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Twentieth Century: Sexual revolution
Essays on the sexual revolution
Twentieth Century: Sexual revolution
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Alfred Kinsey was an American biologist and sexologist who founded the institute for sex research at Indiana University. Kinsey’s founded the research of human sexuality, the research dealt with male and female sexual behavior, which provoked a lot of controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. One contribution that Kinsey did is that his reports on his research contributed to the sexual revolution because his findings brought the era to a more relaxed attitude towards sexual behavior. Another contribution that Kinsey brought to light is women’s sexuality. Before Kinsey, there only a little bit of research done on women’s sexuality and by performing the research Kinsey showed women as sexual being and brought to light the idea that sex and sexuality
was important to women well being and happiness (Kerrigan).
Alfred Kinsey remains the most renowned scientists in the field of sexology. His studies yield important information that helped shape the idea of sex and continues to educate all in the most private aspect of our lives. The Kinsey film is a great depiction of his life, research, and impact on the perspectives of sex as we know it.
Kinsey, a film written and directed by Bill Condon, chronicles the story of well renowned human sexuality researcher Alfred Kinsey, and his struggles of being the first to study what was considered a taboo subject back in that time period. The film does a great job of not only telling his story, but it also integrating real theories from psychology and sociology.
The importance of sexuality is one of the most odd and misconceived elements of Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Instead of a war between races and genders, this novel is about the complication of living in a prevailing democracy where one party has ultimate control over the other. The novel includes a democracy where one must be willing to live as a slave or a defender, one must be willing to have it all or have absolutely nothing, and every patient has very little control over that choice. In an Oregon psychiatric hospital; the male patients are divided into the Acutes, who can be cured, and Chronics, who cannot be cured at all. The mental patients are dominated by Nurse Ratched, a prior army nurse who controls the ward with jagged and sterile precision. During daily group meetings, she instigates the patients to attack one another in their most shameful areas, humiliating them into submission. Chief Bromden, the half Indian narrator of the novel, shows us through his delirium that the hospital is not what it appears to be. Beneath the walls of the ward lies a deep rooted sexual repression and the patients are manipulated into believing that the daily torture they experience is for their well being. Although the institution implies that having a healthy expression of sexuality is the key to sanity, in reality, the ward does the exact opposite.
To provide a summation, I have learned a great deal about sexuality throughout this class and have utilized some of its teachings in order to help clarify my sexuality. While I have strayed away a bit in this essay about sexuality especially on Freud, I have tried incorporate their teachings into constructing my sexuality identity such as Foucault teaching of sexuality and power and Judith Butler’s sexuality and categories. Freud was just absurd however I will take advantage of these teachings utilized in class in order to constitute a more accurate representation of my sexual
Masters and Johnson were a pioneering team in the field of human sexuality, both in the domains of research and therapy. William Howell Masters, a gynecologist, was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1915. Virginia Eshelman Johnson, a psychologist, was born in Springfield, Montana in 1925. To fully appreciate their contribution, it is necessary to see their work in historic context. In 1948, Alfred C. Kinsey and his co-workers, responding to a request by female students at Indiana University for more information on human sexual behavior, published the book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. They followed this five years later with Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. These books began a revolution in social awareness of and public attention given to human sexuality. At the time, public morality severely restricted open discussion of sexuality as a human characteristic, and specific sexual practices, especially sexual behaviors that did not lead to procreation. Kinsey's books, which among other things reported findings on the frequency of various sexual practices including homosexuality, caused a furor. Some people felt that the study of sexual behavior would undermine the family structure and damage American society. It was in this climate - one of incipient efforts to break through the denial of human sexuality and considerable resistance to these efforts - that Masters and Johnson began their work. Their primary contribution has been to help define sexuality as a healthy human trait and the experience of great pleasure and deep intimacy during sex as socially acceptable goals. As a physician interested in the nature of sexuality and the sexual experience, William Masters wanted to conduct research that would lead to an objective understanding of these topics. In 1957, he hired Virgina Johnson as a research assistant to begin this research issue. Together they developed polygraph-like instruments that were designed to measure human sexual response. Using these tools, Masters and Johnson initiated a project that ultimately included direct laboratory observation and measurement of 700 men and women while they were having intercourse or masturbating. Based on the data collected in this study, they co-authored the book Human Sexual Response in 1966. In this book, they identify and describe four phases in the human sexual response cycle : excitement, plateau, orgasm, and resolution. By this point in time, the generally repressive attitude toward sexuality was beginning to lift and the book found a ready audience.
