This week in the archives, I noticed an article about Theater Emory. The title says, “Theater Emory Probes the Complex Nature of Women.” At first glance it seems like the perfect article for sexual identity, and the title makes one hope for some sort of bisexual or asexual topics in order to line up perfectly with what has been read this week. Although nothing is explicitly said about any type of sexuality other than heterosexual, the play has some controversial undertones. The first thing that really stuck out, was that the “five portraits” of women, or five plays, were all written by men. The article claims that the plays are about the “myth of the feminine experience” but that myth is through the eyes of men. I thought this odd at first, and easily forgave them because I figured that they just didn’t have any female play writers. However I personally think this is a prime example of men overstepping their reach and imposing what/how they believe women behave, desire, and represent.Note Sep 27, 2012 (9)

Even though they do claim to “paint” a “myth of the experience” it will be a myth told by men. Often times we see men influence, if not dictate, the perception of many things, in this case the identity of a the female. Men’s interpretations and believes are also one of the reasons female homosexuality has a less negative connotation than male homosexuality. It was not mentioned but one does wonder if they will have any homosexually based story lines, or if the male writers thought that was not essential in painting the myth of a woman. This article was written in 1983.

In a 2003 article in the Emory Report there are two sections outlined in blue, one about the status of minorities, and the other about LGBT. It tells of a Pride banquet, and also mentions the first openly gay black female to hold office in Georgia, which is a very impressive accomplishment considering the state. There is also mention of a gay-hate art exhibit. This article was published in 2003 and one can not help but think about how different it was for gay and lesbians then compared to the 1980’s. Most of the articles I have seen have been from the 80’s so it was nice to have a fresher opinion on homosexuality.

Note Sep 27, 2012 (7)

The 1980’s can be best described as a time where poofy hairstyles were in, Calvin Klein the major brand and the first cases of AIDS were reported in the United States. This week, I spent my time in MARBl reviewing Emory yearbooks from 1981 and 1987. What I did notice, other than hairstyles, was how beginning with 1981, Emory’s sexuality was more apparent in public and pictures.

The first signs of sexuality were in the yearbook from 1981. This intro page reads “We kissed, and carried on- and allowed ourselves to talk about it openly in programs such as “Sex at Emory Expressed” during spring quarter.” I think that nowadays sexual talk is becoming sort of a norm between individuals in society and I was surprised to see this in because I could imagine how this little paragraph could have made such a big impact back then and how much weight it carries.

I’m sure that there is a correlation between the AIDS report in the United States to the number of sex talks on a campus such as Emory. What I would question now is, if AIDS did not exist or if it never made in impact in the US then, would we still have talked sex to our peers? Professors? World? Why did we need this negative impact to shift worldviews on sexuality and make voices heard? Today, would we still be hushed or afraid of talking sex if this never happened?

The positive impact that I can testify to, thanks to the AIDS epidemic is that voices began to speak up and were beginning to be heard. I think that because of this tragedy, we gained and are continuing to gain so much insight and knowledge about our uniqueness to one another and how communities are being created to support victims of AIDS and the LGBTQ groups. Yes, I feel that we have a long journey ahead of us in redefining what is “normal” and for those of us to get past our one minded views on relationships and discrimination but I think that we are better off than we were 30 years ago.

Programs such as “Sex at Emory Expresses” gave way to sex talk and awareness of sexuality in the Emory community. This shift towards sex talk in the classroom is more apparent today than ever before and I can see the benefit of them. Not only is this class exciting but, it raises awareness to the LGBTQ community and even helps to raise my own awareness to what my sexual opinions are. I have learned so much more in four weeks of this class than I did a full year of history.

Emory yearbook 1981. The first paragraph begins "We kissed..."

AIDS rally from Emory yearbook 1897.

Growing up in Korea and New Zealand before coming to Emory, I never heard about asexuality before. Sadly, the closest word I encountered before is probably ‘impotence’, which conveys a meaning of dysfunction and is definitely not the same meaning as asexuality. Perhaps because I was not aware of their existence, I thought the proportion of asexual population, one percent, was higher than I expected. Embarrassingly, I thought I was understanding variety of sexualities by talking about LGBT’s, but as I was reading the articles, I had so much to discover.

