Crash Course Sociology #31 Sex & Sexuality

  • https://youtu.be/Kqt-_ILgv5c
  • Sex is a biological category, and it distinguishes between females and males.
  • There are primary sex characteristics, which show up as the sex organs involved with the reproductive processes and which develop in utero.
  • And then there are secondary sex characteristics, which develop at puberty and are not directly involved in reproduction, things like pubic hair, enlarged breasts or facial hair.
  • Intersex: people [who] are born with sex characteristics that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.
  • If intersex is defined strictly in terms of having atypical genitalia at birth, then 1 in every 1500-2000 births fits that description.
  • If defined more broadly, however – to include all of the conditions I just mentioned – intersex conditions appear in as much as 2% of the population.
  • And for years doctors performed unnecessary operations on intersex children, in order to make them acceptable according to cultural ideas about sex.
  • Gender is the set of social and psychological characteristics that a society considers proper for its males and females.
  • The sets of characteristics assigned to men are masculinities, and those assigned to women are femininities.
  • Plenty of women are bigger and stronger than plenty of men. And minor differences in average size and strength can't explain why some occupations have been stratified by gender.
  • And we can be sanctioned if we don't do gender right, or well enough.
  • This idea of gender as a performance is known as gender expression.
  • Gender identity refers to a person's internal, deeply held sense of their gender.
  • Nobody really, perfectly fits the cultural ideal of masculinity or femininity.
  • In particular, transgender people are those whose gender identity doesn't match the biological sex they were assigned at birth.
  • By contrast, cisgender people's gender identity matches their biological sex.
  • Sexuality is basically a shorthand for everything related to sexual behavior: sexual acts, desire, arousal – the entire experience that is deemed sexual.
  • One part of sexuality is sexual orientation, or who you're sexually attracted to, or not.
  • That said, based on the surveys we do have, around 4% of the American population identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
  • However, this increases to around 10% if we ask instead whether a person has ever experienced same-sex attraction or engaged in homosexual activity.
  • We'll start with symbolic-interactionism, because its insight is the most fundamental. And that is that sexuality, this intensely private and supposedly primeval thing, is socially constructed.
  • For example, among the Sambia of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, young boys perform oral sex on, and ingest the semen of, older men, as part of a rite of passage to adulthood.
  • So physically identical acts can have radically different social and subjective meanings.
  • Sexual scripts are cultural prescriptions that dictate the when, where, how, and with-whom of sex, and what that sex means when it happens.
  • This brings us to the structural functionalist perspective. Since sexual reproduction is necessary for the reproduction of society, this view says that sex has to be organized in some way, in order for society to function. And society organizes sexuality by using sexual scripts.
  • But, as seen from the perspective of social conflict theory, regulating sexuality is also a matter of creating, and reinforcing, inequalities.
  • Heteronormativity makes heterosexuality seem like it's directly linked to biological sex, but heterosexuality is just as much a social construction as any other sexuality.
  • It's defined by dominant sexual scripts, privileged by law, and normalized by social practices, like religious teachings, so it comes to be understood as natural in a way that other sexualities are not.
  • Queer theory challenges this naturalness and especially shows how gender and heterosexuality are tied together.
  • And so you can see how sex, gender, and sexuality are all linked, and all socially constructed.
  • And you can see how society gets in everywhere, even among these apparently private and primeval things.
  • And in turn, these things help structure society, creating and sustaining inequalities and giving them the veneer of the natural. But sociology can help us pick them apart.

Crash Course Sociology #32 Gender Stratification

  • https://youtu.be/Yb1_4FPtzrI
  • Gender stratification refers to the unequal distribution of wealth, power, and privilege across genders.
  • Patriarchy is a form of social organization in which men have more power and dominate other genders.
  • And patriarchal societies are maintained through a careful cultivation of attitudes, behaviors, and systems that favor men and encourage society to believe that one gender is innately better than others (also known as sexism).
  • Societies often define, and celebrate, certain sets of characteristics as being masculine. Sociologist Raewyn Connell describes this process as 'hegemonic masculinity'.
  • Hegemonic masculinities are linked to power within society, too.
  • Fitting into the archetype of masculinity pays off in the form of societal approval.
  • But ultimately, in a patriarchal society, all men share in patriarchal dividends.
  • If daughters are given dolls to play with and sons are given toy hammers, kids learn that caring behaviors are feminine and building things is masculine.
  • This type of anticipatory socialization is reinforced by the societal assumption that men are the breadwinners in families and women will take care of the home and children.
  • Even as more women have become equal earners outside the home, they still tend to do more work in the household as well.
  • Sociologist Arlie Hochschild called this phenomenon the 'second shift', in which women come home from work to more work – cooking, laundry, childcare – whereas men are more likely to spend their time in leisure after work.
  • Emphasized femininities are forms of femininity that conform to what the ideal female is in men's eyes.
  • Sometimes known as "pink collar jobs", these jobs with the highest concentrations of women tend to come with both lower prestige and lower pay.
  • You've probably also heard of the glass ceiling: a term used by sociologists to describe the invisible barrier that stops women's advancement to the top levels of an organization.
  • One of the results of gender stratification is gender wage gap. According to a survey done in 2016 by the Pew Research Center, white women earn about 80 cents for every dollar that white men make. This gap is wider for non-white women, with Black women earning 65 cents and Hispanic women earning 58 cents for every dollar that white men make.
  • And patriarchal norms about masculinities can affect men as well as women.
  • For example, men have higher rates of suicide than women.
  • Studies of suicide among men have found that it's often linked to financial troubles or divorce, two crises of masculinity that may be related to men's identity as a breadwinner.
  • Men are also more likely to be incarcerated.
  • They're more likely to engage in criminal behavior, yes, but holding all else equal, men are more likely to be tried for a crime and more likely to be found guilty.

