Adolescents receive a variety of messages about sexuality. Each cul tural and ethnic group develops norms and proscriptions for behaviors for its adolescent population, which at certain times may appear to contradict the messages of mainstream culture. In the United States increasingly there has been a concern about sexualizing younger and younger girls. In the […]

Adolescent women today remain preoccupied with the concept of virginity. In certain peer groups virginity results in embarrassment and in­dicates a level of unacceptable immaturity. Yet, in other circles, virginity is a badge of honor, signifying strength as well as purity. Anecdotal evi dence of the stigma of purity imposed by some peer groups was […]

“Like a virgin… touched for the very first time”—Madonna, 1984 “I knew a girl named Nickie, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend. Met her in a hotel lobby masturbating to a magazine”—Prince, 1984 “Let’s talk about sex baby, let’s talk about you and me”—Salt-N-Pepa, 1990 “I can feel your body, pressed […]

Ferguson and Crowley’s (1997) findings of shame-proneness in women and guilt-proneness in men suggested that our society associates sex with shame and taboo and that children are socialized to have negative feelings about their gender roles. Young (1990) discussed the socialization of girls today and interpreted many changes as improvements. Many more girls and women […]

Learning one’s place in the community is an important function of the school experience. Along with reading and spelling, children are tutored (implicitly and explicitly) in gender roles and sexual mores. Investigators have demonstrated that social class determines how children are treated. For example, children from middle-class families receive more praise and are treated in […]

Parents, of course, are typically considered the major influence in the socialization of girls for their gender and sexual roles. Various background factors, including cultural norms, religious beliefs, and social class mores, result in differential expectations. Beginning with gender assignment at birth and the subsequent experience of growing up as a boy or girl, re­searchers […]

More than 20 years ago Anne Beuf (1974) questioned 3- and 4-year olds about their aspirations. She asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up. The intention of this and subsequent studies was to dem onstrate the differences in sex-typed goals and aspirations. Such research also demonstrated the child’s view of their […]

Sexuality must be considered as an emergent process involving bio logical processes and social constructions that evolve on both the individ ual and group level to form each person’s unique sexual identity (Anderson, 1993). Although the observations of cultural and experiential differences among women are noted in clinical and empirical literature, theories of gender role […]

In the research literature and in popular culture, women have been typically categorized according to their sexuality. The classic archetypes represent women in terms of both biological and psychological character­ istics. They are either good or evil. The good woman will be represented biologically as virginal (i. e., pure, innocent, and naive) and psychologically as […]

PAMELA TROTMAN REID AND VANESSA M. BING “Are you a girl or a mother?” This question was posed to me (first author) by an 8-year-old boy many years ago on my first day in a summer job as assistant playground supervisor. As a teenage college student, neither description was apt, but I understood that the […]