 |
 | | |
|
|
| | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Custom essays, essay writing service, essay writing, custom papers,writing service, buy essays, order essay,
cheap essays, cheap research papers, controversial topics
Copyright © EssayEmpire.com, 2004-2012. All rights reserved
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
| You Are Here: Home > Essay Topics > Gender-Related Essays & Research Papers > Sexuality and Sexual Preferences |
Buy Custom Essays, Research Papers, Term Papers. Cheap Online Writing Services, Essay Papers for Sale
|
|
| |
|  Essay on Male to Female Transsexuals |
|
| Male to Female Transsexuals Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Male-to-female (MTF) transsexual refers to biologically born males who identify as female or as a woman and who may seek to undergo or have undergone hormonal and/or surgical intervention(s) to align their external physical sex with their internal female gender identity. Conversely, female-to-male (FTM) transsexual refers to biologically born females who identify as males or as a man and seek to undergo or have undergone hormonal and/or surgical interventions to align their physical characteristics with their male gender identity. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, the prevalence of MTF is approximately 1 in 30,000 whereas the prevalence... |
|
| Essay on Male to Female Transsexuals » |
|
| |
| Essay on Female to Male Transsexuals |
|
| Female to Male Transsexuals Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Female-to-male (F2M, F-M, or FTM) transsexuals (sometimes called ''female-toward-male'' or ''female-to-male'') are female-born persons who suffer from intense, often painful feelings that their assigned sex does not match their actual gender (a condition called gender dysphoria and clinically diagnosed as gender identity disorder). As opposed to transvestites who habitually cross-dress, transsexuals live fulltime as men or women and may undergo sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) in order to transition from one sex to another. Transsexuals may also identify as transgender (an umbrella term coined in the 1970s to refer to multiple gender-bending identities). Some reserve the term... |
|
| Essay on Female to Male Transsexuals » |
|
| |
| Essay on The Third Sex |
|
| The Third Sex Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The term third sex originated in the late nineteenth century among sexologists as a way to describe homosexual men and lesbians. It did not carry the moral or legal stigma of sodomite, and suggested an innate or biological factor existed in behaviors that fell outside traditional categories of male and female. However, it also conflated same-sex desire with gender variance. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs used the word Urning in the 1860s to describe a third sex male being who desired other men; Richard von Krafft-Ebing used the term sexual invert to describe a similar being in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis. Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds followed suit in their 1896 study, Sexual Inversion... |
|
| Essay on The Third Sex » |
|
| |
| Essay on Sexuality: Science, Research, and Understanding |
|
| Sexuality: Science, Research, and Understanding Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Sexuality can refer to sexed beings, reproductive function, genital expression, a libidinal drive, the nature of sexual desire, or sexual identity. At one time it was assumed that all beings were sexually oriented toward heterosexual sexual behavior, thus the biological sex of a person was thought to indicate his or her sexuality. However, as homosexuality demonstrates, one's biological sex does not necessarily predict one's sexual behavior, nor does sexual behavior reflect biological sex. Thus, sexuality is understood in the early twenty-first century to refer only to sexual behavior and not to gender or biological sex (though these factors may influence it)... |
|
| Essay on Sexuality: Science, Research, and Understanding » |
|
| |
| Essay on Sexual Perversion |
|
| Sexual Perversion Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Sexual perversion is an old-fashioned diagnostic term that served as a label for sexual activities considered outside the norm of heterosexual sexual desire and activity. This norm was defined as coitus with a person of the opposite sex with the aim of achieving orgasm through genital penetration. Any other type of sexual activity, regardless of the sex of the participants, was traditionally considered perverse. Sexual perversion appears most famously in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's nineteenth-century medical textbook Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in German in 1886. There sexual perversion is defined as a disease of the sexual instinct, as opposed to sexual perversity... |
|
| Essay on Sexual Perversion » |
|
| |
| Essay on Sexual Orientation |
|
| Sexual Orientation Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Sexual orientation is a set of categories by which a person's sexual and emotional preferences are defined. The possible categories are produced by combining one's gender with the gender or genders of the people to whom one is attracted romantically, sexually, and emotionally. When people are attracted only to people of the same gender as themselves, their orientation is said to be homosexual. When people are attracted only to people of another gender, their orientation is called heterosexual. When people are attracted to people of any gender, they are considered bisexual. People who are not attracted to anyone at all are called asexual. Although people use the categories of sexual orientation... |