Crash Course Sociology #33 Theories of Gender

  • https://youtu.be/CquRz_cceH8
  • Let's start with structural functionalism.
  • From this perspective, gender is a means of organizing society into distinct roles that complement each other.
  • But there are holes in this theory – namely that the early anthropologists who studied this dynamic overemphasized the role of things like big game hunting.
  • More recent anthropological work suggests that gathering, fishing, and small game hunting – all of which were also performed by women – played a much larger role in providing food in these societies.
  • But the idea that we have two genders to play complementary roles has stuck around, partially through the work of sociologist Talcott Parsons. He argued that boys and girls are socialized to take on traits that are complementary to each other, to make it easier to maintain stable, productive family units. Boys are taught what Parsons calls instrumental qualities, such as confidence and competitiveness, that prepare them for the labor force. Meanwhile, girls are taught expressive qualities, such as empathy and sensitivity, which prepare them to care for their families.
  • Though this theory was influential in the mid twentieth century, it's fallen out of favor for a few reasons.
  • First, Parsons was basing his theory on a division of labor that was specific to middle-class white America in the 1940s and 50s. It assumes a heteronormative and Western perspective on what a family is. But not all families are nuclear units with one man, one woman, and a gaggle of children. When you expand the definition of family to include same-sex couples, single parents, multi-generational families, or childless adults, it's less obvious that you should assume that a man works outside the home and a woman works inside the home.
  • Second, the idea of complementary genders rests on there being two distinct and opposite genders. Again – a Western perspective. The idea of gender as a binary isn't universal, and it ignores all those whose identities don't conform to a two-gender system.
  • Third, Parsons' theory ignores the personal and social costs of maintaining rigid gender roles. Critics argue that the idea that men need to be the ones working outside the home to maintain family stability is arbitrary, and it reinforces gender dynamics that give men power over women.
  • Symbolic-interactionists are more focused in how gender is part of day-to-day life.
  • From this perspective, gender is something that a person does, rather than something that's either innate or imposed by institutions.
  • Gender roles, or how a society defines how women and men should think and behave.
  • A man wearing a skirt is seen as more of a rejection of traditional gender roles than a woman wearing pants is. Body language and how people interact with each other are also part of how people do gender.
  • These exercises in 'doing gender' are good examples of how our society's definitions of masculinity and femininity are inextricably linked to each gender's power in society.
  • Gender conflict theory argues that gender is a structural system that distributes power and privilege to some and disadvantage to others. Specifically, that structural system is the patriarchy, a form of social organization in which men have more power and dominate other genders.
  • Intersectionality, or the analysis of the interplay of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other identities, which often results in multiple dimensions of disadvantage.
  • White women make 80 cents for every dollar a white man makes. Black women make 65 cents for every dollar a white man makes. If we divide those two numbers, we get the wage gap between white women and black women: a black woman makes 81 cents for every dollar that a white woman makes. But what about black men? Well, they make 73 cents for every dollar that white men make.
  • Feminism is the support of social equality for all genders, in opposition to patriarchy and sexism. Broadly speaking, feminism advocates the elimination of gender stratification, expanding the choices that women, men and other genders are allowed to make, ending gender-based violence, and promoting sexual freedom.
  • Liberal feminists seek to expand the rights and opportunities of women by removing cultural and legal barriers to women's equality, like implementing policies that prevent discrimination in the workforce or improve reproductive freedom.
  • This contrasts with socialist feminism, which views capitalism as the foundation of the patriarchy and advocates for full economic equality in the socialist tradition. Socialist feminists tend to believe that the liberal feminist reforms don't go far enough since they maintain most of the existing institutions of power.
  • The third feminist school of thought is known as radical feminism, which believes that to reach gender equality, society must actually eliminate gender as we know it. Radical feminism has clashed heavily with other subsets of feminism, particularly on transgender individuals' rights. Many radical feminists refuse to acknowledge the gender identities of trans women and have accused the transgender movement of perpetuating patriarchal gender norms.