We are born, we are named. We die, we are named. Be it the name of a new child or the title given to a hero who gives their life for the sake of many, a name is a sacred thing within our world. A name is a mark that follows us, identifies us, and lets us state our place in the world. Humans name everything we come in contact with – corporal or incorporeal. Every substance, action, or emotion has a name. Every state of being is labeled and defined. For centuries this powerful ability to give a name has been used in a variety of ways, some almost sacrilegious to the nearly spiritual act of defining yourself. We have branded, ostracized, and dehumanized using labels as a tool to discriminate against those who do not fall within our own neat little boxes of normality. Yet, for groups invisible to the world at large, naming and labeling retains its power.
Under threats such as “asexual are just people who need to get raped hard and often enough” and “Just kill yourself, please seriously, just die. Please kill yourself. In a very painful way” a community of very brave people come together to create a name and a place for themselves (qtd. in Swankivy). From most every age group, religion, nationality, and sex these people are united by only one common denominator – they fall into category “X” of Alfred Kinsey’s scale of human sexuality.
Listed as nothing more than a footnote in Kinsey's 1948 path breaking volume Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, category X represents the sexual minority known as asexuals, who, according to Kinsey's original description, are people who experience "no socio-sexual response” (Kinsey 658). In the time since Kinsey published this work, however, the asexual community has come to describe themselves as pe...
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The film “Kinsey” released in 2004 based on Kinsey’s life seems to be determined to shock the audience. In 1938, according to the film his proposal of teaching a “marriage” course gets accepted and is only offered to teachers, seniors, and married students. Not surprisingly, his students feared to talk about sex, in fact, they didn’t know much at all. Ultimately, he begins to
When I was looking at the first sexual autobiography, Initially, I thought I had very little input in regards to sexuality. However, as a result of learning about sexuality through Sexing Shakespeare, I have learned that this is not the case. By learnings about Butler, Foucault, Bataile, and Freud, I have learned that my expression of sexuality is present in my being. An example of my sexuality being portrayed would be through the teachings of Judith Butler. Judith Butler states that an individual performs certain actions, then that person takes on a certain identity. Therefore, even though I have performed zero physical activity, as a result of not performing such an activity, I constitute the category of either a romantic or an asexual. Which category I belong to I am not sure of yet, and Judith Butler fails to clarify as to which category
Masters and Johnson were a pioneering team in the field of human sexuality, both in the domains of research and therapy. William Howell Masters, a gynecologist, was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1915. Virginia Eshelman Johnson, a psychologist, was born in Springfield, Montana in 1925. To fully appreciate their contribution, it is necessary to see their work in historic context. In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey and his co-workers, responding to a request by female students at Indiana University for more information on human sexual behavior, published the book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. They followed this five years later with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. These books began a revolution in social awareness of and public attention given to human sexuality. At the time, public morality severely restricted open discussion of sexuality as a human characteristic, and specific sexual practices, especially sexual behaviors that did not lead to procreation. Kinsey's books, which among other things reported findings on the frequency of various sexual practices including homosexuality, caused a furor. Some people felt that the study of sexual behavior would undermine the family structure and damage American society. It was in this climate - one of incipient efforts to break through the denial of human sexuality and considerable resistance to these efforts - that Masters and Johnson began their work. Their primary contribution has been to help define sexuality as a healthy human trait and the experience of great pleasure and deep intimacy during sex as socially acceptable goals. As a physician interested in the nature of sexuality and the sexual experience, William Masters wanted to conduct research that would lead to an objective understanding of these topics. In 1957, he hired Virgina Johnson as a research assistant to begin this research issue. Together they developed polygraph-like instruments that were designed to measure human sexual response. Using these tools, Masters and Johnson initiated a project that ultimately included direct laboratory observation and measurement of 700 men and women while they were having intercourse or masturbating. Based on the data collected in this study, they co-authored the book Human Sexual Response in 1966. In this book, they identify and describe four phases in the human sexual response cycle : excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. By this point in time, the generally repressive attitude toward sexuality was beginning to lift and the book found a ready audience.
