How Do You Decide What Sex You’ll Engage In?
ll sexually active human beings make decisions about when, where, and with whom they will engage in sexual activity. For most people, at least part of that decision is based on their views of what behaviors are morally acceptable, which may be derived from their religious beliefs, their upbringing, or personal decisions about the kind of person they want to be. For example, some people would not have sex with a partner they did not love, perhaps because they feel it is meaningless, immoral, or against God’s wishes; others find it acceptable if both partners are willing and go into the encounter openly and freely. There are few areas of life in which moral principles are so clearly and commonly debated. Why is it that sexuality evokes so strong a moral response in us?
The sexual behavior of human beings differs from all other animals in part because of our moral, religious, legal, and interpersonal values. How simple it seems for animals, who mate without caring about marriage, pregnancy, or hurting their partner’s feelings! Human beings are not (typically) so casual about mating; every culture has developed elaborate rituals, rules, laws, and moral principles that structure sexual relations. The very earliest legal and moral codes archaeologists have uncovered discuss sexual behavior at great length, and rules about sexual behavior make up a great part of the legal and ethical codes of the world’s great civilizations and religions.
Sexuality is a basic drive, and it is one of the few that involves intimate, one-on-one interaction with another person’s basic needs. We may eat next to each other, but we each feed only ourselves. Conflicts may arise when our own
needs, feelings, fears, and concerns are not the same as our partner’s. People can be hurt, used, and taken advantage of sexually, or be the victim of honest miscommunication, especially because sex is so difficult for many people to discuss.
Sexuality is also closely related to the formation of love bonds and to procreation. Every society has a stake in procreation, for without adequate numbers of people a society can languish, and with too many people a society can be overwhelmed. Most societies create rules to prevent accidental births and births that do not fit conventional family structures (such as "illegitimate" births). Societies also formulate sexual rules to control the size of their population (such as the outlawing of contraception or abortion in cultures that want to encourage childbirth, or distributing free contraception and free abortions, as they do in modern China, when the population gets too high).
Another reason sexuality and ethics are so closely linked is because the sexual drive emerges relatively late in life. Think about it—you’ve been eating, sleeping, loving, communicating, and otherwise exercising most of your basic drives since you were an infant. However, genital-based sexuality did not emerge in its present form until somewhere around puberty. You had to learn to cope with these new feelings at the very time that you were learning to cope with being an adult, establishing independence from parents, and forming your own identity.
There are certainly other possible explanations for the moral and ethical standards that have developed around sexual behavior. Why do you think morality and sexuality are so closely bound?
Reality makeover shows, such as Dr. 90210, The Swan, and Extreme Makeover play upon our physical insecurities. Television, movies, and advertising often brainwash us into believing that we can achieve the perfect body and look with a little help from a plastic surgeon. How far would you go to look like this woman?
Sexuality is an important component of each of us, but it is also one of the most difficult aspects for us to express and explore (McKenna, Green, & Smith, 2001). Social norms, embarrassment, and fear hold us back from expressing many of our sexual needs and desires. However, the Internet is changing patterns of social communication and relationships (Griffiths, 2001). People now have access to sexual information and are able to express various aspects of their sexuality online without the fear of negative responses. The popularity of the Internet for gathering sex information continues to grow.
Countless websites offer information, provide advice, and answer questions on sexuality today. Sexual paraphernalia (such as vibrators or sex toys), pornographic picture libraries, videos and video clips, and access to a variety of personal webcam sites can be purchased online (Griffiths, 2000), and a variety of chat rooms cater to just about any conceivable fantasy. More than 8,000 chat rooms devoted to sex can be found at any given time of day or night (McKenna et al., 2001). The Internet allows for anonymity and provides the freedom to ask questions, seek answers, and talk to others about sexual issues.
Teenagers rate the media as one of their leading sources of sex information (behind school sex education programs; Kunkel et al., 2005), yet much of this information is not very educational. Each year the average American adolescent is exposed to nearly
14,0 sexual references in the media, but very few of these references have anything to do with contraception, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), or pregnancy risk. Even though sexual information in the media is often inaccurate, unrealistic, and misleading, many young people accept it as fact.
What is the effect of living in a society that is so saturated with sexual references and images? How do these messages subtly affect the way we think about our own sexuality? The sexuality of others? As you read about various aspects of sexuality covered in this text, keep this media saturation in mind.
Question: The other day as I was reading a Details magazine, I was amazed at how sexual the advertising was. Sometimes when I look at ads like these, all I see is half-naked women straddling some guys. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind looking at that kind of stuff, but many times I can’t even tell what the ad is for. Sometimes the ad is for jeans but no one in the picture has jeans on! Just how does an ad like this sell jeans?
Ahhh, you ask a very important question. Advertisers know that consumers are emotional beings. When half-naked men or women in ads wear a pair of jeans, it arouses us and helps us to associate the jeans with passion. Suddenly we need the jeans because we want to be sexy too, just like the model in the ad. So, even when the advertised item isn’t in the ad, we associate the feeling the ad generates with a particular item or brand name.
We will now turn our attention to the history of human sexuality, from prehistoric times to the present. Of course, in the space of one chapter, we cannot begin to cover the variety and richness of human sexual experience. Hopefully this overview will give you an idea of how varied human cultures are, while also showing that human beings throughout history have had to grapple with the same sexual issues that confront us in American society today.