Human Sexuality SSc 245 Divine Word College Spring Term 2011

1. Human SexualitySSc 245Divine Word CollegeSpring Term 2011

2. IN OTHERS’ WORDS… • “After people are clothed and fed, then they think about sex.” —K’ung Fu-Tzu (Confucius) 551–479 BC • Rape occurs in many species, but rape is unknown amongst the porcupines. (Gregory Clark) • If you cannot be chaste, be cautious. (Spanish Proverb) • When the penis stands up, the brain goes to sleep.(Yiddish Proverb) • The ability to make love frivolously is a chief characteristic that distinguishes humans from the beast.

3. CHAPTER OBJECTIVES • Identify and discuss the dimensions of human sexuality, including biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors. • Discuss the historical aspects of human sexuality, including the sexual revolution, the role of gender, and the role of culture.

4. CHAPTER OBJECTIVES • Apply critical thinking methods to human sexuality. • Outline the reasons to study human sexuality, including the steps of the decision-making process.

5. THE FOUR DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN SEXUALITY • The interactive nature of sexual dimensions. • Biological dimension (Physiology of sex). • Psychological dimension. • Sociocultural factors.

6. IN OTHERS’ WORDS… • “Sex is hardly ever just about sex.” —Shirley Maclaine

7. THE DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN SEXUALITY • Biological dimension (Physiology of sex) • Gender. • Genetics. • Reproduction. • Fertility control. • Sexual arousal and response. • Physiological cycles and changes. • Physical appearance. • Growth and development.

8. THE DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN SEXUALITY • Psychological dimension • Emotions. • Experiences. • Self-concept. • Motivation. • Expressiveness. • Learned attitudes and behaviors. • Body image.

9. THE DIMENSIONS OF HUMAN SEXUALITY • Sociocultural dimension. • Religious influences. • Multicultural influences. • Socioeconomic influences (income, education). • Ethical influences. • Media influences. • Political policy.

10. HISTORICAL INFLUENCES ON SEXUALITY • Sexual revolution. • Control of sexual behavior. • Conception. • Contraception. • Gender roles. • Multicultural dimensions. • Polygamy.

11. Example of a BeliefSambia of Papua New Guinea • The Sambia (a typical New Guinea group) believe that semen is in short supply. 
Young children are genderless. 
However, they add the notion that children must be made into men by the receipt of semen from other men. • After puberty the boys enter the second phase of initiation: it is now their turn to provide seed for the benefit of the younger ones.

12. Sambia • At around age 22, they marry. Marriage terminates the young man's ritualized-homosexual life, since once his penis has penetrated a woman's vagina it is no longer considered clean and it would be dangerous for any other male to touch it.

13. Why study sexuality, especially as a seminarian? • It provides you with knowledge that has a high potential for your everyday life. • It is amazing what individuals will believe about sex/sexuality, even in today's modern age with the access to communication and resources. • Sexuality education helps prevent sexual problems. • It importantly helps us become more sensitive and aware in our relationships and in achieving intimacy in our lives, especially as celibates. • Help determine what is normative and appropriate behavior within our cultural context.

14. Why Study Sexuality? • Understand the relationship to moral issues and sex. • It can help us deal with issues we might encounter as ministers as well as questions which people may come to us regarding; infertility, sexual dysfunctions, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual harassment. • We need to be aware of issues related to sexual diseases, HIV, Herpes, Syphilis, Genital Warts, Chancroid, Genital Warts, Molluscum Contagiosum, Public Lice, Vaginal Infections. Syphilis Herpies Genital Warts

15. As a Seminarian • It used to be that religious and clerics saw celibacy in a negative sense of not being sexual or not engaging with their sexual energy. • Asexuality in feeling and behavior was the goal of the celibate. • Pope John Paul II wrote in Pastores Dabo Vobisthat there is a need for proper sexual development and sexual education of priestly candidates. • In another work, The Theology of the Body, the Pope places the body along with its sexed and gendered nature squarely in any consideration of celibate living.

16. As a Seminarian • Celibacy should not be the antithesis of sexuality but may be an acknowledgment and expression of sexual energy. • One may construe a call to the consecrated life as a call to express one’s sexual energyin a particular way. • Sexual energyis the orgasmic energy of sexual passion that God chose as the means to catapult each of us into existence. • There is nothing abstract about our sexual energy. The body, male or female, must be included in any discussion of sexuality.

