Double standard of sexuality (week 9)

Question 1

What is the double standard of sexuality?

Answer 1

• Studies have consistently found that young women use their sexuality to please boys and not themselves whereas boys tend to use sex to boost their self esteem and masculine egos
• This double standard of sexuality sets up an overarching structure of sexual relations into which sexually active boys are slotted as studs and sexually active girls as morally impure sluts
• Boys who fail to demonstrate sexual prowess are vulnerable to being outcast and bullied
• To avoid failure, and thus ostracism from their peer group, the authors of this research suggest that boys are drawn into sexual strategies where the purpose of having sex with girls is not to share an intimacy or express mutual affection- but to establish masculine identity
• Bourgois argues that marginalised young men invest in sexual promiscuity as a mark of masculine respect
• Feminist studies of youth culture have consistently complained about this double standard of sexuality whereby boy’s reputation is enhanced by his objectification of girls as objects of sexual desire
• Carmody’s research on young women’s experiences of sex confirms that a sense of sexual desire and pleasure is almost completely missing from the narratives of the girls they interviewed

Question 2

Hydraulic model of male sexuality

How women are expected to respond

Answer 2

• One particularly problematic feature of adolescent sexual relations is that the sexuality of boys is too easily understood as something driven by uncontrollable urges
• This is commonly referred to as the hydraulic model of male sexuality
• According to this model, the sexual actions of boys are mitigated so that boys can never be reasonable expected to assume full responsibility over something they cannot be expected to control, of course this is not the case
• Nonetheless the construction of male sexuality as something as uncontrollable has been deeply noted in western civilisations and has deep and recurring implications for the policing of harmful forms of sexuality
• Young women are then expected to control their sexual imagery of their bodies, usually through displays of coyness, grooming, manner, dress and other techniques of self-fashioning
• Those who do not, risk being stigmatised as loose, immoral or sluttish
• If young women fall prey to sexual assault the clues as to why are commonly sought in how she behaved, dressed and acted