Women 's Sexuality, The Lgbtq Community, And Educational Institutions

My chosen academic journal article is Contesting silence, claiming space: gender and sexuality in the neo-liberal public high school by Susan W. Woolley. This article examines how educational institutions and its actors introduce and reinforce a heteronormative binary ideology, and reject any non-normativity that may occur. Through this deep-rooted theoretical framework, high school students struggle to freely explore individual interpretations of sexuality and

C.J. Pascoe’s book, Dude You’re A Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, examines masculinity and its connection with sexuality through an eighteen-month study at River High School. The goal of Pascoe’s study is to explain how teenagers, teachers, and schooling construct adolescent masculinity through idioms of sexuality. In addition, the book investigates the relationships between gender and sexuality as it relates to a major social institution. Throughout the book she asks how heteronormitive and homophobic discourses, practices, and interactions produce masculine identities through focusing on gender and sexual practices of the students, teachers, and administrators.

What is even stranger is that women fully enforce this sexual double standard. Over 99% of woman agree that women enjoy sex as much as men do, yet when asked to describe a woman who has had many sexual partners, over 59% percent of women used words that fell under the negatively connotative ‘Promiscuous’ category, using words like “slut,” “cheap,” “loose,” “whore,” “easy,” and “dirty.” Twelve percent of women even used words that would suggest that sexually liberal woman are psychologically damaged, using words like “insecure,” “lonely,” “desperate,” “needy,” and ‘unfulfilled.” Only 8% of women tagged a sexually liberal woman in the more positive category of “sexually focused,” the respondents feeling that “these women were uncommitted and focused on sex rather than the relationship” (Milhausen and Herold). In addition, “Women were more likely to discourage a female friend from dating a highly experienced male that a male friend from dating a highly experienced female” (Milhausen and Herold). This fact furthers the case for women’s involvement in maintaining the double standard. In a one study researchers found that “Women will endorse a sexual double standard in which women are judged more

Whilst many disagreements have arisen in feminist discourse over the years, none has been quite as prevalent or divisive as the issue of the commodification of sexuality. There are two central groups in feminist ideology that are divided on this issue, liberal feminism and radical feminism. Liberal feminism is influenced by the ideas and values of liberalism. Thus, these feminists share a contractarian view which places an emphasis on a woman’s ability to make choices for herself and that the selling of one’s sexuality is merely an expression of that choice. Paradoxically, radical feminists believe that because women live in a patriarchal society, the commodification of sexuality can never be a choice or a form of expression. Rather, forms of sexual commodification such as pornography and prostitution just enforce male oppression. This essay will explore these two ideological positions in regard to their divergent definitions of human nature and freedom which has created a division within feminism about the commodification of sexuality.

Pascoe begins by pointing out ways in which the school as an institution plays a crucial role in the formation of masculinities. She often noticed teachers routinely ignored homophobic and sexist comments made by students. Students were never really punished for using words like “fag,” “gay,” or “dyke”. What are less obvious and more upsetting than the criticisms of the sex-ed program are the varied examples of the ways that “Heterosexual discourses were embedded in the physical environment of the classroom, teachers’ instructional practices, and students’ classroom behavior” (p. 39). From the pictures of boy/girl pairings on the walls, to the homophobic jokes between male students and male teachers, the schools’ complacency with heterosexism becomes undeniable. In one instance a boy and girl left the Winter Ball early, two vice principals joked “You two going to a hotel or what”? I feel that if two male students walked off that the administrators would have reacted in a different manner.

In the book, Slut!—Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation by Leora Tanenbaum, she collects a multitude of testimonies from women who have been subjected to sexual harassment, physical abuse, rape, incest and slut-bashing from all ethnicities and locations around the globe. One astonishing truth approaches you at the beginning of the book. Tanenbaum enters a table that shows the positives and negatives of being a sexually active man and a sexually active woman, unfortunately the truth is absolutely ludicrous. The table states a total of two positives of being a sexually active woman; hot and sexy. On the contrary, it states three negatives for sexually active men, compared to the twenty-eight negatives for sexually active women. This list consists of names from “slut” and “Jezebel” all the way to “prostitute.”

Media influence has caused beauty to evolve into ideals that can’t actually be attained. In addition to this, women are objectified and seen as sex objects, being sexualized by men without consequence due to the normalcy the media has created for genders. In fact, men are even encouraged to sexualize women. During her TEDTalk, Kilbourne presented a photo of an adolescent boy wearing a shirt that stated “pimp squad,” showing how our society is comfortable with men sexualizing women from a very young age. In contrast, women are labeled as sluts or whores without even engaging in sexual activity. I, for example, have been called a slut for wearing leggings, merely talking to a guy, and even wearing shorts— in the summer.

