The article Gender and the Meaning and Experience of Virginity Loss in the Contemporary United States suggests, “Young women, while more permissive than in previous decades, continued to value virginity and predicate sexual activity on love and committed romantic relationship, whereas young men continued to express disdain for virginity, engage in sexual activity primarily out of curiosity and desire for physical and welcome opportunities for casual sex” (Carpenter 1). This depicts the need for sexual activity rather than a romantic relationship by men and why they may look at women as sexual objects rather than ordinary
The article Boys on the Side by Hanna Rosin discusses the “hookup” culture that has largely replaced dating. Young women are behaving like frat boys, and no one is guarding the virtues of honor, chivalry, and everlasting love (Rosin 38). Girl land a book by Caitlin Flanagan discusses sexual culture and how in earlier times, fathers protect their daughter’s innocence and girls understood their roles to also protect themselves. The central argument is that women have effectively been duped by a sexual revolution that persuaded them to trade away the protections of and from young men (Rosin 38).
Throughout history, women have been oppressed and not viewed as equals to men. Orleanna Price and her daughters in the book, The Poisonwood Bible, are no strangers to being oppressed and molded into the role of a perfect woman and a perfect wife. Throughout this story, the girls’ femininity often gets rejected, often by their society and the society in the Congo, and even by their own father, Nathan Price. Orleanna Price, Nathan’s wife, has lived her life living in her husband’s shadow for years. Orleanna has been conquered by Nathan, in the sense that he overtook her and now controls her.
Amy Schaltes effortlessly argues that sex, one of life’s most trivial issues, could be less difficult to handle if parents embraced their children’s natural maturation, instead of shying away from it. Schaltes’s “The Sleepover Question” is informative, and gets the audience thinking. Why is teen sex so controversial? Would talking about it remove the stigma from consensual teenage sex? Further, should the stigma be removed?
Titian was an Italian Renaissance painter. He used oil-based paint for his artwork. The Assumption and Consecration of the Virgin is kept in Venice on a high altar in the Basilica de Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. This painting stand twenty-two feet high and is arched at the top. Three sections are shown in this piece of artwork.
These unmarried women wants to “fulfill their noble tasks of motherhood”(p132). One of the motivation is they feel a sense of loneliness because many of them experience sentiments of insufficiency and uneasiness in a society surrounded by people who are in harmonious conjugal relationships(131). Moreover, even though numbers of “women are unlikely to marry, but “would need a child to take care of them in their old age” (132). A program implemented “encourage women to adopt an intensified focus on their bodies as the locus of their ‘femaleness’”(132).
The Homeric Hymns portray Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis and Hestia as strong females who uphold their own beliefs; challenging the “typical” gender stereotypes of the time period. Women in antiquity were expected to follow and uphold certain societal rules, most of these rules emphasized the gender stereotypes that women were perceived as being. The use of the goddesses powers challenge these societal rules and ideas about women. Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis, and Hestia are portrayed in the Homeric Hymns in contrast to ancient stereotypical roles of women being confined to the household; as a result this contrast emphasizes that women can showcase strength, intelligence, and power within society. A women’s life in antiquity was constricted by
In his article published in the New York Times in 2008, "Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?," Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality in 2008, questions the importance some employers give to a 4-year degree as a job qualification instead of judging abilities students have learned because of their experience or certificates earned related to their studies. Murray implies that President Obama may use his “bully pulpit”, which is the ability to express beliefs and ideas with people, to change the vision of 4-degre as a job requirement. Moreover, he states that “colleges have adapted by expanding the range of courses and
This week we learned about how to keep respect for ourselves and for each other. We learned that chastity is respecting sex as a gift for your spouse. The speaker shared with us her own life story and we learned that she was a teen parent herself and that she had gone through some rough times. She shared with us that she was a teen mom and that before she engaged in sexual behavior, she was an honors student and she was focused on what was important but then after engaging in sexual behavior, she saw her grades drop drastically and she started to not care about the important things in life anymore.
Inside and beyond the myth and the social impact of the subject as One or Substance. Alan H. Goldman’s essay ‘Plain Sex’ is a central contribution to the academic debate about sex within the analytic area, which has been developing since the second half of the ‘90s in Western countries. Goldman’s purpose is encouraging debate on the concept of sex without moral, social and cultural implications or superstitious superstructures. He attempts to define “sexual desire” and “sexual activity” in its simplest terms, by discovering the common factor of all sexual events, i.e. “the desire for physical contact with another person’s body and for the pleasure which such contact produces; sexual activity is activity which tends to fulfill such desire of the agent” (Goldman, A., 1977, p 40).
There is no term for someone who has never been kissed, or never been on an airplane but never had sex? Hold the phone. Okay, so the literal definition of “virgin” is someone who has never had sex. However, the idea that virginity is a virtue and that when lost, a person is fundamentally changed, is a social construct. This idea that a woman is “lesser than” for having sex is an outdated notion from a time when women were viewed as property.
Abstinence is not an effective method of birth control. According to a study from Advocates for Youth, 95% of Americans have had premarital sex and teens who pledged to wait until marriage and 60% broke their promise after six years. In addition, the study also found that people who pledged virginity were more likely to engage in oral or anal sex than non-pledging virgin teens and less likely to use condoms once they become sexually active. Also, people who pledged were much less likely than non-pledgers to use contraception the first time they had sex and were less likely to know their STI status. Abstinence only education provides a false sense of security the first time people are having sex.
Ancient Greek sexuality and gender roles and their place in society were very different from what is considered the societal norm today. Society, law and democracy focused on the adult male citizen [Source 9], with mainstream sexuality being defined as his active pursuit of a partner of lower social status than himself who was expected to be passive in both the courtship and the sex act itself [Source 2][Source 6][Source 10]. This partner could be a woman, an adolescent boy, or slaves of either gender. It should probably be pointed out at this point that, while much has been written on “Greek homosexuality,” the Ancient Greeks themselves would not have seen it as such, as such definitions only really came into usage relatively recently [Source 4]. The Ancient Greeks had no concept of “gay” as we would understand it, as equally no concept of “straight.”
The Virgin Suicides is a dream like story that will hypnotise any reader with its poetic writing. A collective narrator known as “we” takes the reader through a journey to understand and come to grips with the suicides of the five Lisbon girls that happened in a suburban neighborhood outside Detroit. Eugenides connects the degradation of nature and the suburban area with the fall of each of the girls, with the Lisbons’ house getting progressively more and more torn apart with each death. The objectification that each of the girls encounter from the boys show how the homogeneity and lack of voice is so suffocating it eventually leads them to take their own life. Each of the girls is forced to deal with their coming of age under the microscope
The emic conception of gender in Paradise Bent was interesting to see since it is so different from what we are used to in our culture. In Samoa, the people there do not gender-linked to biological sex. Gender to the culture there is linked to social constructs (90), for example, boys who help with housework are called fa’afafine. Samoan people believe that the fa’afafine have both a feminine and masculine spirit. For traditional fa’afafine there is a different concept of what it means to have both spirits where they only help with house chores.