|
| Essay on Sexual Orientation » |
|
| |
| Essay on Sexual Inversion |
|
| Sexual Inversion Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Sexual inversion was a nineteenth-century theory of homosexuality best described by the pioneering sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) as anima muliebris virili corpore incluse, or, a woman's soul confined within a man's body. In the nineteenth century, sexual inversion, homosexuality, and antipathic sexuality were interchangeable terms. The ''inversion'' in sexual inversion referred to the inverted, or upside-down, quality of a body that did not reflect the ''true'' essence of its possessor. The truth of the invert was inside rather than on the surface; thus a male invert was ''really'' a woman, and should be allowed to express a female gender, and a female invert was ''really'' a man... |
|
| Essay on Sexual Inversion » |
|
| |
| Essay on Sexual Orientation and Identity |
|
| Sexual Orientation and Identity Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Sexual identity can refer to either sexual orientation or gender identity. Sexual orientation, the first and more common meaning of the term, assumes that a person's sexual practices define that person in a crucial way. The definition of sexual identity as gender identity is used predominantly by medical practitioners to describe a person's gender, regardless of that person's sexual practices. Under the first definition if a woman who desires other women interprets her sexual activities as lesbian and identifies herself with that label, she has a sexual identity as a lesbian. Under the second definition she may prefer sex with other women, but if she identifies herself as a woman, her sexual... |
|
| Essay on Sexual Orientation and Identity » |
|
| |
| Essay on Queer |
|
| Queer Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The term queer has traditionally meant strange, odd, or suspicious. In the twentieth century the word acquired almost exclusively sexual connotations, and as such, came to be used as a fundamentally derogatory label for homosexuals. Having been reclaimed by gay and lesbian activists in the 1980s as a term of self-identification, in the early twenty-first century queer is primarily used to refer to any form of nonheteronormative gender, sex, and sexuality, as well as in contradistinction to more straightforward categories of sexual identification, such as lesbian, gay, and bisexual. While it serves as an umbrella term to include a broad range of sexual orientation and/or gender expression... |
|
| Essay on Queer » |
|
| |
| Essay on Queen as a Gender Position |
|
| Queen as a Gender Position Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The term queen denotes a gender and/or sexual category that is notable for its simultaneous ambiguity and concreteness: It creates a specific image while subtly eliding what, exactly, that image refers to. Its grammatical function mirrors its social one. It is most often used in conjunction with another word, but it is unclear which word is the noun and which is the modifier. Examples are drag queen, drama queen, and scream queen. Its similarity to the word queer is not coincidental, and when queen is used by itself (in description of a nonroyal personage), it almost always denotes homosexuality. This can take the form of false titles, such as when Michael Holroyd dubbed the British... |
|
| Essay on Queen as a Gender Position » |
|
| |
| Essay on Puberty |
|
| Puberty Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Puberty refers to the physiological, anatomical, and hormonal changes in sexual maturation. Puberty begins with menarche in girls and the first ejaculation in boys and marks the beginning of adolescence, a complex psychological and developmental process that spans the years roughly from eleven to twenty. Sexual maturation starts this process, but the process of puberty occurs in the context of a social life and is thus influenced by these forces: it is socially constructed. Peter Blos (1979) views adolescence as the second individuation. The first individuation is completed toward the end of the third year of life, with the development of self and object constancy. Both periods share the vulnerability... |
|
| Essay on Puberty » |
|
| |
| Essay on Pedophilia: Causes, Treatment, and Law |
|
| Pedophilia: Causes, Treatment, and Law Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The word pedophilia comes from Greek words meaning ''love of children.'' The term denotes actual, intended, and/or fantasized sexual relations with a child. Pedophilia is defined in various ways, however, in that it often is parsed and specified not only by the mental health community but also by the criminal justice system. Much confusion has surrounded the term as researchers and lawmakers still question the status of pedophilia as a psychological disorder and are reevaluating the age range of the victims of pedophilia along with the treatments and/or necessary punishments for offenders. In ancient Greek and Roman culture (300 BCE-400 CE) male members of the upper... |
|
| Essay on Pedophilia: Causes, Treatment, and Law » |
|
| |
| Essay on One-Sex Theory |
|
| One-Sex Theory Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The term one-sex theory refers to the belief that there was only one sex and it was male. The theory originated in the writings of Aristotle and Galen; they had postulated a structural homology between the sexual organs of men and women whereby they were basically the same, except that those of men lay outside the body while those of women lay inside it and were, naturally, reversed: a vagina was a penis turned inside, the ovaries were the testicles, and so on. Similarly, bodily fluids (semen, blood, milk) were basically the same, being composed of the same fungible matter. The difference between men and women was not, therefore, one of kind (two different types of beings), but of degree... |
