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Chapter 14
Gender Roles, Female Sexuality, and
Male Sexuality
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Gender Roles and Stereotypes
• Gender role - set of norms, or culturally
defined expectations, that define how
people of one gender ought to behave
• Stereotype - a generalization about a group
of people that distinguishes them from
others
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Gender Roles and Ethnicity
• Gender-role stereotypes vary among various
ethnic groups of the United States
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African Americans
Latinos
Asian Americans
American Indians
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Gender Schema Theory
• Sandra Bern’s theory about a set of ideas
that we associate with males and females
• Socialization - refers to the ways in which
society conveys to the individual its norms
or expectations for his or her behavior
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Male-Female Psychological
Differences
• Males and females differ in aggressiveness
– Males are generally more aggressive than
females
• Males and females differ in their style of
communicating, both verbally and
nonverbally
• There are gender differences in selfdisclosure
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Male-Female Differences in
Sexuality
• Masturbation - men are more likely to have
masturbated than women
• Attitudes about casual sex - men are more
approving of casual sex
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Male-Female Differences in
Sexuality
• Arousal to erotica - men are more aroused
by erotic materials
• Orgasm consistency - men are more
consistent than women at having orgasms
during sex
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Why the Differences?
• Biological factors
– Anatomy
– Hormones
• Cultural factors
– Double standard
– Gender roles
– Marital and family roles
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Why the Differences?
• Other factors
– Women get pregnant and men do not
– Ineffective techniques of stimulating the
woman
– Fewer women masturbate than men
– Gender differences in orgasm consistency
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Beyond the Young Adults
• Person-centered sex - sexual expression in which
the emphasis is on the relationship and emotions
between the two people
• Body-centered sex - sexual in which the emphasis
is on the body and physical pleasure
• Adolescent male sexuality is body-centered, and
the person-centered aspect is not added until later
• Adolescent female sexuality is person-centered,
and body-centered sex comes later
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Transsexualism
• Transsexual - is a person who believes he or
she is trapped in the body of the other
gender; also known as a transgender person
• Gender dysphoria - unhappiness with one’s
gender; another term for transsexualism
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Transsexualism
• Sex-change operations - the surgery done on
transsexuals to change their anatomy to the other
gender
• Male-to-female transsexual - a person who is born
with a male body but who has a female identity
and wishes to become a female biologically in
order to match her identity
• Female-to-male transsexual - those with female
bodies who think they are males
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The Sex-Change Operation
• Gender reassignment is complex and
proceeds in several stages:
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Counseling
Hormone therapy
Real life test
Surgery
• What causes transsexualism - no definite
causes are known
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Other Issues
• Buccal smear - a test of genetic sex, in which a
small scraping of cells is taken from the inside of
the mouth, stained, and examined under a
microscope
• Barr body - a small, black dot appearing in the
cells of genetic females; it represents an
inactivated X chromosome
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Criticisms of Sex-Change Surgery
• Meyer found no significant differences in
adjustment of transsexuals who received
surgery and those who did not
– Other studies found Meyer’s scale “peculiar”
• Approximately 7% of the cases have tragic
outcomes
– suicide
– requests for re-reversal
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