Fedwa Malti-Douglas – Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (4 Volume set)

Автор: Fedwa Malti-Douglas
Название книги: Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender (4 Volume set)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Политология и Социология
Страницы: 1716
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Although the vast amount of media attention devoted to sex may make it seem more
important than ever, in some ways sex is actually less important today than ever before. In
the developed world, there has been a trend away from the wide-open spaces of agrarian
settings and toward overcrowded cities, which means that most couples no longer have an
urgent need to reproduce to provide offspring to take care of them when they get older. With
fewer fields to till, infant mortality reduced, and improved health care allowing people to
work for many more years, having a large number of children is no longer the standard
method of retirement planning. So although at one time the ability to limit pregnancies
would have had catastrophic results, today’s birth rates reflect this new reality, be it
voluntarily as in Europe, or involuntarily as in China. And now, with artificial insemination,
we don’t even need the sex act to make babies. So if we humans were ever to lose the ability to
have sex at some point in the future (heaven forbid!), these new technologies would allow our
kind to continue to inhabit the earth for as long as the earth was inhabitable.
But whereas sex has lost its importance in its primary sense, it has grown in importance
in another, keeping people together as couples, leading to its current state where we humans
are having more sex than ever before. I don’t need a study to prove that because one reason
for this increase is simply the fact that we’re living longer, and so each of us is having more sex
than did past generations over the course of our longer lifetimes. But the added leisure time
in our modern societies also frees us to put more focus on sex, so while the sex act has been
decoupled somewhat from its original purpose, it remains very much at the center of our
daily lives.
Many of these changes have taken place over generations, but there have been significant
changes with regard to sex that have occurred in only the past half century or so. I’ll even take
some credit for one or two of those. One significant change is that so many more women
know now that they should be enjoying sex rather than just putting up with it in order to
have a family. In my lectures, I often make reference to a Victorian mother who, when telling
her about-to-be-married daughter about the birds and bees, would say, ‘‘Lie back and think
of England.’’ But while those dark ages continue for too many women, millions of others
have made the transition to being sexually fulfilled by acquiring the knowledge needed to
have orgasms, and the independence to demand them from their partners. So the pleasure
that comes from engaging in sexual relations, which has historically been more important for
one gender than the other, can be shared now by both men and women equally. And one
could say that this happened just in time, because as the reproductive role of sex lessens, its
role in keeping parents together has become more important.
It has always been important for children to have two parents for their survival, but
historically, children were given adult roles much earlier than they are today. In order to
support a child through the college years, parents must find ways of cementing their
relationship over a much longer period of time. And sex is an important part of the glue
that keeps partners together. That is not to say that many divorced couples do not send their
children to college, but it becomes much more of a financial burden if the funds have to
come from two separate households. So as the reproductive aspects of sex have been sinking
in importance, it is the pleasurable aspects for both males and females that have been rising to
the top. This is especially true in societies where women have increasingly been able to
support themselves. When women were financially dependent on their partners, they had
less leverage when it came to asking for sexual satisfaction. But now that women can survive
when living alone, the sexual aspects of a marriage, for both partners, play a more important
role in their combined desire to remain a functioning couple.
This encyclopedia is not only about the sexual act, but also about gender, which
traditionally stood for males and females but these days may be open to further interpretations,
as sexual orientation may not necessarily follow one path linked to the physical
attributes of male and female.
Just as sex has changed in its importance over the last half century, so has gender. Not
that long ago everyone’s place in the world was determined, to some degree, by their gender.
Every year that goes by, that becomes less and less true, and so conversely, as with sex,
knowing about gender becomes more and more important. If all the old assumptions are
wrong, then we all have a duty to learn about the new possibilities. And to do that, you need
as up-to-date a road map as you can find, and that is exactly what you will find inside these
many pages.
When I first went on the radio and used words like penis and vagina, people were
shocked. Today there is hardly a word in the English language that would shock anyone. And
yet so many people, young and old, have shocking lacunae in their knowledge of sex and
gender. I want to commend Macmillan and Fedwa Malti-Douglas for putting this magnificent
set of volumes together, and I hope that the result will be that when it comes out, that
gap in knowledge will become somewhat smaller.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer

NEED FOR THE ENCYCLOPEDIA
No issues are more debated today than those that swirl around the subjects of sex and
gender; in debates that often seem to generate more heat than light. In this area of rapid
social change, and equally rapid progress in scientific knowledge and understanding, the
necessity of a comprehensive encyclopedia of sex and gender is overwhelming. The need is
critical for a reference work that covers in detail the territory from biology to culture (by
way of the social sciences and the humanities), that examines our swiftly changing present
in the light of new understandings of our past, and one that places all these debates in a
global perspective.