Halperin, David. "Is There a History of Sexuality?." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry
Alfred Kinsey was an American Professor of biology and zoology at Indiana University. During his career he decided to shift his focus from studying gull wasps to that of human subjects. He embarked on a study of human sexual behavior by doing a series of interviews consisting of 18,000 people. The first installment of nine books was “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.” This 30 year project was anything but non-controversial especially with in the realm of the FBI and the United States government. As any breakthrough research goes through, there were positive and negative critiques of his study.
In the article “An Anthropological Look at Human Sexuality” the authors, Patrick Gray and Linda Wolfe speak about how societies look at human sexuality. The core concept of anthology is the idea of culture, the systems of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors people acquire as a member of society. The authors give an in depth analysis on how human sexuality is looked at in all different situations.
Milstein, Susan A. Taking Sides Clashing Views in Human Sexuality. Ed. William J. Taverner and Ryan W. McKee. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.
The behaviors of the Pokot wives and husbands illustrated in the article “Human sexuality in cross-culture Perspective” show the norms of sexuality behaviors that are different from the U.S norms. The Pokot wives believe that their behaviors are right things to be done or are the appropriate sanctions given to a husband who is not able to sexually satisfy his wife. However, the US perceives these behaviors differently. In the US perspective, it is considered to be a deviance that is against the law within the society. It is considers to be domestic abuse which might lead some individuals involved in this behaviors to be given a negative sanctions like sending them to prison.
Despite the large collection of literature of sexuality that has been accumulating, human asexuality has been largely ignored. Asexuality is controversially considered to be a sexual orientation and people who identify as asexual are people who typically do not experience sexual attraction (Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, 2013). Though research on sex and sexual orientations has been done for centuries, the first real suggestion that there might be people who fall outside of the heterosexual – homosexual orientation spectrum came from Kinsey and colleagues in 1948. These individuals were put into a separate category and were identified as having no erotic response to hetero- or homosexual stimuli, but otherwise they were largely ignored by the researchers (Kinsey, 1953). Later, researchers linked asexuality with negative traits and pathologies, including depression and lower self-esteem (Masters, Johnson, & Kolodny, 1986; Nuius, 1983). An issue with these studies, however, is that the researchers defined asexuality in a way that most current asexuals do not agree with. For example, in a study done by Bell and Weinberg (1978), there were references made to asexual homosexuals who simply hid their homosexuality. Many asexuals, otherwise known as Aces, would struggle with this definition because homosexuality implies a type of sexual attraction: attraction to your same sex. Because Aces typically do not feel sexual attraction to anyone or anything, they should not be classified under the same label as a closeted homosexual. Another issue is that none of these studies actually focused on asexuality. Instead, they were added on the side and generally ignored.
Osmundson, Joseph. "'I Was Born This Way': Is Sexuality Innate, and Should It Matter?" Harvard Kennedy School. N.p., 2011. Web. 11 Feb. 2014. .
Wilton, Tamsin. "Which One's the Man? The Heterosexualisation of Lesbain Sex." Gender, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University, 2009. 157-70. Print.
Stein, Edward. The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation. New York, NY: Oxford UP, 1999. Print. 20 Oct. 2011
In order to discuss the biology of gender identity and sexual orientation, it is necessary to first examine the differences between multiple definitions that are often mistakenly interchanged: sex, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Sexual orientation is defined by LeVay (2011) as “the trait that predisposes us to experience sexual attraction to people of the same sex as ourselves, to persons of the other sex, or to both sexes” (p. 1). The typical categories of sexual orientation are homosexual, heterosexual and bisexual. Vrangalova and Savin-Williams (2012) found that most people identify as heterosexual, but there are also groups of people that identify as mostly heterosexual and mostly gay within the three traditional categories (p. 89). This is to say that there are not three concrete groups, but sexual orientation is a continuum and one can even fluctuate on it over time. LeVay (2011) also defines gender as “the ...
The sexual orientation of a person has been a critical debate over the past several centuries. For several...
In today’s society things are being expressed and experienced at younger ages, than ever before in our time. Children and teenagers are discovering their sexuality at very early ages. Sexuality is the discovering of who you are and what makes you different from everybody else.