|
| Essay on One-Sex Theory » |
|
| |
| Essay on Intersex: Definition, Incidence, and Treatment |
|
| Intersex: Definition, Incidence, and Treatment Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Intersex is an umbrella term that typically is used to refer to a wide variety of conditions in which a person (or another animal) is born with something other than the anatomy considered species-typical for males or females. A person born with genitals that are between the typical male and typical female types usually is considered intersex, as is a person born with the external anatomy of one sex but most of the internal anatomy of the other sex. Many people also consider intersex any person with atypical sex chromosomes, for example, a person with mosaic sex chromosomes in whom some cells contain XX (female-typical) chromosomes and the rest contain XY... |
|
| Essay on Intersex: Definition, Incidence, and Treatment » |
|
| |
| Essay on Infantile Sexuality |
|
| Infantile Sexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) the psychologist Sigmund Freud explored dream processes and from that analysis developed his early psychoanalytic ideas about mental functioning. He posited a dynamic unconscious mind motivated by love and aggression, the idea of psychic determinism (all human behavior is has a cause, often involving multiple forces), and the idea that people are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Five years later Freud published The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), which is considered his second most important work. At that time strong objections were made to the second essay, ''Infantile Sexuality,'' but soon the influence of Freud's... |
|
| Essay on Infantile Sexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Theories of Heterosexuality |
|
| Theories of Heterosexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s prompted an interest in exploring histories of sexuality. Early examinations of sexuality, however, tended to assume the immutability of sexual desire and object choice; sexuality often was considered a natural instinct that was historically and culturally constructed. Foucault's work on sexuality in the 1970s proved to be seminal in its understanding of sexuality as the product of power and discourse in a specific time and culture. According to Foucault (1976), sexuality was constituted in the Victorian era through a proliferation of discourses about sex; those discourses did not, as Freud later claimed, repress... |
|
| Essay on Theories of Heterosexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Normalization of Heterosexuality |
|
| Normalization of Heterosexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The understanding of sexual identity in terms of object choice in the late nineteenth century was developed through an interest in defining and treating perversity, including same-sex desire, fetishes, and other sexual fixations. Those desires, however, inevitably were compared with normal sexual function, which already had been defined as male-female vaginal sex. In the early twentieth century Sigmund Freud (1989) conceived of sexual dysfunction in terms of overall mental health, advancing a theory of consciousness and human development that posited certain types of psychological disorders, such as hysteria and neurosis, as indicative of abnormal or problematic sexual... |
|
| Essay on Normalization of Heterosexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Heterosexuality in Early Modern Period |
|
| Heterosexuality in Early Modern Period Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. With the rise of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, religious communities began to rethink the relationship between sex and marriage. Protestants differentiated themselves from the Catholic Church, in part by insisting on marital sex as a natural and normal part of marriage. Sexual intimacy was considered desirable in a marriage because it strengthened and solidified the relationship between a man and a woman. Although sexual renunciation no longer was considered necessary to spiritual enlightenment, Protestant churches continued to exercise regulatory influence over the types of sexuality permitted in a spiritually correct marriage. In the eighteenth... |
|
| Essay on Heterosexuality in Early Modern Period » |
|
| |
| Essay on Heterosexuality in Antiquity and Early Christianity |
|
| Heterosexuality in Antiquity and Early Christianity Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The prevalence of male sexual relationships in ancient Greece and Rome has been held up as evidence for the long history of homosexuality. Some researchers have highlighted the ways in which certain subcultures constructed a social identity that was based on a sexual object, arguing that such subcultures are proof of Greek and Roman analogues to the modern notion of homosexuality. Others, however, have contended that same-sex relationships in antiquity were conducted as a performance of social dominance: What was important was not the choice of sexual partner but the act that was performed. Penetration was understood as an assertion of power that... |
|
| Essay on Heterosexuality in Antiquity and Early Christianity » |
|
| |
| Essay on Heterosexuality |
|
| Heterosexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Heterosexuality is a sexual identity in which sexual and erotic desires are directed exclusively toward members of the opposite sex. The term heterosexuality emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in the context of the rapidly expanding field of sexology: the medical, psychological, and social study of sex. The origin of the term is closely linked to the pathologizing of sex that occurred during that period; the concept of heterosexuality came into being largely to distinguish the perversion of homosexuality (also known as sexual inversion or the contrary sexual instinct) from other-directed sexuality. In its early usage the word heterosexuality often was allied with notions... |
|
| Essay on Heterosexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Hermaphrodites |
|
| Hermaphrodites Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Hermaphrodite refers to a being, human or otherwise, that possesses both female and male sexual organs. In humans that being is distinct from the androgyne, who may not have a double set of distinctly opposed sexual organs but whose overall physical appearance is so ambiguous that it makes sexual identification impossible. In contrast, the hermaphrodite may develop one set of sexual traits more than the other and pass for either male or female. The term hermaphrodite derives from the Greek mythic tale eventually set down sometime between 1-8 CE by Ovid as Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. In this tale the adolescent son of Hermes and Aphrodite comes across a fountain that belongs to the... |
|
| Essay on Hermaphrodites » |
|
| |
| Essay on Passionate Friendship |
|
| Passionate Friendship Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The exploration of friendship as a historical site for same-sex love can be traced to Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), who, in Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship (1902), examines famous examples of same-sex friendship from ancient Greece, through medieval Persia and Europe, to his own times. Iolaus was the supposed beloved of Hercules, at whose tomb male lovers were said to have pledged fidelity to each other. Carpenter's anthology includes Sappho (c. 600 BCE), Princess Anne of Great Britain (1950-), Lady Sarah Churchill (1921-2000), and the Ladies of Llangollen (Eleanor Butler [1739-1829] and Sarah Ponsonby [c. 1755-1831], who eloped in 1778 and lived together for fifty years)... |
|
| Essay on Passionate Friendship » |
|
| |
| Essay on Drag Queens |
|
| Drag Queens Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Drag queens is a slang term that is used to describe one variation of male-to-female cross-dressing; drag queens are men who dress as women. They are typified by exaggeration and excess, often resulting in a clownish or cartoonlike presentation. Wigs, makeup, and fashion often are overdone or out of proportion, creating an exaggerated femininity that is instantly recognizable as false or appropriated. That recognition is central to the drag queen aesthetic; drag queens attempt to make the constructed nature of their gender obvious, intentionally borrowing both masculine and feminine qualities simultaneously to create a gender position outside of either. The term is believed to have developed... |
|
| Essay on Drag Queens » |
|
| |
| Essay on Drag Kings |
|
| Drag Kings Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Drag kings are artists, activists, queer people, and others that dress in constantly-evolving styles of drag for theatrical performances (and occasionally other artistic mediums, such as photography) which aim for a masculine realness, a parodied presentation of masculinity, and/or a political intervention or critique. For their performances, most drag kings dress in male attire and bind their breasts with bandages or tight-fitting sports bras. Drag kings have also made an art of the crafting of facial hair. It can be drawn on with eyeliner, and accentuated with dark eye shadow for an unshaven look. The most common method of applying facial hair is to affix clippings of real hair to the face with... |
|
| Essay on Drag Kings » |
|
| |
| Essay on Daddies |
|
| Daddies Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The term daddy usually refers to an older male in a romantic or sexual relationship with a younger person. More than a simple indication of a couple's difference in chronological age, however, daddy signals a particular role in an unequally structured relationship in which the male has greater financial resources or more social power or cultural authority than his partner. The term covers a variety of possible roles and relationships, with different but related meanings in heterosexual and gay male cultures. Although marriage or sexual relationships between older men and younger women have been a feature of many cultures over the course of history, the term first appeared in the United States in the early... |
|
| Essay on Daddies » |
|
| |
| Essay on Cruising, Getting Off, and Hooking-Up |
|
| Cruising, Getting Off, and Hooking-Up Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Cruising refers to the act--and the art--of soliciting a type of sexual activity that is anonymous, impersonal, and often promiscuous. Commonly associated with gay male sexual cultures, cruising references the search for public sex in bars, bathhouses, backrooms, clubs, discos, gyms, beaches, parks, dumpsters, public restrooms (tearooms in the United States or, in the United Kingdom, cottage houses), highway rest stops, piers, churches, and, most recently, on the Internet. When one individual cruises another individual to get off or to hook-up, such interactions are usually prompted by exchanges that involve mutual and sometimes silent recognition of the search... |
|
| Essay on Cruising, Getting Off, and Hooking-Up » |
|
