world of human beings is always made up of human bodies. - Studying the links between the two allows us to see the social construction of both gender and sex.

The Variation in How Humans Have Sex and What it Means to Them

- There is enormous variation in how humans have sex and what it means to them. - Mouth-to-mouth kissing, common in Western cultures, is unthinkable among the Thonga and Sirono cultures: "But that's where you put food!" (Kimmel, 2000). - American, heterosexual middle-class couples have sex a few nights a week for about 15 minutes a pop; the people of Yapese cultures near Guam engage in sex once a month. - Marquesan men of French Polynesia are said to have anywhere from 10 to 30 orgasms a night! Which of these is "normal"?

The Changes in Masculinity Over Time

- This might be an easy point to grasp about femininity, but most people think that masculinity is less subject to such trends and fashions. - It is always harder to do naturalized the dominant category; being the norm, it often is invisible. - Among social categories, those who go on question tend to be most privileged.

Gayle Rubin

- Was one of the first in a long string of thinkers to argue that the nearly universal oppression of woman was in need of an explanation. - In the field of anthropology, most scholars studying societies around the world had previously assumed that, since woman subordination occurred everywhere, and must be fulfilling some societal function, and therefore was less interesting than other possible research questions.

What does the letter "A" in LGBTQIA represent?

- We have already discussed L (lesbian), G (gay [male]), B (bisexual), and T (trans). - We have also discussed I (intersex). - So let's skip to the last letter in the acronym, "A." - Asexuality has, of late, become a more visible sexual identity. - Many individuals do not feel sexual attraction; these individuals may identify as asexual (often "ace" for short). - They may not experience sexuality-related bodily feelings or actions, but others who identify as asexual may, for example, masturbate to fantasies of fictional characters. - The American Psychiatric Association has defined asexuality as a paraphilia—which is an atypical sexual attraction. - This lumps it in with medical disorders, whether or not asexuality results in significant distress for the individual or others, such as a partner. - Sociologists challenge this definition, pointing out that many ace individuals enjoy sexual fantasies that involve others or involve themselves in a completely fictional way (that is, younger, kinkier, or even as a superhero). - A better way to think about asexuality is as an identity based on membership in a shared sexual community. - Hence the "A" was added to the LGBT alphabet as asexual activists have sought to be included in nondominant gender/sexuality social movements, protests, and so on.

Influence of Technology on Romantic and Sexual Relations

- What is for certain is that teens—like their adult counterparts—are navigating new terrain in terms of romantic and sexual relations thanks to technology. - One way we can see this is in the debate over opening lines in online dating apps. - Three million messages per day on the Tinder app begin with "Hey." - Does such a generic approach represent laziness (that is, not having read someone's profile in order to say something specific)? - Or is it just a universal human way to say "hi" without concocting some phony pickup line (even if it is not as vulnerable online as it would be in person at a party or a bar)? - One thing is for sure—it probably beats the most searched GIF on Tinder: Joey from the show Friends, asking "How you doing?" - Figuring out the right way to approach someone online is not the only challenge that teens and adults have in the evolving world of Tinder, Grindr, and OkCupid. - A new phenomenon of the "define-the-relationship" (DTR) conversation is emerging. - In a world where a new potential partner is only a swipe away and where people are inventing new ways of being romantic or sexual and where one cannot assume a single narrative arc of how such relationships are meant to progress, the DTR talk is a way that people can clarify expectations, hopes, fears, and so on after getting to know each other. - Will we be monogamous or friends with benefits? If monogamous, do we delete our dating apps? Will we be public on Facebook as a couple? Is this just something fun for now, or do we mutually envision a longer-term relationship between us? - These are just some of the questions the DTR conversation may address. - As to when to have (or avoid) that conversation, just as there are myriad relationship types nowadays, there is no clear norm on what's too soon (or too late) to discuss or define one's relationship. - Stay tuned: Norms can evolve fast in the face of technological innovation

Glass Ceiling

- When women do enter more prestigious corporate worlds, they often encounter gendered barriers to reaching the very top: the so-called glass ceiling, which effectively is an invisible limit on women's climb up the occupational ladder. - Sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter argues in her classic study Men and Women of the Corporation that the dearth of women in top corporate positions results from a cultural conflation of authority with masculinity. - In Indesco, the fictitious name of the corporation Kanter studied, she found that most people believed that men and women come to occupy the kinds of jobs for which they are naturally best suited. - To the contrary, Kanter showed, the job often makes the person; the person doesn't make the job.

Which genders hold equitable shares of the top spots in occupations?

