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Summary articles week 1™ 3
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Summary of the articles from week 1™ 3 of the youth and sexuality course. All the articles you need to learn before the first exam are included.
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Youth and Sexuality Louise ten Harmsen van der BeekSummary of articles
Week 1:
In pursuit of pleasure: a biopsychosocial perspecti ve on sexual pleasure and gender
A review which present biopsychosocial evidence for gender similarities in the capacity to
experience pleasure, and for substantial gender differences in opportunities for sexual pleasure.
Conclusion: sexual activity, in most cultures, is less pleasurable and associated with greater cost for
heterosexual women than for heterosexual men, even though they do not differ in the capacity for
sexual pleasure.
Sexual pleasure is defined as “the physical and/or psychological satisfaction and enjoyment derived
from shared or solitary erotic experiences, including thoughts, fantasies, dreams, emotions and
feelings”. Not until recently that scholars have started to acknowledge the importance of sexual
pleasure for sexual health and sexual rights. Furthermore, the role of pleasure in sexual
development and relationships is usually not included in educational programs. To date, public
health approaches to sexuality remain largely focused on adverse health outcomes and concomitant
risks. Yet, it is shown that a positive approach to sexual health and sex education has more benefits
than risks.
Many studies have documented the health benefits of sexual pleasure. Longevity of relationships
was associated with enjoyment of sexual activity, not with sexual frequency per se. Engaging in
sexual activity may be exchangeable to experiencing sexual pleasure for the average man, but not
for women. The experiences of sexual pleasure seem embedded in a gendered context. Sex as
experienced by women appears to be substantially less positive and may come at a greater cost than
the sex that men experience. Men of all sexual orientations are more likely to orgasm than women.
Not explained by women simply being less able to orgasm than men as women who have sex with
women have orgasms much more.
The prevalence of pain or discomfort during penile-vaginal intercourse is high among women. Only
half of the women think that having pain is a problem and they still have sex. Male partners’
negative responses to expressions of pain were the best predictor of persisting in painful penile-
vaginal penetration in young women. Additionally, women and girls are more likely to be victims of
violent sex, sexual assault, abuse, and harassment than men and boys. Women are more likely to
having felt scared during sex. In addition, the definition of “scary” was radically different for women
than for men.
Evidence is accumulating that women and men do not differ in their biological capacity for sexual
response. From an early age, children of both genders display responses and behaviors that appear
to produce feelings that can be interpreted as pleasurable and even sexual. The fact that
masturbation is condoned or even encouraged in boys but not or to a lesser extent in girls can have
repercussions on the use and efficacy of masturbation as a source of pleasure. Also, it has been
shown that male and female brains are equally responsive to visual sexual stimuli. So the mechanism
of arousal is also similar in women and men. 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.
The role sex hormones play in male and female reproduction should not be equated with their role
in men’s and women’s sexuality. Labeling the vagina a reproductive rather than a sexual organ
would help women to no longer feel sexually dysfunctional when they have difficulty becoming
, Youth and Sexuality Louise ten Harmsen van der Beek
sexually aroused, let alone experience orgasm, form penile-vaginal intercourse without direct or
indirect stimulation of their pleasure organ, the clitoris. Furthermore, women’s expression of sexual
behavior is more susceptible to moral disapproval by others than those of men. To conclude, women
and men do not seem to differ in their biological or psychosocial capacity for sexual pleasure.
Women and men are, in principle, equally arousable, provided that they are stimulated in a way that
fits their “genital design”, and provided that they have the opportunity to learn that sexual activity
can be sexually rewarding.
The coital imperative = the common view that penile-vaginal intercourse is the most important of all
sexual activities. This coital imperative is likely to provide heterosexual women with fewer
opportunities for sexual pleasure, particularly when this is combined with the belief that women do
not need to be sexually aroused prior to intercourse. Additional gendered practices and scripts, such
as genital mutilation, disregard of the clitoris, slut shaming, body image, and the dilemma of desire,
are likely to limit opportunities for sexual pleasure for women. In sum, while biological and
psychological factors determine the possibilities and restrictions of our sexual potential,
circumstances shape our specific expectations about whether engaging in sexual activity, partnered
or solo, will be rewarding and, thus, worth desiring.
Alfred Kinsey and the Kinsey report: historical overview and lasti ng contributi ons
Kinsey, a biologist, brought to the study of sexual expression a taxonomic approach, an interest in
classification and description. His results challenged many widely held beliefs about sexuality,
including the belief that women were not sexual. He changed the nature of sexual studies, forced a
reexamination of public attitudes toward sex, challenged the medical and psychiatric establishment
to reassess its own views, influenced both the feminist movement and the gay and lesbian
movement, and built a library and an institution devoted to sex research.
The modern study of sexuality began in the nineteenth century, and these early studies were
dominated by physicians. This was a divergence from the past when sexuality had been regarded
almost entirely as a moral issue. Most physicians writing about sex were influenced more by the
zeitgeist of the time rather than by any specialized base of knowledge. As the twentieth century
progressed, the ordinary physician probably was regarded as the easiest available authority on sex,
but most of the medical writings on sexual topics came from psychiatrists, particularly those who
were psychoanalytically trained. Even the most comprehensive sex studies undertaken by
psychiatrists were flawed by the assumptions of the investigators interpreting data. Kinsey’s best
asses was that he was a bench scientist, a biologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Before the appearance of courses on marriage and family, the academic discussion of human
sexuality had been confined to lectures in the hygiene-type courses. They generally emphasized the
dangers of sexually transmitted diseases and masturbation. Rice opposed Kinsey’s questioning of
students because he believed that sexual behavior could not and should not be analyzed by scientific
methods because it was a moral topic, not a scientific one. His openness to sex was what Rice
objected to.
Kinsey began his study finding out what was known and building up a personal library of serious
books on sex and reading extensively. Much of his life became devoted to sex research. His initial
efforts to study sex received encouragement from the CRPS. Before the interviews stopped with
Kinsey’s death, about 18000 individuals had been interviewed, 8000 by himself. Kinsey strongly
believed that individuals would not always tell the truth when questioned about their sexual
activities and that the only way to deal with this was trough personal interviews in which the
contradictions could be explored.
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