| |
| Essay on Coming Out: Revealing Nonnormative Sexuality |
|
| Coming Out: Revealing Nonnormative Sexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Coming out is an expression used to describe the process of revealing one's nonnormative sexuality. It is most commonly used in reference to homosexuals, but is also applicable to bisexual, transsexual, and transgendered individuals. The term is a shortened form of the phrase coming out of the closet, in which the closet refers to the anonymity of hidden sexual practice or desire. Individuals who have not publicly identified their homosexuality are referred to as being in the closet. An alternate form of coming out is outing, which is an involuntary disclosure of one's homosexuality or other nonnormativity by another person. Outing can also refer... |
|
| Essay on Coming Out: Revealing Nonnormative Sexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Closets |
|
| Closets Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Derived from the French closet, itself from the Latin word clausum (shut), the English word closet, meaning a private room, appeared first in the fourteenth century. Starting in about 1400, the meaning was extended to include any secret place, real or metaphorical (i.e., the closet of the conscience). A storage room, the common North American meaning, arose in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as did other specialized meanings, such as a room used for private devotion or a bathroom (water-closet). The phrase closet-sins can be found in seventeenth-century texts, while the phrase skeleton in the closet (a dark secret) did not appear until the mid-nineteenth century. The idea that a forbidden... |
|
| Essay on Closets » |
|
| |
| Essay on Childhood Sexuality |
|
| Childhood Sexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Childhood theories on sexuality in the early twenty-first century have been influenced by psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, object relations theorists, psychologists, and sociologists. Although multiple theorists have written on what kind of childhood experiences influence character, they do not say what the cause of childhood sexuality is or that it lies at the base of adult knowledge and being. Those who treat what causes childhood sexuality, such as feminist authors Dorothy Dinnerstein or psychologist Nancy Chodorow, give a sociological, behavioral interpretation of how sexual difference is created. Physicist and feminist author Evelyn Keller Fox argues for a sociobiological... |
|
| Essay on Childhood Sexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Bisexuality as Collective and Political Identity Category |
|
| Bisexuality as Collective and Political Identity Category Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The emergence of a collective and political identity category of bisexuality has certainly been constrained, if not often foreclosed, by the history of bisexual erasure within Western binary models of sexuality. Until at least the 1970s (if not beyond) a prevailing psychomedical view was that bisexuality did not constitute a sexual identity or ''orientation.'' Instead it was routinely envisioned as a form of immaturity, a state of confusion, or a transitional state on the way to either hetero- or homosexuality. This is in stark contrast to homosexuality, which has formed the basis of collective self-identification at least since the late nineteenth century... |
|
| Essay on Bisexuality as Collective and Political Identity Category » |
|
| |
| Essay on Bisexuality as Sexual Behaviors or Practices |
|
| Bisexuality as Sexual Behaviors or Practices Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Although hegemonic psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses rejected bisexuality, the concept played an important role in describing individual biographies of sexual practice with both men and women. Within the discipline of sociology, several important studies demonstrated the prevalence of bisexual practices and the need for more expansive terminology for describing the variability of human sexuality than that provided by the rigid and exclusive binary of hetero/homosexuality. The groundbreaking studies of Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956) and his associates in the late 1940s and 1950s spearheaded an implicit challenge to what he perceived as the normative... |
|
| Essay on Bisexuality as Sexual Behaviors or Practices » |
|
| |
| Essay on Bisexuality as Psychological Androgyny |
|
| Bisexuality as Psychological Androgyny Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founding father of psychoanalysis, inherited the theory of primordial bisexuality and made it the bedrock of his psychoanalytic framework. Aiming to erect a psychological theory of gender and sexuality that would complement the biological foundations of psychoanalysis, he posited a kind of psychological bisexuality as an analogue to evolutionary notions of embryological bisexuality. Borrowing the idea from his friend Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928), Freud argued that just as primordial bisexuality manifests physically in every individual by ''leaving behind only a few traces of the sex that has become atrophied'' (Freud 1905, p. 141), so too... |
|
| Essay on Bisexuality as Psychological Androgyny » |
|
| |
| Essay on Bisexuality as Biological Hermaphroditism |
|
