Sex of Free Choice Figure Drawings by Homosexual and Heterosexual Subjects

This article reports the findings from studies investigating the relationship between: (a) sex of free choice figure drawings and sexual inversion and (b) sex of free choice figure drawings and gender identity. Both relationships were found to be statistically nonsignificant.     

The Heterosexual Appeal of Socially Marginal Men

Surveyed women consistently specify preferences for egalitarian dates and/or mates. A common perception is that many of these same women often select consorts who are inscrutable, assertive, and controlling, ultimately bemoaning their choices. Dominance has been experimentally shown to provide initial attraction advantages. The Byronic Hero, a venerable literary model, embraces protagonists who possess extraordinary masculine traits that include dominance but also multiple personal flaws. Byronic Heroes, easily identified and plentiful in popular fiction, appear strongly to resonate with youthful audiences and provide alluring portrayals of heterosexual relations. In a classroom survey employing slide images of paired apparel models and a blind date scenario, collegiate women slightly but significantly preferred models independently judged to project Byronic traits over equally handsome men who appeared affable and conventional. Subject comments on Byronic models uniquely included allusions to sexual and mysterious/rebellious attributes. It was concluded that projections of Byronic masculinity provide initial advantages in the securing of heterosexual liaisons.     

Paradoxical Associations of Masculine Ideology and Casual Sex Among Heterosexual Male Geosocial Networking App Users in China

Momo, the most popular geosocial networking app in China, is used as a common platform to seek casual sex. The present study, which is based on the social constructionist view of gender, examines how the endorsement of masculinity among heterosexual male Momo users is associated with the number of casual sex partners they meet on the app. The study also explores the mediating role of the sex motive for using Momo. Analyses of survey data from 125 heterosexual male Momo users showed that the endorsement of masculinity had an indirect positive relationship with the number of sex partners mediated by the sex motive; at the same time, it had a direct but negative association with the number of sex partners. These paradoxical associations were explained by different patterns across the individual dimensions of masculinity ideology. Specifically, the dimension of the Importance of Sex was responsible for the positive indirect association whereas the dimension of Avoidance of Femininity was responsible for the negative direct association. These findings are discussed in relation to the wen-wu dyad of Chinese masculinity. Because unsafe sex has been found to be associated with the use of geosocial networking apps, my study also calls for integrating the concept of practicing safer sex with the cultural ideal of masculinity.

     

Heterosexual Identity Management: How Social Context Affects Heterosexual Marking Practices

It is well established that heterosexism shapes identity management practices of sexual minorities in the United States, but we know little about how such social forces shape heterosexual identity management. This exploratory research is focused on heterosexual marking, defined as behaviors interpreted as signifying a heterosexual identity. Using data from 12 focus groups with young adults, we provide an overview of heterosexual marking in a northeastern United States context and explain how three social forces—cultural assumptions of heterosexuality, sexual orientation ambiguity and suspicion, and heterosexism—are intertwined with these identity practices. Results indicated that this social context generates heterosexual marking that is sometimes intentional and conscious but at other times unintentional and unconscious, depending on levels of heteronormativity and heterosexism.     

Heterosexual displacements of homosexuality clinical implications

This article explores the possibilities for the relationship between various taboo heterosexual relationships and an underlying homosexual preference. The analytic literature has not explored the tendency for many suppressed or repressed homosexuals to marry in order to escape shame over their sexual feelings and to avoid the social rejection experienced by those who are openly gay. The hypothesis stated here is that persons who are unconsciously gay are more likely to incorporate an element of taboo in their heterosexual relationships. The taboo heterosexual relationship substitutes for the more verboten homosexual one and provides an element of “being different”; that may provide greater sexual arousal than a conventional relationship.     

Inventing Sex: The Short History of Sex Addiction

This article takes a critical look at the recent history of the concept of sex addiction, an archetypal modern sexual invention. Sex addiction began as a 1980s product of late twentieth-century cultural anxieties and has remained responsive to those tensions, including its most recent iteration, “hypersexual disorder.” Its success as a concept lay with its medicalization, both as a self-help movement in terms of self-diagnosis, and as a rapidly growing industry of therapists on hand to deal with the new disease. The media has always played a role in its history, first with TV, the tabloids, and the case histories of claimed celebrity victims all helping to popularize the concept, and then with the impact of the internet. Though it is essentially mythical, creating a problem that need not exist, sex addiction has to be taken seriously as a phenomenon. Rarely has a socio-psychological discourse taken such a hold on the public imagination—and proven an influential concept in academic circles too. We argue that this strange, short history of social opportunism, diagnostic amorphism, therapeutic self-interest, and popular cultural endorsement is marked by an essential social conservatism—sex addiction has become a convenient term to describe disapproved sex. Sex addiction is a label without explanatory force.     

The Emergence of Sex

Biological traits, the foci of natural selection, are by definition emergent from the genes, proteins, and other “nothing-buts” that constitute them. Moreover, and with the exception of recently emergent “spandrels,” each can be accorded a teleological dimension—each is “for” some purpose conducive to an organism's continuation. Sex, which is “for” the generation of recombinant genomes, may be one of the most ancient and ubiquitous traits in biology. In the course of its evolution, many additional traits, such as gender and nurture, have emerged. Patterns of sexual exchange are the basis for patterns of biological evolution and are central to the process of eukaryotic speciation. Human sexuality is central to our selves.     

