Midterm 3

• Sexuality - The way in which a person expresses their sexuality and their sexual desires
• Socially constructed categories - traditional binary categories; heterosexual and homosexual
• Sexual scripts - culturally determined scripts that guide the development of sexual behaviour and attitudes, it is highly gendered
• Cultural scripts - the norms that guide sexual behaviour at the societal and cultural level which helps to determine the details(who, what, where) of sexual encounters
• Example of cultural scripts - men should initiate sex, men want sex and women want love, women should be less sexually experienced
• Interpersonal script - the ordering of representations of self and other the facilitate the occurrence of a sexual act
• Intrapsychic scripts - the ordering of images and desires that elicit and sustain sexual arousal; internal fantasies, memories, mental rehearsal
• The sexual double standard - judging heterosexual men and women differently for the same behaviour
• Homophobia - prejudice or hatred of homosexuals
• Societal change - technology, social institutions, population and environment
• Sexual violence - any act of a sexual nature that a person did not consent to 
• Health, medical practices and beliefs are intensely social
• Medical sociology - the factors that promote illness and contribute to health inequalities are largely social
• Four expectations of the sick role (patient); structural functionalist perspective - being sick is dysfunctional society
• The sick role - should be exempted from normal social responsibilities; should be taken care of; socially objected to get well; socially obligated to seek technically competent help
• Social class - what people do about their health depends on their social class
• Gender/race - society has different expectations for mothers than fathers; racialization in the health care system
• Culture - different cultures understand health and healing differently and have different expectations
• New expectations of the sick role - patients are primarily responsible for their illness; illness is blamed on patient's choice; patients are not to be trusted; patients are assumed to be abusing the system; health cost increase due to unnecessary to doctor or er
• Biomedicine - the application of western scientific principles in the diagnosis and treatment of disease; uses physical tests to find physical entities and apply physical therapies
• Examples of biomedicine - X-ray, MRI, CTs, Ultrasound, Surgery
• Biomedical model - is a scientific measure that doctors take to find out the reasons behind a particular disease, they focus on the biological reasons to learn about the illness with this method
• Sociologists argue that the cause of sickness is often larger social conditions
• The social factor states that health and illness cannot be simply regarded as biological or medical phenomena
• SDH; conditions - the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the health system
• SDH; circumstances - those circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources
• SDH; health inequities - the unfair and avoidable differences in health status
• Social inequality - disadvantage groups suffer from high levels of exposure to harmful conditions over their lifetime and more likely to behave in risky behaviour; eg; unsafe workplace, unhealthy neighbourhood
• What makes Canadians sick?

  50% life (income, education), 25% health care (access to health care), 15% biology (bio, genetics), 10% environment (air quality)
• Suicide among indigenous groups are alarmingly high; mostly Inuit youth
• Suicide could be about - high poverty rate, non-cohesive community, housing condition, food insecurity
• Poor people are more likely to have poor mental health and diabetes
• Poverty can lead to - crime and violence to improve financial state (CREAM), substance abuse
• Poverty is bad for kids - exposure to second hand smoke or heart disease or COPD, low levels of academic achievement, food insecurity, poor nutritional outcomes
• Medicalization - process by which certain behaviours or conditions become defined as medical problems and medial intervention becomes the focus of remedy and social control
• Reductionist - reduces complex medical conditions to biomedical causes without examining possible sociocultural or political factors
• Commodification - promotes the commodification of healthcare by identifying normal conditions as diseases that can be treated with commodity cures
• Big Pharma - large pharmaceutical companies which profit from developing, manufacturing and marketing drugs
• Pharmaceutical industry together with health insurance industry decided what's normal
• Medicalization in women - women's life experience are more likely to e medicalized than men's, women's bodies deviate from the male norm; eg; childbirth, PMS, menstruation, menopause