- Williams's new research suggests that women are holding a more equitable share of the top spots in nursing, elementary schools, and libraries, but that a larger problem is emerging that hits both men and women, and their families overall well-being: - Wages in these careers have not kept pace with the cost of living. - Careers that have traditionally been associated with women are not the only ones that have seen declining wages. - Manufacturing, trucking, and warehouse jobs—traditionally dominated by male workers— are also paying less (Mishel & Shierholz, 2013). - In the fashion industry, the escalator reverses the gender filter Williams originally found for women-dominated fields. - Aspiring male models are forced off at the second floor while a small number of women models can continue to top model status. - I talked to former model Ashley Mears about the wage structure in the modeling industry. - She confirmed that "you see a complete inverse" where "women outearn men by two to one, sometimes much more" and that "there are just more jobs and opportunities for women models." - She explained that there are two reasons for this, one cultural and one structural. - From a cultural perspective, "for a man to do the work of showing his body, displaying his body, it's read as being less than what we fully expect in a hegemonically masculine way. It's read as being effeminate work." - From a structural perspective there simply are no stepping-stones to managerial positions or other promotions for models. - According to Mears (who became a sociologist), on the models' job escalator, "there's no place to go," because career positions in the fashion industry go to experienced businesspeople and designers who, surprise, tend to be men. - So even though male models don't enjoy a glass escalator, the wider industry ends up dominated by men all the same.

Christina Hoff Sommers on the "girl crisis"

0 Psychologist Christina Hoff Sommers challenges this "girl crisis" in The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (2000). - She finds that because they are inadvertently penalized for the shortchanging of girls, boys are the ones suffering in education and adolescent health. - For example, although females in general attempt suicide twice as frequently as males, boys ages 15 to 19 succeed in killing themselves four times more often than girls. (That's not to mention transgender people, who unfortunately suffer from extraordinarily high rates of suicide. Researchers estimate that between a third and half of trans people attempt suicide at some point in their lives - Teenage girls may sneak more cigarettes than boys, but boys are more likely to be involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs and to be suspended from school or drop out. - Male teens are also 40 percent more likely to be victimized by violent crime, and that's even taking rape into account

Hijras of India

A group that is often including textbooks like this want to stand in as proof that a binary either or gender system is not so natural after all - We know that hijras Are be know typically men who wear female clothing and ideally, renowned sexual desire and practice by undergoing the sacrificial emasculation that is an excision of the penis and testicles. - To be a hijra includes behaviors that may have little to do with gender: dedication to the goddess Bedhraj Mata, conferring fertility to newlyweds and newborns; a sometimes reluctant, sometimes quite dedicated entry into prostitution; communal living; self-sacrifice; and poverty. - Thus hijra Identity is a master status, but it is not experienced by the hijras as a fight for turf between gender categories. - The hijras may have a few qualms about the balance they've struck between gender and sexuality but more fears about the way their poverty and stigmatization will shape their chances in life.

Statistics of High-School Students Who Have Had Sex

Here are more numbers: - Fewer than 40 percent of American high-school students tell surveyors that they have had sexual intercourse, but this rate is not growing; it has remained more or less steady since 2003. - Boys probably lie more often about the extent of their sexual experience (citing the proverbial girlfriend in a different state), and girls possibly downplay their sexual activity. - Many of those who have not had intercourse are still sexually active in other ways. - Teenagers' romantic interludes last about 15 months on average, leaving them plenty of time before marriage (median age of 27.9 for women and 29.9 for men in 2016) to have many partners (US Census Bureau, 2017m). - To top it off, most adolescents with a sexually transmitted disease (STD) don't know that they are infected. - All of these factors combine to put American teenagers at high risk for STDs, which have been increasing dramatically since the 1970

How would someone who presents themselves as androgynous (neither masculine nor feminine) challenge masculine and feminine gender expectations?

It would challenge masculine and feminine gender expectations because the person's gender cannot be easily explained by appeals to natural differences between the sexes, because it doesn't neatly sync up to a clearly mail or clearly female outward appearance or biology. - But just because gender isn't tied to some fixed biological reality doesn't mean it doesn't have real consequences. - Gender establishes patterns of expectations for people, borders our daily lives, and as one of the fundamental building blocks of society. - Many children acquire a gendered identity that, in most cases, reproduces attitudes and values of their society. - We impose rigid boundaries to maintain a gender order, but if we look at how gender systems very, we can expose those battery boundaries and social constructions. - Our challenge is to identify the systems and inequalities without unwittingly reproducing the binary thinking we wanted to investigate in the first place

Gender, sexual orientation, race, class, nationality, ability, and other factors ALL

intersect. - Just as some women enjoy privilege by virtue of their wealth, class, education, and skin color, some men are disadvantaged by their lack of these same assets. - As bell hooks (1984) noted, if women's liberation is aimed at making women the social equals of men, women should first stop and consider which men they would like to equal. - Certainly, not all men are privileged over all women. - Making universal comparisons of men to women misses these nuances and implicitly excludes marginally positioned people from the discussion. - For example, men of color certainly experience oppression that intersects with their gender identities (for example, black men bearing the brunt of police harassment). - Even going beyond demographic groups, men who do not embody or perform the dominant form of masculine behavior often suffer for it, occupying a subordinate status. - Power comes from many different angles; it doesn't sit evenly on a plane for all women. - When the black activist Sojourner Truth asked, "Ain't I a woman?", she summed up some elusive philosophical questions: What is woman? Who counts as a woman and why?

Sex

is typically used to describe socially accepted, perceived biological differences that distinguish males from females. - There are many biological differences between humans; society gives some of those biological differences gendered labels that, in turn, come to define sex categories such as "male" and "female." - The categories are seemingly rooted in biological reality, since these biological differences tend to cluster into two groups according to sex chromosomes a person has.