Sexual Literacy Research Articles

T10-O-23 Participation of male adolescents to promote gender equality

This quasi-experimental research was studied to give knowledge and construct attitude in gender role and sexual health aspect. The research brought about life style, sex behavior and responsibility in sexual equality of male. The sample group was 60 persons of adolescents in undergraduate school level. Method The participation learning and group discussion (talk, write, read, role play and comment) of female and male youth were used to arise their concept. The content of discussion were friend refuse, alcohol drinking, sexual service, sexual cruel, gender equality, family responsibility, male role and father role in order to conceptualization and changing their attitude and behavior. It was found that sample group had significant changed an attitude following Thai male characteristics standard (pƒ¬0.001). Gain benefit 95% because sex issue is not open, they must learn by themselves. But in this study they learn by correctly document and participatory learning. Moreover, 50% of male adolescents asked their parents in every problems except boyfriend/girlfriend's problems which they prefer to will ask from their friend. Therefore, increasing sex education in parents and teachers is necessary. It was the success of this project that among male and female had the opportunity to talk the sexual literacy openly. It was the effective social desensitization and female changed their attitude in negotiation power. It leaded into comprehend between both gender.

Sex sells!: the media's journey from repression to obsession

In 1953 when Lucille Ball became pregnant, the censors required the characters on I Love Lucy to say only that the wacky redhead was the family way-they feared the word pregnant might conjure up, in the minds of viewers, images of a man and woman having intercourse. Now, some fifty years later, from giant billboards featuring nearly nude models in Times Square to Bill Clinton's creative definition of sex to Madonna and Britney's prime-time kiss, sex pervades virtually every aspect of public life, including the films and television programs we watch, the music we listen to, and the racy ads that bombard us. What happened?Through lively prose and engaging examples, Sex Sells! illuminates this arc from repression to obsession vis--vis changing mores during the last five decades. Not only does the author examine how a broad range of media genres have reflected this libidinous journey, but he also shows how the media have played a leading role in propelling the Sexual Revolution. Whether it was the decision by Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown to run a photo of a nude Burt Reynolds in 1972 or the recent success of Showtime's sexually explicit Queer as Folk, the media have led the charge in bringing sex into the mainstream. Along the way, what the author terms sexual literacy has become vital, especially for young media consumers. For Rodger Streitmatter, unlike many critics, believes that much of the media's content is beneficial, as it gives parents and educators a jumping-off point from which to discuss such matters as AIDS, identity, and mores. In this age of continuing liberation, such a viewpoint seems especially important and timely.

Love at First Sight: The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality

Love at First Sight:The Velocity of Victorian Heterosexuality Christopher Matthews (bio) In mainstream twentieth-century culture, the phenomenon of love at first sight—as romantic trope, Hollywood staple, biochemical wonder—has resided squarely in the realm of what we might call a feminine epistemology. In his 1955 study of the "logical forms" people use to justify their actions, philosopher E. A. Gellner noticed that the "question [of] whether there is such a thing as 'love at first sight'" was "frequently and with interest discussed in the pages of women's journals"—if, that is, his "reading in dentists' waiting rooms [was] at all representative" (158). Mustering a masculine, vaguely scientific authority, Gellner bemoans the naivete of treating the topic as "an empirical question" (158) and, modeling the correct approach, demonstrates that on logical grounds love at first sight could never really exist. Not surprisingly, despite such a confident closing of the case, the culture of "women's journals" has continued to proliferate theories about love at first sight, in articles such as "Love at First Sight," "The Truth about Love at First Sight," and "Love at First Sight: Does It Really Exist?" in Glamour, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Seventeen, and Teen throughout the 1980s and 1990s.1 Like romance generally, a familiarity with love at first sight has been marketed to (implicitly heterosexual) women as a necessity for emotional and sexual literacy: women's expertise at femininity, such marketing implies, requires a mastery of both the pleasurable romantic drama and the tricky empirical problems of acquiring a male mate. In the modern division of sexual labor, women are still addressed en masse as amateur specialists of the heart, practicing an inconsequential mastery in the antechambers of male professionalism. If we were to seek this mastery's genealogy, we might expect to arrive somewhere near the Victorian drawing room, that segregated space of women's discourse. But in nineteenth-century Britain, love at first sight in fact emerged as a question of masculine epistemology and sexuality. Understood as a specifically male experience of desire for [End Page 425] women, the pleasures and dangers of such love required men's attention, their affirmation or skepticism. While never a centerpiece of debate within the professions, love at first sight nonetheless gained a certain currency, and an aura of legitimacy, within male-centered segments of literary and visual arts culture of the mid-century—a culture that became an important resource for later narratives of scientific and psychological exploration. Beginning in the 1840s, love at first sight emerged as a valorized trope, particularly in compact literary and visual forms—lyric poetry, short fiction, and narrative painting—that could accommodate and/or mirror the accelerated intimacy of love at first sight. Short stories entitled "Love at First Sight," "The First Time I Saw Her," or "A First Love," as well as essays entitled "Falling in Love" and "Modern Love," appeared in major British and American periodicals from the 1840s to the 1880s.2 Those decades saw love at first sight represented similarly in poetry, from Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-Na-Fuosich (1848) and "Natura Naturans" (1849) to Henry Austin Dobson's "Incognita" (1866) and Coventry Patmore's "The Girls of All Periods" (1878), as well as in Abraham Solomon's paintings entitled First Class—The Meeting: "And at First Meeting Loved" (1854).3 While such works typically put on display the irresistibly modest woman in public, the real object of their attention is the nature of the development, responsiveness, and moral valence of male desire. The attractive woman is not necessarily a static object—these narratives in part dramatize the procedures and ethics of sexual attraction between men and women—but mid-century portrayals of love at first sight most directly explore and celebrate the spectacle of male heterosexual desire, its origins and processes. Examining a shift from skepticism to valorization over the course of the century, I will argue that the trope of mid-century love at first sight constructs male heterosexuality as a performance of simultaneously instinctual and moral passion. Jeffrey Weeks has written of "the difficulty of finding either a noun or an adjective to act as...

Centering Culture: teaching for critical sexual literacy using the sexual diversity wheel

Expanding on the author's earlier work, this essay explicates the concept of critical sexual literacy within the context of four curricular models for multicultural sexuality education: tolerance, diversity, difference and differánce. The Sexual Diversity Wheel is presented as a pedagogical tool to facilitate student inquiry into the multiple cross‐cultural constructions and valuations of gender and sexuality. Illustrating these differences, the author describes his fieldwork activities in the central Philippines and explores the implications of these findings for those teaching about sexuality in western societies.

Sexual Norms and the Burden of Sexual Literacy

AbstractIn this paper, I argue against the kind of "scientific objectivity" that attempts to maintain the facade of value neutrality on the grounds that since objectivity is impossible, the claim to it is necessarily hypocritical. The impossibility stems from the inextricability of sex and sexuality: Sex as a natural phenomenon cannot be separated from sexuality as a matrix of value-laden, historically situated ideas and emotions. It stems also from the fact that the intensity of the pleasure-pain continuum, which is indissociable from sexual activity, makes caring a fundamental component of our sexual being: To desire is already to value. And it stems finally from the fact that the psychic and somatic health that stands as the goal of the counseling and therapy-providing services is itself a value. My recommendation is that we take responsibility for the values that inform our professional behavior-if only to make them available for critical scrutiny.