Sexuality, an obsession with categories

Sexuality, an obsession with categories

Going to try to avoid loads of definitions, although the lecture does do a lot of that.

Billy Bragg, Sexuality (Link to you tube video).

 However, lets go with some sort of definition of sexuality. Sexuality the human capacity to have erotic experiences and responses.

Sexual orientation, the enduring pattern of sexual and/or romantic attraction to people of the same sex or gender, the other sex or gender, or to both sexes or more than one gender, or to none.

A concern with categorisation

My argument is that very often psychology has followed societal concerns. What are those concerns.

The concern with categorisation has a history, both a legal history and a medical history.   Across history, and across cultures, there have been differing moral and legal codes dealing with sexuality. 

While the diversity of human sexuality has (probably) been with us across time, seeing sexuality as a major part of personal identity may be modern.

Legal frameworks, in a UK context, moved from specific sexual acts, towards more general behaviours, and then to decriminalisation and finally equality.

UK Legal history

Buggery Act 1533 – prior to this sexuality offences were tried through the Church (by this point the split with the Church of Rome had happened).

‘Unnatural sex’ Convictions for anal intercourse or oral intercourse by a man with a man or woman; and sex by men or women with animals.

Death by hanging, unlike many other offences land, titles and wealth were not passed on but went to the crown. Unlike (e.g.) murder, Clergy could be executed for buggery.

Suspicion it was often used politically because of that.

Replaced by the Offences against the Person Act 1828, which provided that buggery would continue to be a capital offence.  Offences against the Person Act 1861 removed death penalty.

The United Kingdom Parliament repealed buggery laws for England and Wales in 1967 (in so far as they related to consensual homosexual acts in private). (Scotland 1980, Northern Ireland 1982)

Up until the 1st May 2004 while (male) homosexuality was decriminalised a series of laws remained on the books that effectively made asking someone to have sex and having sex with a partner in a private room of a shared house illegal for gay men.

This came from the Labouchere amendment to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act

“Any male person who, in public or private, commits or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.”

The act above was an act about the suppression of brothels and prostitution.

 

Age of consent

Age of consent following Sexual Offences Act 1967 for sex between men was set at 21.

1994 age of consent for male same sex activity lowered to 18. 2000 age of consent for all sexual acts equalised at 16 (first time UK law acknowledged lesbians).

Equality legislation

Equality act 2010 (UK wide)

Civil partnership act 2004 (UK wide)

Same sex marriage England and Wales 2013, Scotland 2014, not recognised in Northern Ireland

 

The legal framework matters, but arguably of more importance was the change in the psychiatric view.

The Psychiatric Viewpoint

TRB Glad to Gay (Link to you tube video)

DSM and World Health Organisation International Classification of Diseases.

DSM I (1952) and II (1968) included homosexuality as a diagnosis of psychiatric disorder.

The seventh printing of DSM II (1974) had removed homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. (Although egodystonic homosexuality remained until DSM IV)

ICD-9 1977 included homosexuality as a disease

ICD – 10 1990 removed homosexuality as a disease

Some Effects on Psychology

Conflation of sexuality and gender identity, such that early masculinity-feminity scales were used as part of a diagnostic process for identifying homosexuality.

Terman and Miles  (1936) Masculinity femininity test.

Mf scale in first edition Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test – originally normed on (male) GIs for masculine sample and (male) GIs in the stockade for homosexuality for feminine sample.

Development of sexuality

 

Little effort to understand general development of sexuality.

When homosexuality was seen as a mental disorder effort to understand what caused the ‘abnormality’.

—reudian concepts used (hence egodystonic homosexuality).

Radao (1940) Failure to resolve the Oedipus Complex in a ‘successful’ way.

Often led to ‘mother blaming’

Later ‘mother blaming’ would continue under a guise of social learning theory, having ‘too strong’ a female role model, and/or ‘too weak’ a male role model.

Little to no empirical evidence to back up the theorising.

 

The heterosexuality questionnaire

I use this in class, I don't want my students to tell me their answers to the questions, the point is to get out the way we treat straight people differently to Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people. So if you are heterosexual try to answer these questions.

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?

2. How and when did you decide to become a heterosexual?

3. Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?

4. Is it that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of having intimate relationships with those of your own sex?

