Amin Ghaziani - Sex Cultures

Cultural Sociology series

Wayne H. Brekhus, Culture and Cognition: Patterns in the Social Construction of Reality

Amin Ghaziani, Sex Cultures

James M. Jasper, Protest: A Cultural Introduction to Social Movements

Paul McLean, Culture in Networks

Frederick F. Wherry, The Culture of Markets

Amin Ghaziani

polity

Copyright Amin Ghaziani 2017

The right of Amin Ghaziani to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2017 by Polity Press

Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1858-6

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ghaziani, Amin, author.
Title: Sex cultures / Amin Ghaziani.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016038603 (print) | LCCN 2017004430 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745670393 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745670409 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781509518579 (Mobi) | ISBN 9781509518586 (Epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex.
Classification: LCC HQ21 .G465 2017 (print) | LCC HQ21 (ebook) | DDC 306.7--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038603

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Chapter 1 draws on material previously published in: Ghaziani, Amin (2015) The Queer Metropolis, pp. 305330 in Handbook of the Sociology of Sexualities, ed. J. DeLamater and R. F. Plante. New York: Springer. Reprinted with permission.
Chapter 2 draws on material previously published in: Ghaziani, Amin, Verta Taylor, and Amy Stone (2016) Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements, Annual Review of Sociology 42: 16583. Reprinted with permission from the Annual Review of Sociology, Volume 42 2016 by Annual Reviews, http://www.annualreviews.org.

In April 2011, the global retailer J. Crew published a photo spread in its catalogue that showed the companys president and creative director, Jenna Lyons, laughing with her five-year-old son Beckett, holding his tiny feet in her hand. The caption reads: Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon (see ). The ad incited public fury about the meaning of gender and sexuality. The Los Angeles Times reported, To some the photo depicts a sweet moment between a stylish mom and her equally stylish son. To others, however, it reads as a questionable endorsement of parental support of transgendered or genderneutral children.

The journalist interviewed experts who represented competing points of view. Speaking for one side, the psychiatrist Keith Ablow observed, This is a dramatic example of the way that our culture is being encouraged to abandon all trappings of gender identity homogenizing males and females when the outcome of such psychological sterilization... is not known. In a separate interview with Fox News, Dr Ablow insisted that the ad crossed a line by violating socially important gender and sexual distinctions. It was an attack on masculinity, he said, and it threatened the foundations of heterosexuality. Parenting expert Dr Susan Bartell disagreed. Liking the color pink is unrelated to gender or sexuality, she argued. [A kids] gender is going to emerge naturally as part of who they are and has nothing to do with whether we put pink nail polish on them.

The screaming spread from a fashion catalog to the print media and eventually found its way onto television, where The Daily Show apocalyptically declared the coming of Toemaggedon. Jon Stewart presented a satiric interview with a self-described senior gender analyst and sexuality expert who asserted, Youve got to teach your kids appropriate gender-specific behavior from the get-go. You have to model. I want my boy to be straight.

J. Crew did not comment, saying that they did not want to add fuel to what they considered a nonstory.

Which perspective do you agree with?

Are there any other positions that you can identify?

What does this episode tell you about the assumptions people make related to sex, gender, and sexuality?

Saturday with Jenna

People are obsessed with sex or, I should clarify, we are obsessed with talking about it, even if it sometimes leaves us feeling flustered. From Internet memes to college classrooms and everything in between, it seems like sex shows up all the time in our conversations. But just because we use the word a lot doesnt mean that we agree on what it signifies. Hardly. To muddy the matter, we often say sex when we really should say gender or sexuality and our discussions get inflamed fast, as they did about one little ad from J. Crew. Whys it so complicated? The snag, I think, comes from some deep-rooted assumptions that we make about sex, without even realizing it, which then blind us to a bigger picture. Three stand out to me as the most common culprits: sex is natural, private, and timeless. Lets take at quick look at each one so that we dont make the same mistakes over and over again.

Sex is natural. It is a basic biological mandate, Arlene Stein (1989:1) explains. Our genitals, libidos, chromosomes, and hormones exist in its service, and we express it in physical acts that have reproduction as the end goal. Sex is a natural force that exists prior to social life, Gayle Rubin remarks when she discusses how people think about bodies, biology and nature a natural libido yearning to break free of social constraint (Rubin 1993: 910). Notice that Rubin repeats the word natural. She is drawing our attention to an idea that scholars call sexual essentialism: we confuse the relationship between sex and society. Sex allegedly comes first. It is