| Bisexuality as Biological Hermaphroditism Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Bisexuality appears to have been first used as a biological concept. In nineteenth century evolutionary and embryological theories it was widely used to refer to the state of human primordial hermaphroditism. Evolutionists such as Charles Darwin and his contemporaries assumed bisexuality was the missing link in the descent of humans from invertebrate organisms. Some ''remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom,'' declared Darwin, ''appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous'' (Darwin 1901, p. 249). Within this paradigm, human development was thought to pass through various stages beginning with a state of originary bisexuality... |
|
| Essay on Bisexuality as Biological Hermaphroditism » |
|
| |
| Essay on Asexuality |
|
| Asexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. The definition of the term asexuality depends on what one means by the term sex. One definition of sex is the physical differentiation between males and females. Therefore, to be biologically asexual an individual must lack either male or female reproductive organs and perhaps the corresponding secondary characteristics, such as breasts or facial hair. In this sense, asexual may be distinguished from androgynous, which can mean having neither set of sexual characteristics or having a mixture of both. However, asexual also has come to mean having a greatly diminished libido or even a lack of desire for sex. It is in this social rather than morphological sense that asexuality became a popular subject... |
|
| Essay on Asexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Androgyny in Popular Culture |
|
| Androgyny in Popular Culture Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Resistance to androgyny's denaturalizing effect was evident in European medical and criminological discourse of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Experts in those equated androgyny with underdevelopment, degeneracy and sexual confusion, men with physical female traits (gynecomastie), women with male traits (masculisme), and the promiscuity and violence attributed to lower-class women. Androgynes and hermaphrodites were frequently lumped together in discussions of deviance, labeled 'inverts' and were most bothersome when they did not simply hide in laboratories or circus cages. The hermaphrodite who attempted to live as an integral part of the community attracted... |
|
| Essay on Androgyny in Popular Culture » |
|
| |
| Essay on Androgyny in Literature |
|
| Androgyny in Literature Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Literature has treated the ambiguities of androgyny with varying degrees of suspicion. The greater value of the male being and masculinity is underscored in several narratives of Ovid's (43 BCE-c.17 CE) Metamorphoses. In the story of the nymph Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, the latter's excessive beauty incurs an ill fate. When he dives naked into the waters, the nymph Samalcis is blinded with lust, jumps in after him, naked as well, and fastens her lips to his, clinging to his body with hers. In the end, with ''. . . weakened members and a girlish voice,'' he is made one with her ''so two became nor boy nor girl/neither yet both within a single body'' (Book IV, 121-122). Of Atalanta, the brave... |
|
| Essay on Androgyny in Literature » |
|
| |
| Essay on Androgyny and Religion |
|
| Androgyny and Religion Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Androgyny is the combination or blurring in one being (not necessarily limited to the human) of certain identifiable sex-differentiated traits. The androgyne may display both male and female characteristics at once, but often remains overall so sexually ambiguous that these traits blend into each other and sexual identification is impossible. Androgyny is found in art and in religion, and is constructed in various ways in social life and culture. The distinction between these realms is drastic, as the incorporation of androgyny in the representation and imagination of divine figures in a given culture by no means guarantees that gender-ambiguous appearance or behavior... |
|
| Essay on Androgyny and Religion » |
|
| |
| Essay on Adolescent Sexuality |
|
| Adolescent Sexuality Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Prepuberty and puberty refer to the physiological, anatomical, and hormonal changes in sexual maturation. Puberty begins with menarche in girls and the first ejaculation in boys, and marks the beginning of adolescence, a complex psychological and developmental process that spans the years roughly from eleven to twenty (Tyson and Tyson 1990, p. 62). Three transformations occur in adolescence: There is disengagement from the infantile ties to the parents; there is the discovery of orgasm and sexual desire directed away from the parents; and there is a primary identification with one of the parents as an adult. In Freudian theory, for heterosexuals the primary identification... |
|
| Essay on Adolescent Sexuality » |
|
| |
| Essay on Sexual Abstinence and Celibacy |
|
| Sexual Abstinence and Celibacy Research Paper, Custom Essays and Term Papers Writing on Sex and Gender Issues. Across times and cultures, individuals and groups of sexually mature people have been culturally defined and socially positioned as celibates on the basis of temporary or long-term abstinence from certain types of sex. This abstinence may vary in relation to volition (it can be elected or imposed) and temporality (it can be temporary or permanent), but it always is related to the sociocultural significance of the body and its sexuality (Sobo and Bell 2001). Although people of any age or sexual orientation can be abstinent, in the United States and European culture ''abstinence'' typically refers to the specifically heterosexual activities of biologically mature persons... |
|
| Essay on Sexual Abstinence and Celibacy » |
|
|
|
| see also: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