5. If you have never slept with a person of the same sex, is it possible that all you need is a good gay or lesbian lover?

6. Why do people like you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality?  Can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

7. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?

8. Why do heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into their lifestyle?

9. Despite the social support (and tax breaks) that marriage receives the divorce rate continues to grow.  Why is it that heterosexuals cannot form committed stable relationships?

10. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive heterosexuality?

11. There seem to be very few truly happy heterosexuals.  Techniques have been developed that may enable to change your sexual orientation if you want to.  Have you ever considered, for example, aversion therapy?

12. Would you really want your child to be a heterosexual, knowing all of the problems that s/he may face?

And Finally

If you have got time I recommend this to you, it is the video of a talk by Dr. Lisa Diamond on sexual fluidity. It is 45 minutes long.

https://youtu.be/m2rTHDOuUBw

 

Psychological differences between men and women

The idea that there are psychological differences between men and women are encoded in our language about sex and gender. Masculine and Feminine. The idea of the opposite sex. The words and phrases we have for people who do not fit into gender roles, like Tom Boy or Sissy.

Since at least the 1960s psychology has been trying to scientifically study these differences, either by using laboratory based experiments or using scientifically designed surveys. It would seem reasonable to suggest that in the 21st century we could point out these differences.

Resources

Many of you will not have access to the journal articles.

Sci hub might be a way to get papers, but beware the publishers of journal articles see using it as piracy.

Some early history

While large scale work on psychological differences between men and women would wait until the 1960s, with the increase in women undergraduate students making it easy for psychologists to include sex/gender as an independent variable there was a little bit of work at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Thorndike in 1914  argued that for intelligence, and other traits men showed greater variability than women, and so there would be more men at the two extremes.

Hollingworth (1914), who was Thorndike's PhD student and prior to that New York City's first civil service psychologist, argued against the male variability idea using data that she collected on a range of measures. https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Hollingworth/sexdiffs.htm

At this time there were societal changes as women argued that they should be more readily admitted to higher education, and should have the vote.

So what are the differences?

In 2005 Hyde published her article claiming that across thousands of studies in psychology there are only three areas where differences between men and women are large enough to have a real world impact, and are consistent across the lifespan and are consistent over the history of testing.

Hyde, J. S. (2005). The gender similarities hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.6.581

The three areas are, physical aggression, physical tasks involving throwing, and some measures of sexuality (men claim to masturbate more than women, men claim to view pornography more often than women, men claim to want more (hetero)sexual partners than women claim to want.

Now quite what physical tasks involving throwing have got to do with psychology I do not know, I suspect that they got included as dependent variable (thing to measure) back in the 1910s and so psychologists keep measuring it.

Of course any individual paper is open to contest, and the way that science moves forward is by arguing about findings and conclusions, so Hyde's paper is not the last word. However, this is the puzzle.

The puzzle

There are several ways of wording this:

If psychological sex/gender differences across a wide range of domains exist why are psychologists so bad at finding them under (for want of a better term) laboratory conditions?

If psychological sex/gender differences do not exist why do psychologists keep looking for them?

Making psychology studies on sex and gender better

In 1979 Unger published a paper "Toward a redefinition of sex and gender'. In the paper Unger argues that psychologists need to be much more careful in how they do sex and gender work.

Unger noted how inconsistent findings are with regard to psychological sex and gender difference.

As scientists psychologists need to look out for confounding variables. In classic science the psychologist assigns participants to a condition for an experiment, with sex and gender work people come into the study with their gender, there is no assignment. If we lived in a society where there was full gender equality then men and women would have the same experiences, we do not live in such a society. We need to watch out for these confounding variables.


Psychologists need to eliminate expectancy effects. People have an idea of gender differences (probably a stereotypical idea), psychologists need to, at least, not reinforce these, and ideally remove them through a standard script for all participants.

Over time many of these effects have been minimised or eliminated in psychological sex and gender work.

The other thing Unger suggested was that we distinguish between psychological sex differences, which are understood to have a root in biology, and psychological gender differences, with a root in society.

