Erotic Authenticity: Comparing Intimate Relationships between High-End Bar and Low-End Bar in China’s Global Sex Industry

Research on the sex industry generally focuses heavily on the economic relationship between sex workers and their clients but typically fails to consider the role and significance of intimacy within these interactions. By drawing upon over 36 months’ ethnographic work conducted in high-end and low-end bars in Dongguan from 2008 to 2009 and 2011 to 2017, the article argues that sex workers and their clients are not only involved in pecuniary transactions but also may exchange intimate and non-remunerative feelings. In order to understand the factors that both facilitate and limit experiences of intimacy in sex work, relevant socioeconomic circumstances must be deconstructed. The dynamics that characterize contemporary Dongguan must be considered within the unique subcultures that characterize the high-end and low-end sex markets. In order to extrapolate from the aforementioned factors, this article examines the interactions of concepts such as economic and cultural capitals, emotional labor, and bounded authenticity to provide insights into how intimacy occurs in China’s global sex industry. The article will also draw from these insights and explore how Chinese and foreign clients overcome social and cultural barriers to develop intimate relationships with sex workers.     

The role of the mass media in promoting a thin standard of bodily attractiveness for women

Eating disorders appear to be more common among women than among men and more common now than they were in the past. Recent speculation has focused upon the role played by an unrealistically thin standard of bodily attractiveness for women in the promotion of these disorders. To demonstrate that this standard does play such a role, and to implicate the mass media in the promotion of this standard, it is first necessary to demonstrate that the current standard of attractiveness for women portrayed in the media is slimmer than that for men, that the portrayed standard is slimmer now than it has been in the past, and that these findings apply to many of the major media. The four studies presented here demonstrate that the current standard of attractiveness portrayed on television and in magazines is slimmer for women than for men and that the recent standard for women portrayed in magazines and in movies is slimmer than it was in the past.     

College student stereotypes of female behavior: Maternal professional women and assertive housewives

Traditional gender stereotypes were normative in that it was believed good mental health depended on members of each gender acquiring the appropriate gender role. Current research that describes subcategories of females (housewife, professional woman, Playboy bunny) suggests that the traditional stereotype cannot be normative. Two studies investigated college student's stereotypic expectations about female behavior related to five role characteristics: maternal sensitivities, financial provider responsibilities, interpersonal tendencies, instrumental tendencies, and passivity. Subject stereotypic expectations indicated that women in all subcategories are expected to be maternal and to be more assertive than passive. For the other role characteristics, women representing the different subcategories are expected to vary. The results were inconclusive about which aspects of the stereotypes are normative.Portions of this paper were presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, 1987. This research was completed at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, as part of the author's doctoral dissertation.     

DOES IT MATTER HOW WE GOT HERE? DANGERS PERCEIVED IN LITERALISM AND EVOLUTIONISM

Abstract. Creationism and evolutionism are taken to typify a fundamental opposition among the diverse beliefs about creation to be found in the United Kingdom and the United States. A comparison between the two types and the two countries suggests that people may be more concerned about the credibility and consequences of belief in an alternative account of our origins than about the actual method by which we were created. Examples of concern include interpretations of the Bible, ethical implications, and the epistemological standings of revelation and/or science that are thought to follow from acceptance of a particular belief concerning how we got here.     

ACQUISITION OF SIGN LANGUAGE BY AUTISTIC CHILDREN. I: EXPRESSIVE LABELLING

There has been growing interest in teaching sign language to autistic children who have failed to develop speech. However, controlled experimentation in this area is nonexistent. In the present study, four nonverbal autistic children were taught expressive sign labels for common objects, using a training procedure that consisted of prompting, fading, and stimulus rotation. The efficacy of the procedure was demonstrated in a multiple-baseline design across objects. The results were reliable, replicable across children, and generalizable across therapists. A stimulus control analysis demonstrated that, for three of the children, correct signing was controlled solely by the visual cues associated with the presentation of a given object and was independent of the auditory cues related to the same object. These latter results are discussed with respect to the known perceptual and linguistic deficits of autistic children.     

DISPLACEMENT OF LEISURE REINFORCERS BY FOOD DURING PREFERENCE ASSESSMENTS

Identification of reinforcers for individuals with developmental disabilities is often based on the outcome of preference assessments in which participants make selections from among a variety of items. We determined the extent to which individuals might show a general preference for food items over leisure items during such assessments and whether leisure items that are “displaced” by food items might nevertheless function as reinforcers. Arrays consisting of food items only and then nonfood items only were presented separately to 14 participants and then were ranked to determine preference. The top selections from these initial assessments were subsequently combined in a third assessment, and preferences were again established. All but 2 participants showed a general preference for food items, such that selection of nonfood items in the combined arrays was displaced downward relative to selection of nonfoods in the nonfood-only arrays. Two of the participants were exposed to a condition in which a nonfood item was delivered contingent on the occurrence of an adaptive response, and increased rates of responding by both individuals were observed. Results are discussed in terms of limitations posed by using only food items as reinforcers and the resulting need to take precautionary measures when attempting to identify nonfood reinforcers.     

Within-modal and cross-modal reliabilities of two laterality tests

Sixteen right handers were given four tests of a dichotic listening recall task (concrete words) and a visual half-field recall task (letters). There was a significant right ear and right visual half-field superiority for the four test sessions, with improvement in recall scores over sessions. Pearson correlations for each ear on the four dichotic tests ranged from .74 to .90. Correlations on the visual half-field scores, however, were significant only after the first session. Analysis of stability in lateral preferences across modalities revealed stable and reliable performance, particularly in the last two testings, where 81.3% of the subjects had a right-sided asymmetry. Cross-modal correlations, however, were not significant. Implications regarding predictions of speech laterality are discussed in the light of these findings.     

Interview training with adolescents—A controlled group study incorporating generalization and social validation

Ten school-leavers were allocated either to an interview-training group (E) or a discussion control group (C) for three sessions. For E group a combination of modelling, coaching, roleplay, feedback and discussion was used to train both verbal and non-verbal interview skills. An attempt was made to programme generalization of treatment effect into training and subjective evaluations of interview skill were made by an experienced Personnel Officer to assess the social importance of the skills trained. After C group had completed three sessions to control for the non-specific effects of being in therapy, they received the same training as E group. Subjects were assessed using videotaped roleplayed interviews at the beginning and end of each training phase. After training E group showed significant improvements on both global and specific ratings of interview skill compared to C group; there was evidence of generalization and maintenance of treatment effect and the social importance of the skills trained was substantiated by the subjective evaluation data. C group then went on to replicate the changes in E group.