In The Introduction to the History of Sexuality, Foucault explains how during the 19th century with the raise of new societies, the discourse or knowledge about sex was not confronted with repulsion but it “put into operation an entire machinery for producing true discourses concerning sex” (Foucault 69). In fact, this spreading of discourse on sexuality itself gives a clear account of how sexuality has been controlled and confined because it was determined in a certain kind of knowledge that carries power within it. Foucault reflects on the general working hypothesis or “repressive hypothesis,” and how this has exercised power to suppress people’s sexuality. It has power on deciding what is normal or abnormal and ethical or unethical about sexuality. Through discourses of life and sexuality, power is exercised because humans learned how to behave in relation to sexuality, which method keep individuals controlled and regulated. This explains why people experience that sense of behaving inappropriate when we talk about sex in a different way than the whole society. Foucault points up how sexuality is not just treated in terms of morality, but it is a matter of knowledge and “truth.” However, these discourses, including sexual discourses are not true or false, but they are just understood to be the truth or falsehood to control society. As a result, sexuality begins to be explored in a scientific way, developing the “truth” science of sex (Foucault 69). For Foucault, he asserts that sexuality has developed as a form of science that keeps us all afraid of such phenomena, which people think to be true, thus this science helps society to discipline and control individuals’ behaviors.
Halperin, David. "Is There a History of Sexuality?." The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry
Looking at our past, there have been dramatic changes in the way humans view sex. Long before the 1900s individuals framed their views based on the religious institution. Due to the fact that they strongly centered their idea of sexual thought on religion, they believed that the only purpose of having sex was to procreate. As the 1920’s approached, there were various factors that changed the way individuals viewed sex. The “new women” known, as flappers were women who were confident in who they were. They changed their attire as well as their social attitude. In the 1920s, the flappers redefined sex; customs and traditions were broken and new norms were created by society.
In the book History of Sexuality: An introduction, Volume 1 by Michel Foucault, he discusses the “repressive hypothesis” which he had developed. Sexual repression was due to the rise of the bourgeois. He suggests that the repressive hypothesis is important for discourse on the revolution of sexuality. Foucault has recognized the repressive hypothesis as a form of discourse. The repressive hypothesis has power to repress the debate of sexuality. Foucault mentions that society has created control over how people talk about sex over time. In the 17th century with the rise of the bourgeoisie, there had been control on the discourse of sex. In the 18th century, sex was studied for the means of regulating the demographic of the population. Sex lives
Also, it was interesting that Kinsey was able to stay without having sexual encounters with any girl until marriage. I believe that it is appropriate for a couple to experience their first sexual encounter with the
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian psychoanalyst in the twentieth century whose studies and interests were focused on psychosexual behavior, psychosocial behavior, and the unconscious. He blames incestual desires and acts on neurosis and believes neurotics were victimized and molested in their youth. Congruently, this is his explanation for sexual urges in children. He watched psychiatrists fail at inventions of electrical and chemical treatments for mental disorders, only for them to turn to treatments that followed concepts of psychoanalysis. Even though drugs diminish symptoms of suffering he believed psychoanalytic or talking therapy would truly restore a patient’s self-esteem and welfare. As quoted by Ernst G. Beier:
Somerville, Siobhan. "Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body." Gender, Sex, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University, 2009. 284-99. Print.
Psychosexual development, or stages, was considered a fixed sequence of childhood development stages, during which the id primarily finds sexual pleasure by focusing its energies on distinct erogenous zones. Sigmund Freud believed that every child had fully matured personalities by the age of six, but had to first endure five stages of development. Each stage had a certain fixation and interest that a child seemed to stay at before they matured to a teenager, and wherever the fixation lied, a problem or condition occurred later. The stages of psychosexual development were named the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages; all stages were critically important to the development of any person.
In today’s society things are being expressed and experienced at younger ages, than ever before in our time. Children and teenagers are discovering their sexuality at very early ages. Sexuality is the discovering of who you are and what makes you different from everybody else.
Throughout Western civilization, culturally hegemonic views on gender and sexuality have upheld a rigid and monolithic societal structure, resulting in the marginalization and dehumanization of millions of individuals who differ from the expected norm. Whether they are ridiculed as freaks, persecuted as blasphemers, or discriminated as sub-human, these individuals have been historically treated as invisible and pushed into vulnerable positions, resulting in cycles of poverty and oppression that remain prevalent even in modern times. Today, while many of these individuals are not publicly displayed as freaks or persecuted under Western law, women, queer, and intersexed persons within our society still nonetheless find themselves under constant