Myth Acceptance Research Articles

Cultural myths and supports for rape.

This article describes the "rape myth" and tests hypotheses derived from social psychological and feminist theory that acceptance of rape myths can be predicted from attitudes such as sex role stereotyping, adversarial sexual beliefs, sexual conservatism, and acceptance of interpersonal violence. Personality characteristics, background characteristics, and personal exposure to rape, rape victims, and rapists are other factors used in predictions. Results from regression analysis of interview data indicate that the higher the sex role stereotyping, adversarial sexual beliefs, and acceptance of interpersonal violence, the greater a respondent's acceptance of rape myths. In addition, younger and better educated people reveal less stereotypic, adversarial, and proviolence attitudes and less rape myth acceptance. Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for understanding and changing this cultural orientation toward sexual assault.

Sexual implications of deaf-blindness

For those individuals handicapped by both deafness and blindness, interpersonal communication and relationships are greatly hampered and restricted. This fact can better be understood when we examine the nature of the disabilities and their effect upon the learning about one's sexuality. We generally learn about our sexuality in three significant ways: (a) directly (from personal experience), (b) indirectly (from talking or reading about it), and (c) through observation (from listening to and watching others). When a physical and/or mental impediment interferes with this learning process, the more natural opportunities for learning about one's sexuality are limited and often not available. It is not difficult to imagine the possible affects both deafness and blindness have upon this learning process. When one's ability to read, talk, hear and see is impaired, it leaves only one primary source of learning for the individual, his/her experiences. This was reflected in the 1972 Grossman study that compared college students from Gallaudet College (the only liberal arts college for the deaf) and Pennsylvania State University students. According to this unpublished master's thesis the Gallaudet deaf students had less sexual knowledge, were more accepting of sexual myths and engaged in more sexual activity than the Pennsylvania State freshmen and sophomores with whom they were compared.

Joseph Campbell's Theory of Myth: An Essay Review of his Oeuvre

Joseph Campbell has been writing about myth since 1943, and his most recent book, The Mythic Image (1974), is the culmination of his lifelong study of the subject. Since 1943 Campbell's view of myth has remained not only virtually unaltered but also virtually unproved. Campbell offers no arguments for any of his various assertions about myth: that modern society is in turmoil because modern man finds life meaningless; that modern man finds life meaningless because he has no myths, which alone give life meaning, that modern man has no myths because science precludes his acceptance of myths at the literal level; that the real meaning of myth is not, however, literal but symbolic; that the symbolic meaning of myth is psychological; that the psychological meaning of myth is Jungian; that when so understood, myth is acceptable to modern man; and that when accepted, myth can give life meaning and thereby end the turmoil of modern society. Rather than arguments, Campbell offers examples, but, subject as all of them are to alternative interpretations, they do not suffice. Finally, Campbell at times contradicts or qualifies his own otherwise dogmatic interpretation.