Chapter 6-9 (raya reviewer)

• Asexuality


  An asexual person is someone who does not experience sexual attraction
• Asexual community


  • The notion of 'asexual' as a social identity is a relatively recent one, consolidating through online community spaces and moving from the 'online' to the 'offline' as these communities gave rise to activists and were discovered by the media and academics
  • The category of 'asexuality' should be addressed with care, given that such categories delineate 'inside' from 'outside' and, in doing so, foreclose certain ways of being asexual while recognizing others
  • What can appear to be a converging self-identification as asexual might, nonetheless, mean very different things for different people
• Other asexual identities

  • Gray-a - those who fall within the grey area
  • Demisexuality - someone who feel attraction to someone after they’ve formed a strong emotional bond with them
• Asexuality Visibility and Education Network (AVEN)


  An organization that provides information and support about asexuality
• Celibacy


  A choice to abstain from sexual acts, distinct from a lack of sexual attraction (asexuality)
• Asexuality


  A unique sexual orientation, distinct from heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual
• Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD)


  How asexuality relates to this psychiatric diagnosis is a current debate

  
  

  a persistent or recurrent absence of sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity, causing marked personal distress or interpersonal difficulties.
• BDSM


  The umbrella term used to describe a set of consensual sexual practices that usually involve an eroticized exchange of power and the application or receipt of painful and/or intense sensations
• While the news media might see sexualized BDSM as perverted, Anglo-American culture has presented spanking and caning as punishment in a comic form
• Psychoanalysis and Freud


  • Offered an account of the reasons why sexuality should be understood separately from reproduction
  • Argued that sexual life begins in infancy, that 'genital' and 'sexual' have different meanings, and that sexual pleasure involves the development of erogenous zones that may or may not lead to reproduction
  • Characterised the infant as a 'polymorphous pervert'
• Stoller


  • Did not consider perversion in terms of a description of behaviour, but rather in the intention of the individual
  • Argued that perversion is ubiquitous: that more or less every person and every erotic act can be described as 'perverse'
  • Addressed the issue of sexual thrill, which occurs on finding an excitement in danger
• Psycho-medical perspective on BDSM

  • Many of the practices associated with BDSM are still classified as 'paraphilic disorders'
  • The DSM-5 offers some revisions, including a change in diagnostic name from 'paraphilia' to 'paraphilic disorder' to recognise the distinction between a non-normative sexual interest and a disordered sexual interest
  • Criterion A defines non-normative or atypical sexual interests, while criterion B specifies clinically significant distress or impairment
• Non-pathologising perspectives on BDSM

  • Queer theory aims to challenge heteronormativity and considers BDSM as able to challenge and resist mainstream sexual norms
  • Social constructionism argues that language constructs reality and is interested in how BDSM practitioners construct their sexual identities and interactions, rather than viewing an interest in BDSM as biologically or psychologically determined
  • Phenomenological psychology is interested in understanding the lived experience of BDSM participation, rather than relying on psycho-medical discourses
• There has always been a duality surrounding sexuality: the aspect of sex for procreation and the aspect of sex for pleasure
• Transgressive sex


  Sexual behaviour that merely transgresses prevailing social norms, as opposed to coercive sex which involves activities in which one party has not consented
• BDSM as adult recreation


  An alternative reconceptualisation of BDSM as a form of adult recreation that requires consistent effort to gain knowledge and skills
• Transgressive sex


  Sexual activities that challenge prevailing social norms
• Coercive sex


  Sexual activities in which one party has not consented
• Denman concludes there is no evidence to support a connection between transgressive sex and pathology
• It is coercive sex that we should think of as perverted, not transgressive sex
• Feminist camps on BDSM

  • Pro-sex
  • Anti-SM
• Pro-sex camp's view on BDSM


  BDSM is an example of healthy sexual agency
• Anti-SM camp's view on BDSM


  Any and all instances of BDSM perpetuate the power differences and inequalities between men and women
• The main points of the anti-SM feminist argument claim that all forms of BDSM are incompatible with feminism because BDSM represents repetition of violent heteropatriarchal relationships
• BDSM as adult recreation


  A form of adult recreation that requires consistent effort, knowledge, learning techniques, and developing specific skill sets to engage safely
• In the United Kingdom BDSM is not a crime; there is no law against being a sadomasochist; however, certain aspects of BDSM may incite a criminal law response
• Heteronormativity


  The reinforcement of beliefs about heterosexual sex and sexuality that are perpetuated in society via social institutions, policies, and procedures, leading to the view that heterosexuality is the normal and natural expression of sexuality
• Patriarchy


  The implicit and explicit dominance of heterosexual men within a culture and/or society
• Bisexuality


  An individual who experiences sexual attraction to more than one gender – or whose attractions are based on characteristics other than gender
• In early sexology, a 'masculine' woman would be attracted to other women; a 'feminine' man would be attracted to other men. If a person desired both women and men, it followed that they themselves must have both male and female characteristics, which was termed 'psychic hermaphroditism' rather than 'bisexuality'
• Ulrichs' 'third sex' theory


  Homosexual individuals were conceived as neither male nor female, and instead understood as 'sexual inverts', who were female souls trapped in male bodies and male souls trapped in female bodies
• Krafft-Ebing's view on bisexuality


  Bisexuality was part of the evolutionary process, suggesting the possibility that humans' evolutionary ancestors were hermaphrodites (or bisexual people), and that bisexuality was therefore a predevelopmental (or immature) state, or starting point, the root from which all other sexualities evolved
• Freud's view on bisexuality


  He theorised that all humans were by nature bisexual, or had a bisexual disposition, but in 'normal' social and psychological development the expectation was that sexual attraction would become focused on the 'opposite' gender
• By the early 1900s the terms 'psychic hermaphrodite' and 'bisexual' were used to refer both to someone with the characteristics of males and females and to someone who was sexually attracted to males and females
• Sexologists had begun to move away from theorising sexual behaviour and towards describing sexual identities, with homosexuality appearing as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny
• Comprehensive divisions of all sexually functioning persons

  • Heterosexual
  • Bisexual
  • Homosexual
• Kinsey argued that binary models consisting of two distinct and rigid categories of human sexuality ('homosexual' and 'heterosexual') did not capture the huge variance and diversity in human sexual behaviours
• Kinsey's scale


  Theorised that an individual's position on the scale could change over time, reflecting his belief in sexual fluidity, although the scale takes a 'zero-sum' approach to sexuality, by implying that increased attraction to one gender means decreased attraction to the other
• Hooker's research, along with June Hopkins' similar 'lesbian-affirmative' research, eliminated bisexuality or collapsed bisexual identities into homosexual and heterosexual ones
• Early 'bisexual-affirmative' research


  Theorists positioned bisexuality as the 'original' human sexuality, with binary categories seen as an artificial rendering-asunder of what was once whole