17. As a Seminarian • The only purpose of sexual energy in most of creation is the perpetuation of species. Not so with humans. • What one does with sexual energy determines rightness and wrongness in our society.

18. What is Sex? • Sometimes the word "sex" is used ambiguously. • To have sex. • What is your sex? • Sometimes we say “to make love” or “they made love” • Sexsimply refers to that which makes us male and female.

19. Definitions • The word "sexuality" includes the realm of sex—that is our reproductive organs and our genital behavior—but also encompasses much more of who we are. • It is what our body means to us, how we understand ourselves as a man or woman. • Sexuality moves us beyond biology toward the social expectations and cultural ideals that influence us. • Being Bodied has to do with how we feel about our body and as our body changes, how we think about ourselves.

20. Definitions • Our sexuality is also being gendered—what being male or female means. This includes social expectations and biological limitations and differences. • Mature sexuality challenges us to gradually come to greater confidence of who we are as men and women. • There are differences here as to how men and women will look at friendships and intimacy.

21. Definition • Sexualityrefers to a fundamental component of personality in and through which we, as male or female, experience or relatedness to self, others, and the world and even God. • Sex refers either to the biological aspects of being male of female (i.e., a synonym for one’s gender) or to the expressions of sexuality, which have physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, particularly genital actions resulting in sexual intercourse and/or orgasm. (U.S. Catholic Bishop Conference)

22. Biological Dimension • Meaning of life is to “create more life.” • Man's hypothesized direct ancestor, Ramapithecus, evolved over a period of a few million years and gave up life in the trees for life on the ground. • Some of the significant changes in sexual activity are by-products of overall evolutionary change.

23. Evolutionary Change in Sex • One of the direct long-term results of the change to bipedal locomotion was also a change in the mating stance. • In the usual primate position, the female presents her rear to the male and intercourse is brief, crude, and purposeful.

24. Evolutionary Change • Sexual intercourse plays a major role in Bonobo monkey society, being used as a greeting, a means of conflict resolution and post-conflict reconciliation. Bonobos were thought to be the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in all of the following sexual activities: face-to-face genital sex (most frequently female-female , then male-female and male-male ), tongue kissing, and oral sex. In scientific literature, the female-female sex is often referred to as GG rubbing or genital-genital rubbing.

25. Evolutionary Change • Thus the theory has been advanced that female orgasm, which other primates do not experience, emerged in response to the new position for intercourse. • Sex now becomes an activity which is pleasurable as well as instinctively purposeful, and pursuit of the pleasure and fulfillment of the purpose have had their influence on human development.

26. Evolutionary Change • Behind the sex drive is the drive to preserve and pass on one’s genetic material. • Until the appearance of some written records in about 3000 B.C., most of what is known is based on putting together a limited number of archeological facts. • When does monogamy develop and why? • Of the apes, only the Gibbon has a life partner. Other non-human primates live in mixed-sex groups, in which one sex often predominates and where there is no "pair bonding."

27. Evolutionary Change • Polygamy seems to have been far more widespread than monogamy during the first part of the five thousand years of recorded history. • Geneticists hold the struggle is not among people but among genes. Many of man's inexplicable acts and attitudes, say the socio-biologists, are a product of his genes' determination to propagate themselves.

28. Evolutionary Change • During early times, especially Paleolithic times, the cooperation of both parents was necessary to insure the survival, not so much of their young as of the parental genes invested in them—producing a monogamous situation. • Male/female roles in procreation were discovered late. Anthropologists have been consistently taken aback to discover primitive tribes still ignorant of the relationship between coitus and conception. • Sex and morality converge only at a relatively late stage of civilization.

29. Psychological Dimension • This refers to our sense of wellbeing. This involves our attitudes toward ourselves and other people, which develop from experience. • This dimension also involves messages and attitudes we receive from our parents, religion, community, TV, etc. • What others tell us is right or wrong. • What are dirty words. • What parts of our bodies should be hidden. • What feelings should be hidden.

30. Psychological Dimension • What is true intimacy? • The range of emotions can lead to a sexual relationship. • Anger can move us away from others. • While masturbation and sexual fantasies can occur outside of the context of a relationship, much of sexuality occurs in the context of an interpersonal relationship.

31. Psychological Dimension 1856-1939 • Freud believed that sexuality was both the primary force in the motivation of all human behavior and the principal cause of all forms of neurosis. • a psychological disorder usually characterized by anxiety and/or tension. • He describes infant sexuality. • Stages of sexual development—Oral, Anal, Phallic, Latent, Genital. • Oedipal, Electra complexes. • Castration anxiety and penis envy.

