sociology
Tido1!
marriageandfamilywk2questions.docx1. This just in: A new study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found that “fully straight” people don’t exist. Unfortunately, the Journal article is not available for free online, so I do not have access to the actual article yet but here is a summary of the research findings. Once you read the information below please answer the following questions.
Researchers looked as the eyeballs of straight-identifying men to determine just how straight they were. Turns out, every single one of them was just a wee bit gay. “It’s basically a study that assesses sexual orientation by looking at the eyes and whether they dilate or not,” Ritch C. Savin-Williams, the Director of Developmental Psychology and the Director of the Sex and Gender Lab in the Department of Human Development at Cornell University, told website Broadly. He continues, “You can’t control your eye dilation. Essentially, that’s what the whole project attempts to get at, another way of assessing sexuality without relying on self-report.”
Savin-Williams and his team closely monitored the eye dilation of men while showing them a range of pornographic imagery. “We show straight men a picture of a woman masturbating, and they respond just like a straight guy, but then you also show them a guy masturbating and their eyes dilate a little bit. So, we’re able to show physiologically that all guys are not gay, straight, or bi.” So, what does this all mean? “There are aspects [of male sexuality] along a continuum, just as we have always recognized with women,” Savin-Williams says. “Men have gotten so much cultural crap put on them that even if a man does have some sexual attraction to guys, they would never say it.”
Savin-Williams say another way of monitoring responses would be by monitoring a person’s genital arousal, but, he says “that gets a little invasive.” So, they just stuck to their eyeballs.
Savin-Williams adds that while the study once again confirms that sexuality operates on a spectrum, it also finds that it’s not a binary system, which means that while someone can’t be 100% straight, they also can’t be 100% gay either.
Questions:
a. Do you believe that it is plausible that by monitoring eye dilation, researchers can obtain a valid measure of sexual arousal or attractiveness?
b. Although considered invasive today, do you believe that monitoring genital arousal would be less, more, or the same in terms of validly measuring sexual arousal or attractiveness?
c. Do you believe the conclusion above that people are neither 100 percent straight nor 100 percent gay? Do you consider this finding to be controversial or “ho hum” and not that big of a
Deal? Explain.
2. Here is an article that presents more information about the idea that there is a continuum in terms of a person's sexuality called "What Does It Mean to Be “Mostly Heterosexual?"
3. Thinking of sources of information such as your parents, grandparents, and other adults of a generation or two older than you, what are some aspects of gender roles that have changed from these older generations when compared to gender roles in your generation? If possible, also compare your generation with a generation younger than you. Does the older generation typically see the changes that have occurred or are now occurring as negative or positive? Are there any differences between the terms sex and gender? Give examples.
4. I watched several commercials and observed things that I had not observed before, the subliminal messages. To be honest I really don't watch commercials, as I dvr anything I watch to skip them. Both commercials I looked up were based on the Gender Schema Theory. The first one I watched was a tide commercial where the mom, dad and daughter were all preparing for a trip. Dad was watching TV, mom and daughter were running around preparing laundry and packing. So the daughter was helping her mother and preparing in a sense to do this for her husband in the future. Dad was relaxing while mom was doing her job, which was a household chore. In another commercial, Mr. Clean shows up at a stay at home mom's door to give her a cleanser that was strong like him. Instead of cleaning it, he gives it to her because it is her job to clean and the cleanser is strong like him because he is a man, so he's giving her the muscle because she isn't strong. These were old commercials of course. The more recent commercials I’ve seen of time and Mr. Clean have men cleaning and helping. I just wanted to compare the commercials from different time periods. Very interesting. What do you think of this?
