Youth and sexuality – lectures
25-04-2023
Youth doesn’t have one definition, but focusing on adolescent years
Sexuality can be a lever in adolescent development
Independence from parents
Development of personal morality and identity
Development of meaningful intimate relationships
Crucial in finding balance between autonomy and connectedness (struggle)
Also, the first steps in terms of exploring desires and boundaries (consent)
What words would you use in a definition of SEXUALITY?
- Sexual attraction (homosexuality, heterosectuality)
- Intimate, personal, differs between people.
- Part of identity
Sex or sexuality:
- the “act of penetration”, but the wider area seems to be ignored.
- Sexual preference, sexual behavior, sexual health, pleasure
Sex and gender
- Biological sex
- Social/cultural definitions
Sexology
- Sex therapy, treatment of sexual dysfunction
- Scientific study of sexuality
Sexual health
- Dealing with sexual risks, SRHR
- Sexual disfunctions, violence
- Positive sexual placed
The modern study of sexuality – an (ultrashort) overview
1900-1940
- First period of large growth of scientific interest, sexology research and societal
influence
- Dominated by physicians, which was a divergence from the past (in which sexuality
was mostly a moral issue)
,Post WW2
• More interdisciplinary (also biology, psychology, sociology)
• US leading in sexology (Kinsey, Money)
• Europe: first feminist wave e.g. Simone de Beauvoir (La deuxieme sexe, 1949)
Sexual liberation (1960S)
- Sexual revolution, second feminist wave, oral contraceptives
- Masters & Johnson, ‘discovery’ human sexual response
1973 – 2000
- Social constuctionist vs medicalization/evolutionary perspective
- Simon Gagnon: the social sources of human sexuality
- 1974: homosexuality removed from DSM (no longer considered a mental disorder)
- More attention to sexual violence and inequality
Recent developments
- Professionalization sexology
- ‘discovery’ of the full anatomy of the clitoris
- More attention for sexual pleasure and inequality; orgasm gap
first scientific developments (1900-1940)
- From religious-moral to medical-psychiatric
- German psycho-analysts layed foundation for sexology: Von Krafft-Ebing, Freud →
often considering female desire deviant, clitoral orgasm is infantile, vaginal orgasm
are adult
- 1906: Birth of sexology as a science
Bloch: Das sexualleben unserer Zeit
Hirschfeld & Bloch: Founded Sexual Science Institute Havelock Ellis, Bloch &
Hirschfeld: research on homosexuality
- First steps of moving away from LGBT as disease, immoral or a crime
Alfred Kinsey (US, 1894-1956)
Pioneer of sex research
Biologist, zoologist, sexologist
“The Kinsey Reports” (1948, 1953) based on 5000 and 6000 interviews
- Revolutionary: he moved the field from medical to interdisciplinary
- Taxonomy of human sexual behaviors (including pedophilia), descriptive.
Homosexuality as a scale (homosexual orgasm, heterosexual orgasm)
- Controversial in his time: revelations about masturbation, orgasm, premarital sex,
homosexuality (37% of all men have had homosexual orgasm), differences and
similarities between men and women, and more
,John Money (New Zealand, 1921-2006)
psychologist, sexologist
- Groundbreaking clinical empirical studies on gender identity development among
intersex children
- Introduced the term ‘gender’ (1955): all those things that a person says or does to
disclose himself or herself as having the status of man or woman. It includes, but is
not restricted to, sexuality in the sense of eroticism.
- Gender is “nuture” not “nature”
- Criticized for e.g. David Reimer sex reassignment study
- Gender is complex, up to the individual
William Masters & Virginia Johnson
1966: ‘discovery’ of the human sexual response cycle
Stage 1: Excitement
Stage 2: Plateau
Stage 3: Orgasm
Stage 4: Resolution
A natural physiological process, can be blocked by psychological inhibitions
- Controversial methods: observing people having sex
- Layed foundations for behavioral therapy of sexual dysfunctions
- Sexual liberation (60s)
The 70’s
Michel Foucault, Jonh Gagnon, William Simon Shere Hite, Susan Brownmiller
- Emergence of social-constructivist perspectives
Dismissal of the Freudian idea of ‘sexual instinct’
Growing attention for sexual violence, sexual equality (m/f)
- Sexuality = product of societal regulation, norms, meaning, and the freedom/right to
express themselves
- Sexual behavior = social behavior sensitive for interpersonal and intra-
psychological cultural scripts
1974: removal of homosexuality from the DSM
After heated debate, 58% of 10.000 APA psychiatrists voted that homosexuality is no longer a
‘mental disorder’
Increased awareness:
What is normal and abnormal?
What is sexual ‘deviance’ or ‘variation’?
1998/2005: ‘discovery’ of the full anatomy of the clitoris - Helen O’Connell, US urologist
In pursuet of pleasure
Ellen Laan (1962-2021)
Groundbreaking research into female sexual arousal
Psychologist/sexologist/professor/founder of Sexual Wellbeing Nederland
, Some myths maintaining sexual inequalities*:
1. Men are from Mars, women from Venus
• Of 30 sexual behaviors, only 4 moderate differences, and 80,26% overlap (Petersen &
Hyde, 2010)
2. Penis and vagina are important for reproduction and therefore for sexual pleasure
• Penis-in-vagina sex does not facilitate women’s orgasms
*Between heterosexual cisgender men/women
Sexual inequality observation #1: Orgasm gap
In heterosexual relationships, women have fewer orgasms then the men with whom they
have sex (65% vs 95%; Frederick et al. 2018)
(Women in lesbian relationships have more orgasms)