‘‘Sex’’ and ‘‘gender.’’ Two words that can have a powerful effect, whether taken
separately or together, on those who encounter them. They, and the discussions around
them, may be anathema to some. These subjects may be taboo for others. There are still
many who, under the guise of a defense of traditional mores, believe that by shutting their
eyes and ears (while loudly opening their mouths) they can stop the results of centuries of
social evolution. To those who think that sex, in all its variety, is a subject best not talked
about (lest talking lead to action), the Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender stands as a challenge.
Closets are not healthy places; and where there are problems, as there are in all aspects of
human life, they are best confronted in the open, not buried behind walls of ignorance and
denial. Fortunately, the voices of censorship are losing their power as a swiftly growing
segment of the population embraces knowledge of sex and gender, seeing in this knowledge a
mode of liberation and a recognition that the topics treated under the rubrics of sex and
gender have been central to all world cultures from the beginning of time. Perhaps had the
snake in the Garden of Eden not tempted Eve, she might not have tempted Adam to eat of
the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Once that door was opened, it could not be closed.
Whatever else it may imply, this ancient story transmits two basic truths: the relation of sex
and knowledge, and the fact that we cannot go back.
Now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, it seems timely and appropriate to
produce an Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender. It has been over half a century since the
publication of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking and controversial studies of sexuality in
the human male and the human female. Much ink has been spilled over what constitutes sex
and sexuality. And it seems that we, as human animals, have barely begun to imagine the
ramifications of the still unfolding area of sex. Our human emotions are being put to the test by the rapidly expanding areas of technology. Can We Fall in Love with a Machine? was the
title of a multi-media exhibit at the Wood Street Galleries in Pittsburgh in 2006.
SCOPE AND CONTENTS: WHAT IS SEX AND GENDER?
Our task is not made easier by the fact that the word ‘‘gender’’ (especially as distinguished from
sex) has a distinct relationship to the English language. In French, for example, when one
wishes to express the idea of masculine and feminine social roles, one is thrown back on the
word for sex. A similar situation pertains with Arabic. All this is because gender, as it is used in
this encyclopedia, is a recent construct in English. The English term ‘‘gender’’ used to refer to a
linguistic category of masculine and feminine. But grammatical gender in English can be
misleading, explaining why the jump from grammar to human behavior is easier in English
than in other languages. English grammatical gender encourages the blurring of boundaries.
For, in English we have natural or biological gender. Nouns with a male or female sex (e.g., he,
she, mother, father, ewe, ram) carry the appropriate grammatical gender. Nouns deemed
sexless (e.g., table, cloud) are neuter. Grammatical gender carries sexual information. Not so in
other languages. In most, grammatical gender is merely a division of nouns into categories.
While a few terms may have been pulled towards biological sex (e.g., le pe`re, la me`re), the
overwhelming majority of nouns is classified according to morphology, not content. A famous
example is that the German term for a young woman, Fra¨ulein, is grammatically neuter not
feminine. Did Americans who developed the new thinking about gender merely exploit the
resources of their language or did the particularities of their language influence the creation of
their categories?
As will become clear from this encyclopedia, gender is a crucial term for the way in
which societies organize sexual categories, sexual roles, sexual behavior, sexual identification,
and so on. Gender Studies has appeared as an avatar, or more correctly an evolution, from
Women’s Studies. That is, a disciplinary area still practiced today (and as such a major
intellectual force in this encyclopedia) and has traditionally concentrated on women’s
history, the status, image, and role of women in various societies, cultural forms, etc.
Gender Studies is more englobing and its paradigms are at the same time more flexible
and more complex than those traditionally associated with the discipline of Women’s
Studies. To take but one example: scholars and scientists have become aware that even
biology (not to speak of society) is not so simply dichotomous as we used to think it was, i.e.
the male sex with its attendant chromosomes or the female sex, also with its attendant
chromosomes. Science has broadened our universe, at the same time as it has complicated it.
Now we must include a category of intersex, in which human chromosomes are not identical
to those of the male and female of the species but rather represent a mixture of the two.
Intersex individuals are not fertile, and therefore cannot propagate themselves. But they can
live normal sexual lives, with some phenotypically females free of the menses that plague
women for a large part of their existence.
