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Gender

GENDER

Gender is a term that I will be using to mean all those things that we LEARN, everything that is culturally significant and socially constructed that makes people in society women or men.

SEX

I will use the word SEX to mean the physical equipment and behaviors that functions to reproduce organisms, and may or may not be the biological foundations for a society's men and women. Sex - male/female - the female of any species is functionally defined by biologists as the sex that invests more energy (calories) into reproduction. More often, and popularly defined by contrasting anatomical features. Sex roles, sex assignment.

Erotics

Erotics - activities/situations that people find sexually stimulating, or gratifying. Socially and politically sexual preference has become a master status in mod society - no longer a private matter. This at the same time that gender preferences are outlawed, and gender is diminishing in civil society. Paraphilias chart.

Sexual Suicide - is a book by George Guilder. In it; he present the notion that the mother/child relationship is the fundamental ; relationship of human association - and it is a natural relationship. Human; society (and history) emerge with the construction of the NEXT relationship. That next relationship, which Guilder sees as the bridge from nature to ; culture is this: the female must engage, and somehow construct ways formales to be 'useful', not destructive. Those 'ways' then are the primary features of every human society, distinguishing it from nature.

Ivan Illich in his book - Gender - presents a different view. He begins with the premise that the fundamental, the foundational relationship upon which societies develop is the partnership between men and women. He stresses that this partnership may be a 'truce', but in all historical societies that he has studied, there is an asymmetric, complementary set of customs distinguishing the lives of men and the lives of women.

These differences are in speech, tools, techniques, values, beliefs, roles, statuses, occupation. There is in each society a 'women's world' and a 'man's world' that are interdependent, though distinct. He more so than Guilder recognizes that our society has created huge inequities between the lives of men and women, but he does not see obliteration of gender - and the rise in obsession with sex (erotics) - which characterizes modern society as doing much more than making it impossible to become fully a man, or fully a woman.

 

 

Masculinities and Athletics. What do sports have to do with the manly character? Read Messner article

Fashion - What does clothing have to do with being a woman? Read Fernea article

What is the point of 'male role model' if there are no male roles in mod society? (parents - not mother/father, fire-fighter - not fireman, celebrity -not actor/actress, loom operator not seamstress/tailor. Is there any social necessity that requires men (sperm donor, and someone to take out the trash notwithstanding) ?

A sexed-up genderless society, or a genderless society? Any other options?

The vision is of a world in which the Michael Jackson persona - autoerotic crotch-grabbing androgyn - or Pat (of Saturday Night Live), a sexless occupant of a genderless world, develop domestic partnerships and raise 'persons' rather than boys and girls.

 


Hijras, 3rd sex people in India, blessing baby

 

 

 

Social Problems surrounding sex,gender and erotics.

  1. Gender socialization - stereotypes: models, templates,toys and tools always shape a pathway - all paths go where they go - facilitate one destination, but constrain if that is not where one wants to go. Who creates these models of man/woman, boy/girl, feminity/masculinity? How are they maintained? -Parents, Peers, Schools, Media, Churches, Gov, Celebrities.
  2. Sports and gender in modern America - Title IX in 1972 - What consequences.
    Are athletics the same thing for women as they are for men?
    Participatory athletics and industrial (professional, spectator) athletics - do they count the same for women as for men.
  3. Veils and Wonderbras; Taliban and Victoria's Secret would both like to define femininity. Why? Who cares?
    - Cultural customs/values, Cult Relativity/Ethnocentrisms
    -Chastity/FGM, Circumcision , AMA statement, Amnesty Int'l on FGM
    -Beauty/liposuction, at the mall operations
  4.  
    Piercing at the mall
    Eye-implant decoration
  5. Gendered division of labor - home, workplace
  6. Wage gap between males and females for comparable work
  7. Dimensions of sexual harassment
  8. "The Glass Ceiling" and the "Second Shift"
  9. Sex selection in China - social security in China requires sons. Population policies restrict number of births per family. Ammniocentesis and abortion facilitate sex selection. Infanticide is illegal. 106 boys born for every 100 girls born in China.
  10. Gender, Health, Longevity
    American women longevity greater than men by a couple years.
    Warfare and differential death rates (more men die in war)
    Childbirth and diff death rates (few men die in childbirth)
    Eating disorders and differential prevalence between men/women/children
    Other gendered diseases and social response - care, research funding, pharmacologic market,
  11. Hermaphrodites and Intersexual people - other than two sexes? Intersexual there are babies born that are anatomically, physiologically, chromosomally, blends.
    Berdache - a third gender in some American Indian Cultures.


Erotics: Social structure, control, function, problems

  1. Breeders/non, Incidence
  2. DINK's and social position (productivity of monasteries/manors in medieval France)
  3. Personhood and inclination - conduct or nature or history
  4. Civil Society and sexual partner preferences
  5. Law and partnerships - marital, affinial rights and obligations, property ownership, use, inheritance. Authority over and obligation to another person (parental, spousal, government/citizen, doctor/patient, teacher/student, neighbors/housing, army/soldier, corporation/workers, archdiocese/priest)

    Sex for Sale

    • Sex in advertising
    • Prostitution and Law
    • Prostitution and Power/Poverty
    • T he masturbation industry: xxx-movies, daguerrotype and "french" cards, Smut, Porno,Cosmo/Playboy, Sex shops, Internet.xxx, phone sex
    • Sex and slavery - kids and women, local and global



 

 
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