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 child was asking about my role in relationship to him using the only categories he knew for women.
The sexual personae of girls and women comprise a complex matrix of roles and attitudes prescribed and determined by ethnocultural socialization. However, the predominant views of women held in the United States and elsewhere appear to be not much more complex than the basic classifications we developed as children. Indeed, we still rely heavily on stereotypes in our attempts to define female roles (Castaneda, Ortiz, Allen, & Garcia, 1996; Loxley, 1996). Women have been represented on one polarity as asexual madonnas, and at the other end as highly sexual, alluring sirens. We have developed cultural icons of virtue, such as the woman who is chaste and pure—symbolic of the Virgin Mary, while also holding onto images of seductresses, like Eve and Delilah. In this chapter we will examine these socially constructed images and the roles that girls and women are (mis)led to adopt. Given our assumption that neither the sexual images nor roles for girls and women rely to any great extent on actual biological factors, we will necessarily focus on social factors and expecta tions.
Traditional expectations about the manner in which girls and women should behave impose themselves in every arena, both public and private. Beliefs about appropriate responses extend themselves into every social class, into all professions regardless of level of training, and across families of all backgrounds and ethnicities. Although the specifics of our expectations may vary widely, most observers agree that girls and women are uni versally cast in secondary roles and hold lower status than their male coun terparts.
In the United States the notion of sexuality is most often considered to be specific to behaviors related to seduction and sexually intimate activities. These can, of course, be discussed in terms of level or degree. Thus, colloquially, one says a woman is more or less sexual, referring to the degree of sexual appeal or allure she possesses. At almost every age and every stage in women’s lives, the promise or specter of sexual appeal looms as a factor in social exchanges. It leads us to conscientiously cover the immature breasts of prepubescent females—not only school-age girls, but also female toddlers and infants. It led in the not too distant past to restricting the work and even public appearances (i. e., going out in public) of pregnant women. And, it has led aging women to outfit themselves in fashions in tended for the young.
The belief in the power of women’s sexual allure is also used to ex plain and excuse men’s antisocial behavior toward women. Ironically, al though women are perceived as less able in many arenas, with respect to sexuality, it is acceptable to consider them in control of themselves and of most situations. Thus, activities as obnoxious as sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault may be attributed to the personal characteristics and attractiveness of the victim, rather than to defects in the male per petrator. According to society’s demands, it is the woman who should be perceptive enough to understand the course of current and future behavior. Her youth or other forms of incapacitation (e. g., drugs, mental disability) often are not considered sufficient to remove her culpability in the opinion of many. A much-publicized example was the Glen Ridge, New Jersey, case (Houppert, 1993; Kantrowitz, 1993) in which a mentally retarded young woman was sexually assaulted by neighborhood boys. Another instance was a case in the Midwest in which a woman was raped while unconscious from alcohol. In both instances, the accused men argued their innocence by placing the blame on the women who were clearly not capable of giving consent.
Society holds some explicit notions about the relationship of sexual roles and sexuality; however, psychology has been more circumspect and most often focused on gender roles. Gender roles are defined as sets of behaviors assigned to an individual as a result of being a woman or man in a particular culture (Unger, 1991). The internalized sense of femaleness or maleness is referred to as gender identity (Money & Tucker, 1976). Neither gender roles nor gender identity have been conceptually related to sexuality (Lips, 1992). In fact, it is not clear if we are able to distinguish sexual roles from other gender-typed behavior. One may ask, what makes a role sexual? Or a more cynical question may be: Are there gender roles that are not sexual? Anderson (1993) noted the irony that our society appears excessively conscious of sex (through advertising and popular cul ture) while simultaneously adopting a repressive and proscriptive agenda for sexuality (Durham, 1998; Freedman & Thome, 1984).
In this chapter we will adopt a broad definition of gender roles and examine those that are related or directly connected to the biological func tioning of girls and women as sexual beings. This is in keeping with the current acceptance of gender as a social construction and sex as a biological fact (Riger, 1992). Obviously there will be considerable blurring of dis tinctions across definitions since there are many instances when biological function leads to social construction, but this is unavoidable. Indeed, Caul field (1985, p. 356) indicated that it is “the culturalization of sex,” that is, our ability to transform a biological function into a social activity with rules, expectations, and socialized demands, that render it a function of human nature.
The universal acceptance of the confluence of female gender roles and sexual roles has greatly contributed to psychology’s tendency to ignore differences among girls and women. The belief that seems predominant in psychology is this: There is an essential experience of women, so we do not need to examine the variety of social conditions in which girls and women find themselves. Because psychology cannot easily disentangle the biological from the social, the need to separate contexts from one another has been left unattended. The narrowness of vision and oversights are par ticularly glaring with respect to issues of ethnicity and social class (Reid, 1993; Reid & Kelly, 1994). Still we have managed to identify a number of widely held images of women, some of which transcend group boundaries and many of which are defined within them.