SOCIOL 2HH3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Havelock Ellis, Sexual Script Theory, Victorian Era
20 Nov 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Lecture 8: 14/11/18
Sexualities and Gendered Desires
Defining Sexuality
• The erotic arousal and genital responses resulting from the share sexual scripts
of that society
• Each society places its own specific sexual scripts on how, when, with whom,
why, and where erotic arousal and genital responses should occur
Two key characteristics
• Physical pleasure
• Self-disclosure
o These are the generic building blocks of human relationships
Cultural variation
• Generalization difficult
o 1) patriarchal control over female sexuality
o 2) prevalence of rules governing licit sexual expression
• Victorian Era in Europe and America
o Women had little to no sexual desire
o Double standard: men as sexually desirous and women as less interested
in sex
o Patriarchal sexual script
o Importance of virginity
• Ancient Greece
o Acceptance of same sex relationships as natural
o Relations based on love and reciprocity
• Ancient Christianity
o Negative attitude towards sexuality
o Considered sex a sin
o Highest form of morality was virginity
o Marriage and sexuality denied to people who served god
o Many sexual practices within marriage were forbidden
o Christianity and colonialism
• Shift towards a more scholarly study of sexuality in the 1800s:
o Saw sexual behaviour as a result of individual psychology rather then sin
and morality
• Freud:
o Key researcher in this area
o Focus on the penis and penetrivice interoucrse
• Havelock Ellis 1859-1939
o Studies in the psychology of sex
• Alfred Kinsey 1894-1956
o Sexual behaviour in the human male (1948)
Document Summary
Two key characteristics: physical pleasure, self-disclosure, these are the generic building blocks of human relationships. The sublimation of homoeroitc desire: driving underground into the subconscious sexual desires that appear deviant in society. Ambert: changing families: adolescent sexuality, 2005 national survey, 33% of 15-17 year olds had had intercourse, 68% of 18-19 year olds had had intercourse. : importance point of the voluntariness of sexual activity: males tended to report their first intercourse as exciting and satisfying, females tended to report fear, anxiety, embarrassment, and guilt. Identify university students perspectives on various aspects of their first sexual experience of consensual, heterosexual sex: women more likely to believe they were in love at first intercourse, greater internalization of the feelings that sx is about love. Navigating sexual terrine: legacies of the sacred and the secular in the lives of french. Canadian women: how women negotiate competing loyalties to tradition (catholicism) as well as the person sexual freedom they experience living in toronto.