Fusion and Heterosexual Women's Friendships:

This paper will discuss the phenomenon of fusion in heterosexual women's adult relationships; first as it emerged clinically in my treatment of women in group therapy; next as it hsa been discussed in the literature and finally as it emerged in my study of healthy women's friendships. There, the most differentiated and autonomous women in my study reported experiencing fusion in their closest female friendships. The paper then explores the meaning of fusion in women's relationships and calls for a transformed view of adult development which admits women's experiences of fusion with their strong sense of self. Finally, I suggest that fusion in adult friendships need not be seen as regressive nor pathological but may play an important role in women's experiences of self-differentiation.     

The structuring of Vicarious Sex

This paper proposes a change in the typing of a form of sexual deviance: voyeurism (watching persons who are undressing, undressed, or in the act of sexual intercourse). The analysis focuses on a suggested change in what is thought to prompt voyeurism. Voyeurism is presently regarded as pathological deviance by some researchers. This paper suggests that some voyeurism can be better understood if considered within the context of sociological deviance. Support for this change is offered from a review of relevant literature and data collected from two groups of voyeurs.     

The Relationship of Sex, Sex Role, and Mental Health

Mental health differences due to sex, sex-role identification, and sex-role attitudes were investigated using 109 undergraduate students. Females reported higher levels of depression and anxiety. Both males and females with more liberal scores on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale scored higher on the Well-Being Scale of the California Psychological Inventory. No differences due to androgyny were found.     

The Effects of Sex of Subject and Sex of Partner on Interruptions

Sex differences in interruption behavior were examined using the Kraemer-Jacklin (1979) procedure to isolate and test the effects of sex of subject, sex of partner, and their interaction while controlling for between partner correlation. The results of the study were three. First, men did not interrupt more than women and women did not get interrupted more than men. Instead, there were more opposite-sex interruptions, both male-female and female-male, than same-sex interruptions, both female-female and male-male. Second, interruptions were asymmetrically distributed in both same-sex and opposite-sex dyads. However, in opposite-sex dyads males did not interrupt females more than females interrupted males. Third, women did not have less assertive behaviors interrupted; they did not interrupt less assertively, nor did they respond less assertively to interruptions.     

The Butterfly Dilemma: Asian Women,Whiteness, and Heterosexual Relationships

Critical Whiteness theory explores Whiteness as a form of power and privilege that originated in Western countries and has been dispersed globally. Its form is particular to location and its interaction with race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and gender. Two ways it has operated historically is through making the norms of Whiteness universal and the marker of reason and rationality. This article examines Whiteness through two lenses, the colonial-era opera, Madame Butterfly, and three recent therapy case studies involving White American husbands and Asian immigrant wives. Although the women in these therapy cases have emigrated from different Asian countries and cultures, the treatment toward them suggests that colonial-era images and stereotypes of Asian women still resonate in contemporary White American culture and are impervious to national or cultural boundaries. A comparison of the opera’s themes with those of the therapy cases suggest how historical and social constructions of Whiteness continue to promote inequality in heterosexual relationships comprised of White American males and Asian females. Feminist, multicultural analyses of the therapy cases are provided to highlight more egalitarian treatment of the women in therapy, in their families, and in the broader society. The intersectionality of gender with ethnicity and culture is discussed for these Asian women who experience the homogenization of their identities in spite of having immigrated to the U.S. from distinct cultures.     

Heterosexual and homosexual activity among gay males

Abstract

A total of 150 adult self‐professed homosexual men, age 20 to 40, living in three locales‐Manhattan, Suffolk County, (N.Y.), and Minneapolis‐were interviewed, in part to determine their heterosexual and homosexual activities. About two‐thirds (65%) said they had experienced intercourse with a woman at least once, but only 6% had done so in the year prior to the survey. The respondents with heterosexual experience (especially with several women) were more homosexually active currently than were those without it. This pattern holds true even when residence, age, bargoing, and education are controlled. The authors speculate that “action seeking” and sexual desirability account for the observed relationships. Even prior to taking on a homosexual identity, some men are more sexually active and seek out sexual “action” and are, in addition, sought out sexually. In a heterosexual sphere their activities will be heterosexual, but in a homosexual sphere their activities will be homosexual.     

Hypoactive Sexual Desire in Heterosexual Women:

The problem of hypoactive sexual desire is the most common sexual problem that heterosexual couples and individuals present to sex therapists. Often it is a woman who reports that she has the problem, or her male partner brings her to therapy believing she has hypoactive desire. The treatment literature describes a variety of causes that contribute to the disorders of sexual desire. However, most of the literature looks primarily at the causes within an individual's history of within a couple's relationship. There does not seem to be adequate consideration given to the social and cultural limitations that have defined and prescribed a sexual role for women that is primarily oriented to the service of male needs rather than female sexual pleasure. This article will analyze some of the social and cultural forces that limit female sexual expression, and are a neglected factor when causes for low sexual desire in heterosexual women are given.