In Canadian society, there are certain things that are expected to happen. Any type of public hatred against the LGBTQ+ community, or any other cultural, or religious group, is completely not acceptable. As well as sexual education is to be taught in the school system. Beginning September of 2015, the Ontario school system implemented an upgrade to the province’s sexual health education curriculum. The updated curriculum contains a more progressive outlook than the old curriculum, which had not been updated since 1998 Today’s society is sexually explicit, and because of this, Ontario has tapered their sexual education towards this fact. This essay will explore the differences in how the curriculum has been received, and how the sexual education

For example, Black girls are considered more deviant because of the amount of liberation they possess. In order for girls to make moral decisions about their sexualities, they need to be taught how to control themselves. Once again, this notion that a girl/woman’s body needs to be policed for the sake of society, as if they are the only ones in the wrongdoing. If a girl is sexually active, especially those with more than one partner, she is viewed as possessing delinquent behavior that needs to be fixed. Therefore, it is no surprise that girls are proportionally more likely to be admitted to training schools or group homes, whereas boys are more likely to receive day treatment (Chesney-Lind and Sheldon 171). Boys are apparently ‘active agents’ of change in their lives, compared to girls who are seen as ‘perpetual victim’ who is pathologized for her ‘badness,’ who lacks agency for change, and who will always experience (and need) external control over her life (Paso 824). This is simply the reflection of the roles played out in larger society where a man can have sex whenever, wherever, and as many times as he wants, because men can control their sexuality; while women are ridiculed for even acknowledging their sexuality. Yet, between 60% and 99% of rapes and sexual assault are perpetrated by men onto women, children, other men, and transgender people (The Order

The book ‘Yes Means Yes!’ by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti contains articles written by themselves and articles written by other women about women’s sexual power and rape. Jessica Valenti’s ‘Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How it Reinforces Rape Culture’ and Jaclyn Friedman’s ‘In Defense of Going Wild’ discusses the problematic ideology of society towards sexuality, purity, and rape. Valenti argues that the way media depicts certain women and that chastity pledges supports rape culture; while Friedman argues that the “taboo” of women’s sexuality is what drives the porn business and rape.

Presently an ongoing turmoil between women is the insulting and shaming of one another’s sexual tendencies which have been inflicted upon society by the misogynist double standards imposed by men. In doing so, women are belittled in their slut shaming and are therefore degraded and neglected in their social life. Collectively Elizabeth A. Armstrong; Laura T. Hamilton; Elizabeth M. Armstrong; and J. Lotus Seeley composed an article, ‘ ' 'Good Girls ' ': Gender, Social Class, and Slut Discourse on Campus’ in 2014 for Social Psychology Quarterly (p. 100-122), utilizing observations on social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate females exploit shaming to construct social barriers around status groups—along with overseeing sexual behavior and social relations among females. Within the study, the primary focus is what determines the right of the discrimination between supposed good girls and the promiscuous alongside how it functions in the select college females within a university dorm hall. Attention is also drawn to the fact that men are encouraged to have sexual activity in general whereas women are restricted to minor contact within relationships or face the detrimental judgement of society.

I found this article on Discus under Opposing Viewpoints In Context. One of the things that really stuck out to me in this passage was a certain quote “To be sexually free, women must be able to discover and legitimate their own sexualities through representing and seeing them represented in a vast variety of ways. We don't want the U.S. government, or Andrea Dworkin, telling us which representations are "good" and which ones "degrade" us. To be equal, women must take control of their bodies, aided by information about contraception, abortion, and AIDS that

Humans now have a very different life compared to the past since freedom, opportunities, and information together are playing a vital role in this modern society. Especially young people, they become more independent and are capable of living their lives. However, while society provides people a lot of benefits, it makes their lives even more complex at the same time by leaving them pressured and confused about who they really are. In her essay, “Selections from Hard to Get:Twenty-Something Women and the Paradox of Sexual Freedom,” Leslie Bell mentions that in this new-in between developmental period American twenty-something women have more freedom and opportunities to their sexual lives than previous generations. But they are struggling with the paradoxes of their relationships and desires at the same time. Bell suggests that social expectations and cultural guidelines, which are conventions of female sexuality and stereotypes of being a good girl, prevent these young women from pursuing their sexual desires and limiting their relationships with men. However, even these women have chosen the way they live, and what kind of sexual life they want to be bad girls to break those old rules, they ended with losing their identities. As a result, establishing a women’s identity rather than clinging to contradictory directives and social expectations impacts female sexuality more. When these twenty-something women try to split

The sexual double standard, according to Michael Flood, refers to two standards of sexual behavior, one for men and another for women, in which men’s sexual behavior is relatively free of social constraint while women’s sexual

This construction reinforces control over young women’s sexual expression. Faus highlights how it forces women to partake in this patriarchal culture where women’s bodies are under control