Perspectives

• Culture


  Invented, takes different forms in different places, changes over time
• We have witnessed how rapidly and dramatically culture can change, from ways of communicating to the emergence of same-sex marriage
• Many of us live in culturally diverse settings and experience how varied human cultural inventions can be
• We readily accept that clothing, language, and music are cultural—invented, created, and alterable—but often find it difficult to accept that gender and sexuality are not natural but deeply embedded in and shaped by culture
• The division of humans into two and only two categories, "male" and "female," is not universal, that "male" and "female" are cultural concepts that take different forms and have different meanings cross-culturally
• Sexuality, rather than being simply natural is one of the most culturally significant, shaped, regulated, and symbolic of all human capacities
• The concept of humans as either "heterosexual" or "homosexual" is a culturally and historically specific invention that is increasingly being challenged
• Gender


  Has a biological component, but in many ways is like food - we have a biologically rooted need but what constitutes "food," what is "delicious" or "repulsive," the contexts and meanings that surround food and human eating—those are cultural
• Gender and sexuality, like eating, have biological components. But cultures, over time, have erected complex and elaborate edifices around them, creating systems of meaning that often barely resemble what is natural and innate
• We experience gender and sexuality largely through the prism of the culture or cultures to which we have been exposed and in which we have been raised
• We learn culture the way we learn our native language: without formal instruction, in social contexts, picking it up from others around us, without thinking. Soon, it becomes deeply embedded in our brains
• We learn very early (by at least age three) about the categories of gender in our culture—that individuals are either "male" or "female" and that elaborate beliefs, behaviors, and meanings are associated with each gender
• Gender ideology


  A complex set of ideas about gender that all societies have, just as they have belief systems about other significant areas of life
• Sex


  In the past, referred both to sexuality and to someone's biologic sex: male or female. Today, "gender" now means the categories male, female, or increasingly, other gender possibilities
• In the past, influenced by Judeo-Christian religion and nineteenth and twentieth century scientific beliefs, biology (and reproductive capacity) was literally considered to be destiny
• Nineteenth and mid-twentieth century European and U.S. gender ideologies linked sexuality and gender in ways that conflated separate phenomena - sexual preference and gender role performance - because of beliefs that rooted both in biology
• Decades of research on gender and sexuality, including by feminist anthropologists, has challenged old theories, particularly biological determinism
• We now understand that cultures, not nature, create the gender ideologies that go along with being born male or female and the ideologies vary widely, cross-culturally
• What is considered "man's work" in some societies, such as carrying heavy loads, or farming, can be "woman's work" in others. What is "masculine" and "feminine" varies
• Women can be thought of as stronger ("tougher," more "rational") than men
• Research on the human sexual response by William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson established that men and women have equal biological capacities for sexual pleasure and orgasm
• Gender


  A set of culturally invented expectations and therefore constitutes a role one assumes, learns, and performs, more or less consciously. It is an "identity" one can in theory choose, at least in some societies
• The reality of human biology is that males and females are shockingly similar. There is arguably more variability within than between each gender
• Some cultures have more fluid and flexible gender systems, allowing individuals born as one biologic sex to assume another gender or creating more than two genders from which individuals can select
• Examples of non-binary cultures come from pre-contact Native America, with "two-spirit" people, and the Hijra in India, often called a third gender
• Individuals with ambiguous genitals, sometimes called "intersex," are surprisingly common, constituting an estimated 5% of human births
• Even societies with a binary gender system exhibit enormous variability in the meanings and practices associated with being male or female
• Gender ideologies can emphasize differences in character, capacities, and morality, sometimes portraying males and females as "opposites" on a continuum
• Forms of cultural expression

  • Rituals
  • Body decoration
  • Music
• Both genders may farm, but may have separate fields for "male" and "female" crops and gender-specific crop rituals
• The village public space may be spatially segregated with a "men's house" (a special dwelling only for men, like a "men's club") and a "women's house"
• Even when married couples occupy the same house, the space within the house is divided into male and female areas
• Gender-specific cultural elements


  • Religious rituals
  • Deities
  • Tools
  • Foods
  • Rains
  • Languages
• Gender ideologies


  Emphasize differences in character, capacities, and morality, sometimes portraying males and females as "opposites" on a continuum
• In societies that are highly segregated by gender, gender relationships sometimes are seen as hostile or oppositional with one of the genders (usually female) viewed as potentially threatening
• Female bodily fluids


  Can be dangerous, damaging to men, "impure," and "polluting," especially in ritual contexts
• Menstrual blood is associated with positive power in some cases, and a girl's first menstruation may be celebrated publicly with elaborate community rituals
• Men in some small-scale societies go through ritualized nose-bleeding, sometimes called "male menstruation," though the meanings are quite complex
• Virtually all major world religions have traditionally segregated males and females spatially and "marked" them in other ways
• Ambivalence and even fear of female sexuality, or negative associations with female bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood, are widespread in the world's major religions