Science, biology, and technology have also permitted something that might well have
been surprising to nineteenth and early twentieth scientists and physicians. Even Sigmund
Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, might raise his eyebrows at bodily transformations that
have become part and parcel of our gendered universe. When Donald McCloskey, a
prominent economist, decided to change his sexual identity through surgery and hormonal
treatments from male to female, in other words to become what we today consider a
transsexual individual, his family had him arrested for insanity. Today, Donald lives happily
as Deirdre and retains her position as a prominent social scientist.
It is younger generations of individuals, those in their teens and twenties, who have led
the revolution to change sexual mores, at the same time transforming gender into a much
more elastic category. A masculine young woman, already sporting short hair and dressed in
blue jeans, may one day decide to no longer play what was left of the female role that society
had assigned to her, and instead adopt the identity of a male with a simple first-name change.
I experienced this personally in my office and had to constantly apologize to the male when I called him by his previous female name. He laughed it off, adding that everyone gets him
confused.
Gender confusion. This is not identical to hermaphroditism, in which a person
possesses some combination of male and female genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics.
Hermaphrodites have existed for as long as humans have. It is simply that in earlier
centuries medicine, lacking the combination we possess today of biological and technological
means, relegated the unusual physical types to their own categories. The great French
historian, Michel Foucault, who has done so much to make us rethink our ideas about
sexuality, isolated and popularized the account of a young French hermaphrodite, whose
story has even become a film.
The unusual (and the perverse) have always been part and parcel of our ideas on sex and
gender. Prominent authors like Jean Genet and artists like Andy Warhol played on the edges
of that world. And let us not forget Sado-Masochism, named after the famous Marquis de
Sade and the physician Sacher-Masoch. And while many have traditionally combined the
exotic with the sexually forbidden, today’s world with its lightning-fast modes of communication
and transportation can easily move a pedophile from California to East Asia where
he can fulfill his fantasies at a far lower cost and less danger than in his home country. What is
sometimes referred to today as ‘‘sex tourism’’ is an enormous industry, part of the new
globalized face of the far older commercialization of sex.
Yet, even the term ‘‘sex’’ is not without its ambiguities. To start with, it has two basic
meanings. Sex is biological: the divisions of individuals in a species into two distinct groups
such that one from each group must come together and exchange genetic material to create the
next generation. Sexual reproduction is an elegant and creative way of multiplying the genetic
variation needed for evolution. It is no surprise, therefore, that with the exception of benighted
creatures at the lowest rungs of the evolutionary ladder, sex makes the world go around. The
sexes, therefore, are biological categories dividing most animals, humans included.
But sex is also an act or acts, specifically those necessary to accomplish sexual reproduction.
Again, not so simple. Many human cultures have classified as sexual, acts which of
themselves do not lead to reproduction. The fact that some of these acts may have been
characterized as more or less proper, shameful, or even unnatural does not change their
assimilation to sexual practices. A recent American scandal makes a fine example. For the
purposes of Paula Jones’s suit against President William Jefferson Clinton, the court adopted
the so-called Jones definition of sexual acts, a definition that included lots of non-procreative
activities. President Clinton tried to evade the charge of perjury by claiming that what he
indulged in with Monica Lewinsky did not constitute sex according to the Jones definition.
Few found his explanation credible. But there was a sense to his more general argument that
he had not had sex with Monica Lewinsky if one did not include fellatio (in which by
everyone’s definition the couple engaged) as constituting having sex. Sexual acts, both
narrowly and broadly construed, are a major focus of this encyclopedia.
The first definition of sex, that which creates the biological categories of male and
female, stands in a paradigmatic relationship with gender. That is, these concepts can replace
one another and are, indeed, often confused. After all, do they not both refer to males and
females, the masculine and feminine? If sex refers to the biological basis of this distinction,
gender refers to the innumerable cultural traits that have grown up around the original
biological reality, and which historically have varied from place to place, culture to culture,
and epoch to epoch. Perhaps the main reason for developing the concept of gender was to
create an analytical distance from biology, often mistakenly called ‘‘nature’’ (it is a mistake
because culture is natural for human beings). The space between biological sex, on the one
hand, and gender, on the other, has cut the idea of gender loose from the original dichotomy
of male and female. The degree to which gender roles or gendered behavior are social
constructs and the degree to which they reflect biological realities or predispositions remains
highly controversial and the subject of ongoing debate and research.