32. Psychological Dimension • Havelock Ellis wrote "Studies in the Physiology of Sex" (1897 - 1910). • Anticipated Freud’s writings. • Recognized the common occurrence of masturbation in both sexes. • He took exception to the Victorian idea that "good" women had no sexual desire, and emphasized the psychological rather than physical causes of many sexual problems.

33. Socio-Cultural Dimension • The sum of cultural and social influences that affect our sexual thoughts and actions. • These influences may be religious, multicultural and global, ethical and legal, political, or derive from socioeconomic status or media input. • Until about 100 years ago, religion was our main source of information about sexuality. • Aristotle's Master Piece, was a popular guide to sex and a best seller throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. (Writing in the 17th Century).

34. Socio-Cultural Dimension • Aristotle’s Masterpiece followed Church teachings that the purpose of sex was for procreation only within the context of marriage.

35. Socio-Cultural Dimension • The early Greeks used myth to explain the sex drive. They recognized the validity of both homosexuality and heterosexuality explaining it that originally there were creatures with twice the normal limbs and organs. • The gods fearing these creatures split them in half with the result that the creatures were forever searching out its missing half. • This was used to explain sexual desire.

36. The Ancients Egyptians Greeks • Nudity was accepted in work, entertainment & children. • Prostitution was a scandal. • Adultery was frowned upon for both sexes. • Homosexuality was regarded as a sexual misconduct. • Nudity was widely accepted especially in athletics. • Prostitution was part of daily life. • Men could have sex w/ slaves, prostitutes, children. • Homosexuality was prevalent.

37. The Ancients

38. Greek Ancients Phallic Temple, Island of Delos

39. Egyptian Ancients

40. Egyptian Ancients Aphrodite Egyptians had sensitivities regarding what might be erotic art but nudity in itself was acceptable and they frequently worked naked.

41. Ancients • In Hindu society, anything that was sexual received approval and in China "sex was not something to be feared, nor was it regarded as sinful but as an act of worship. China Ancient China had the book "Master Jung-ch'eng's Principles of Sex."

42. The Ancients--Kama Sutra • The KAMA SUTRA was compiled at the same time as Augustine was writing this Confessions and is a detailed Indian sex manual. • Attributed to the sage Vatsyayana and seems not to have been compiled until some time between the third and fifth centuries A.D.

45. Jewish • In the Torah, the word used for sex between husband and wife comes from the root Yod-Dalet-Ayin, meaning "to know," which vividly illustrates that proper Jewish sexuality involves both the heart and mind, not merely the body. • Sex is the woman's right, not the man's. A man has a duty to give his wife sex regularly and to ensure that sex is pleasurable for her. • The general view of halakhah is that any sexual act that does not involve sh'chatat zerah (destruction of seed, that is, ejaculation outside the vagina) is permissible.

46. Sin of Onan • "And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brotherﾕs wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother.” Genesis 38:4 • Sin of Anti-Messiahism?? • Sin of Disobedience??

47. Greek Roman • Sex is natural part of life. • Marriage-monogamous. • Men can seek erotic intercourse w/ others. • Homosexual activities are acceptable. • Abortion/infanticide. • Marriage is not about love but progeny. • Males ideal beauty. • Sex is natural part of life. • Marriage-monogamous. • Men can seek erotic intercourse w/ others. • Homosexual activities are acceptable. • Abortion/infanticide. • Marriage is not about love but progeny. • Males ideal beauty.

48. Philosophers • “Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children to be faithful guardians of our households.” (Demosthenes) • Both Plato and Aristotle judged sexual pleasure to be lower pleasure shared with other animals. • Plato offered in both the Republic and the Laws a design for the equality of men and women. • Aristotle always opposed this.

49. Philosophers • Musonius Rufus, in his Reliquiae, and Seneca, in his Fragments, considered sexual desire and activity to be irrational and liable to excess. They judged sex to be solely for the purpose of procreation.

50. Christian • In contrast to Judaism, which did not distinguish physical from spiritual love, Christian theology borrowed from the Greek and separated EROS, or carnal love from AGAPE, a spiritual or nonphysical love. • It picks up on the Hellenistic era in Greece (around 323 BC) that was marked by denial of worldly pleasures in favor of developing the spiritual.