Meta Analysis

From  1974 on psychologists have turned to meta analysis to try to understand the underlying trend behind inconsistent findings with regard to sex and gender. The various meta analyses have suggested that for most areas of psychology differences between men and women are so small as to have no real world effect. However, the number of psychological studies using the difference between men and women as something of interest have multiplied. So what tends to happen now is that people will do a meta analysis of a particular thing (e.g. language use). Hyde's 2005 paper was an attempt to give an overview of all these meta analyses.

Inconclusion

Perhaps at some point we will find sex and gender differences of the scale that stereotypes predict. We are not there at the moment.

Perhaps it is the very act of removing social influence from the laboratory that means we do not detect such differences currently.

Perhaps people (including psychologists) are so convinced that such differences exist that they refuse to acknowledge the evidence.

Reading

Else-Quest, N., Hyde, J., & Linn, M. (2010). Cross-national patterns of gender differences in mathematics: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 103-127. doi:10.1037/a0018053
Hegarty, P., & Buechel, C. (2006). Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965-2004. Review of General Psychology, 10(4), 377-389. 
Hyde, J. S. (2005). The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. American Psychologist, 60(6), 581-592. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.10.4.377

Marecek, J. (2001). After the facts: Psychology and the study of gender. Canadian Psychology/psychologie Canadienne, 42(4), 254-267. doi:10.1037/h0086894

Petersen, J., & Hyde, J. (2010). A meta-analytic review of research on gender differences in sexuality, 1993-2007. Psychological Bulletin, 136(1), 21-38. doi:10.1037/a0017504

Tyson, P. J., Jones, D., & Elcock, J. (2011). Psychology in social context. [electronic resource] : issues and debates. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K: BPS Blackwell (Chapter 5)

Unger, R. (1979). Toward a redefinition of sex and gender. American Psychologist, 34(11), 1085-94. 

 

Blogging Gender and Sexuality

As some of you know I intend this to be my last term working at the University of Gloucestershire before I retire. My favourite bit of teaching is my final year module, currently called Gender and Sexuality, although a very similar module called Sex and Gender preceeded it.


So that the module is not lost forever, and given that I am unlikely to write any more academic texts, I have decided to blog the module. Basically each week once term starts I will write a blog post about that teaching session.

In this post I am going to write about the major themes of the module.

The module is over 20 years old, starting its life as the Psychology of Sex and Gender, over that time most of material taught has changed although it has always had a similar structure, a few weeks of more theoretical material, followed by looking at some of the applied areas, a mixture of psychology professions and other concerns.

Some major themes

The quest for difference

For over a hundred years psychologists have been failing to find consistent, large, stable, psychological differences between men and women when they do laboratory experiments. At the same time there are plenty of differences, often contradictory, in one off experiments. Using meta-analysis and looking over time some differences between men and women that could be found in the laboratory appear to be getting smaller. This session attempts to understand this, and why after a hundred years of effort people are not happy to follow the data.

Attempting to categorise

Psychologists seem to love trying to find differences between groups of people. In order to do that it needs to establish categories of people. While some recent research suggests that (some) people shift in their sexual appetites across their lives binary categorisations remain remain popular. In recent history, and currently, a great deal of damage has been done to people who do not fit in with the accepted categories, and the accepted categories have changed across time.

Critical theories

Feminist psychology and social constructionism. There is a long standing strand of feminist psychology that has investigated how to make a science of psychology better with regard to understanding sex and gender. For over 40 years these researchers have been using meta-analysis to try to understand the contradictory laboratory experiments. At the same time they have been making suggestions on how to make laboratory experiments better, annoyingly other psychologists ignore these suggestions and continue to produce garbage research.

Another strand of feminist psychologists, and other social constructionists, question the whole experimental enterprise, and suggest we try to understand why sex & gender, and sexuality, are so important in current society.

Practical impacts

Being the object of discrimination is damaging. Believing that there are a narrow set of behavioural expectations can also be damaging. More women than men attract a diagnosis of depression, more men than women commit suicide. Stereotypes of men and women fit in with the idea that men are better leaders. Should we worry about the attainment gap in education between women and men. Is evolutionary psychology just a scientific gloss on top of current discriminatory practices. These are the sorts of issues I will write about in the coming weeks.

So I invite you to have a look at some of the current understandings of the psychology of gender and sexuality.

Not quite made my mind up if I am going to try to write this in the days just before the lecture, or just after the lecture. Teaching term starts Monday 17th September.