Summary Articles for week 1 and 2 Youth and Sexuality 2023
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Course
Youth and Sexuality (201800003)
Institution
Universiteit Utrecht (UU)
Articles for week 1 and 2 Youth and Sexuality 2023 includes the following articles:
- Bullough, V. L. (1998). Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical overview and lasting contributions. The Journal of Sex Research, 35(2), 127- 131.
- Laan, E., Klein, V., Werner, M., Van Lunsen, R. H. W.,...
Lecture 1
Bullough, V. L. (1998). Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey Report: Historical overview and
lasting contributions. The Journal of Sex Research, 35(2), 127- 131.
Kinsey brought a taxonomic approach to the study of sexual expression; this is an interest in
classification and description.
Kinsey comes on the scene:
Kinsey strongly believed that people would not always tell the truth when questioned about
their sexual activities and that the only way to deal with this was through personal interviews
in which the contradictions could be explored. He did not believe that self-administered
questionnaires produced accurate responses: He regarded them as encouraging dishonest
answers.
Subjects were usually told that there were some contradictions in their answers and were
asked to explain them. If they refused to do so, the interview was terminated, and the
information not used.
Kinsey was also aware of potential bias of the interviewer. He sought to overcome this bias by
occasionally having two people conduct the interviews at different times and by relying
mainly on four interviewers, including himself, to conduct the study.
Following taxonomic principles, he wanted to gather data from as many subjects as possible,
and he hoped initially to conduct 20,000 interviews and later to conduct 80,000 more.
What Kinsey did:
Kinsey brought to public notice many sexual practices that previously had not been publicly
discussed.
Kinsey believed that he was totally objective.
For his time and place, something revolutionary was that he implied that homosexuality was
just another form of sexual activity.
Kinsey gathered information from pedophiles as well, because he was interested in many
different sexual behaviors. He was accused for not turning these pedophiles over to
authorities.
Kinsey paid almost no attention to swinging, group sex, and alternate lifestyles such as
sadism, masochism, transvestism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism. He justified this neglect by
arguing that such practices were statistically insignificant. He was also not interested in
pregnancy and STDs. Sex to him was just another aspect of human behavior.
,Laan, E., Klein, V., Werner, M., Van Lunsen, R. H. W., & Janssen, E. (2021). In pursuit
of pleasure: A biopsychosocial perspective on sexual pleasure and gender. International
Journal of Sexual Health, 33(4), 516–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2021.1965689
Lecture 1b. Psychosexual development (Hanneke de Graaf)
Sexual pleasure: “the physical and/or psychological satisfaction and enjoyment derived from
shared or solitary erotic experiences, including thoughts, fantasies, dreams, emotions, and
feelings.”
Domino theory of sexual peril: sees sex as an uncontrollable biological force that, if not
repressed (allowing procreation within monogamous heterosexual marriages only), will
inevitably lead to societal chaos and anarchy.
A positive approach to sexual health and education has more benefits than risks:
Comprehensive sex education, even the kind that stays clear of anything remotely associated
with sexual pleasure, is associated with heterosexual adolescents engaging in penile-vaginal
intercourse at a later age, with more consistent condom and contraception use, and lower
unwanted pregnancy rates in both developed and developing countries.
Countries that promote abstinence-only sex education or no sex education usually perform
worse on these indices of sexual health than countries that provide comprehensive and
positive information about sex to adolescents.
Health benefits of pleasure:
The experience of sexual satisfaction, sexual pleasure, and positive sexual self-esteem
improves sexual health, mental health, and physical health outcomes. It promotes overall
wellbeing through improved relationship quality and general life satisfaction. This finding
also holds true for older people and for people with a chronic condition or physical
limitations.
The quality of couples’ sex lives makes a unique contribution to the quality and longevity of
committed relationships, over and above the effect of being in a committed relationship.
A survey on sexual behaviors found that sexual pleasure was associated with various health
indicators (e.g., communication about sexually transmitted infections (STIs), condom use,
absence of sexual problems, and orgasm frequency), with sexual pleasure predicting sexual
health outcomes more strongly in women than in men.
The gendered context of pleasure:
Around the world, sexual complaints are more prevalent in heterosexual women than in
heterosexual men. In most contemporary societies, heterosexual women’s sexual pleasure is
still generally subordinated to heterosexual men’s pleasure.
In (religious) traditional cultures sexual pleasure of women is judged to be more dangerous
and undesirable than that of men, or even considered irrelevant, probably because sexual
pleasure of women does not appear to be directly related to reproductive success.
Sex as experienced by women appears to be substantially less positive and may come at a
greater cost than the sex that men experience.
Various sources of data support this contention:
1. Pleasure gaps. Heterosexual sexual activity benefits sexual pleasure of men more than
that of women.
2. Painful sex. The prevalence of pain during penile-vaginal intercourse is high among
women.
, 3. Violent and scary sex. Almost one-third of women report having experienced some
form of sexual violence by their intimate partners.
Capacity for sexual pleasure:
1. Childhood genital responses and behavior
Based on retrospective studies, it is evident that some children experience sexual arousal or
orgasm before puberty, but due to different samples and definitions of key concepts, it is
impossible to say to how many children this applies and whether there might be any
systematic differences between girls and boys.
2. Responsivity to sexual stimuli
Women and men do not seem to fundamentally differ in either genital or central responsivity
to sexual stimulation. Processing of sexual stimuli by the brain generates blood flow to the
genitals with apparent ease in women and men. So, even the mechanism of arousal is similar
in women and men.
3. Sexual desire
The almost universal idea that men have higher levels of desire than women and that this is an
innate capacity, an idea reinforced by evolutionary theories and reproductive strategies, may
depend on how sexual desire is conceptualized and measured. If sexual desire is seen as
emerging from rather than preceding “incentivized” sexual arousal, as incentive motivation
theory posits, gender differences in reported feelings of desire may be the result of differences
in incentive, or sexual context, quality rather than reflective of innate differences.
4. Sex drive, sex hormones and reproductive success
Even though a certain level of testosterone is required for men’s brains and genitals to be
sensitive to sexual stimuli, normal physiological testosterone levels above that minimum
threshold seem unrelated to levels of sexual desire.
The role sex hormones play in male and female reproduction should not be equated with their
role in men’s and women’s sexuality.
5. Sexual behaviors and attitudes: gender differences or gender similarities?
Heterosexual women experiencing less sexual pleasure than heterosexual men may be related
to the fact that these women are having sex with men, with the definition of “sex” as
penetration, and with women’s sexuality being associated with stigma and danger. When these
contextual and sociocultural factors are removed and opportunities for sexual pleasure are
increased, the sexual pleasure gender gap is likely to be removed as well.
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