Asexuality first seemed to be a population of more variety because of the different life styles of the asexual people. Because asexuality is generally defined as ‘a person who does not experience sexual attraction’ (1), it includes all those who does not feel attraction but may or may not have romantic relationships, and do or do not engage in sexual activities. However Prause and Graham’s ‘Asexuality: Classification and Characterization’, had tested more aspects, including Sexual Desire indicator, Sexual Arousability indicator, and Sexual Inhibition indicator. Although asexuality sounds like they are not having any sexual activities, the investigation finds out that an asexual person may still have romantic relationship with a partner without sexual activities. In another examples, an asexual may even have both romance and sexual activities to make the partner pleased, and maybe avoid possible negative opinions from the society.

I thought that this is just as typical as more common, sexual (as opposed to asexual) people. ‘Normal’ people vary almost the same way as asexual people. Some of us have romantic and sexual relationship with the opposite sex or just the romance without the sexual activities before marriage. Fathers and nuns of catholic church, and monks in temples are attracted to their opposite sex, but do not have neither romance or sexual lives. Perhaps this similarity is one of the reasons why some people were not aware of asexuality. Compared to LGBT’s, who are different from heterosexuals in their behaviors, asexuals are different from heterosexuals in whether they feel or not. Since sexual lives are very private part of our daily lives, it will be almost impossible to see if a person is asexual unless we become very close to them.

It was mentioned in the reading that only some of the asexual people are in a romantic relationship because they like their partners ‘as a person’. However, from my narrow point of view, I could not understand the idea of being in a romance with somebody without being attracted to their sexuality. I could assume that LGBT’s are attracted to their partners in the same way as I feel when I see an attractive female, but I wanted to know how asexual person would start a relationship without such feeling.

I expect finding the answer for such question would be hard due to the low number of asexual people intending to participate in a research, and the private nature of the topic. However, as long as they exist in our society, we will more learn about them and start understanding them without prejudice.

Sources

(1) http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/200912/asexuals-who-are-they-and-why-are-they-important

(2) Prause, Nicole, Graham, C. A., Asexuality: Classification and Characterization.

Classification of Sexual Identities outside the LG Community

Talks with S

09/29/2012

The main focus of the topic in debate is usually about accepting the gay and lesbian community into our society. In this discussion, the bisexual and asexual community is although somewhat touched upon, the struggle seems to be of the acknowledgement of the LG community only. While some may disagree or somewhat agree with my view, I personally believe that this holds true for most of us. After the readings for this class, I am embarressed to say, that I myself did not know the basic classification of Asexuality. I knew it existed, however, I had never thought about it. Last week in class, we talked about broadening our thinking and not asking a child to choose his or her sexual identity at an early age. We discussed about not asking a girl who her “boyfriend” was and hoping that in the future one may ask a girl “ If she was dating someone?” with the open-mindedness of the answer referring to a girl or a guys name. Now, I feel that this question shouldn’t be asked at all!

Talking specifically about Asexuality and Bisexuality, the main issue is their acknowledgement as “real” sexual identities and then their full-fledged acceptance into society. According to Angelides, “Bisexuality has been persistently refused the title of legitimate sexual identity.” Till today, some regard it as a sexual identity invented by others for fun, for a popularity stunt or because of an imbalance of ones hormonal state. Similarly, Asexuality isn’t acknowledged as a “real” sexual identity either. According to Prause and Graham,  “We live in a world that assumes that everyone experiences sexual desires.” Thus, the first step for society should be to acknowledge the existence of bisexuality and asexuality as legitimate sexual identities.

My research on various random online databases helped me conclude that: some think that asexuality and bisexuality shouldn’t be dignified as sexual identities because bisexuality promotes sexually transmitted diseases, while asexuality leads to various ‘personal disorders’. According to Prause and Graham, asexuality can lead to hypoactive sexual desire disorder. In 2000, the American Psychiatric Association stated that, “absence of sexual fantasies and desires for sexual activity, leads to marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.” The association also states that this could potentially lead to extreme stress and then depression.

Although I feel that bisexuals have not been given the same acceptance into society as gays, and lesbians, I do not disregard the inclusion of “bisexuals” as the letter “B” to have been included in the LGBT Group.  However, this LGBT Group or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual Group that was formed a few decades ago, doesn’t traditionally acknowledge asexuality as a sexual identity. Around 1996, the letter “Q” referring to “queer” was added to LGBT, thereby making it the LGBTQ Group. This new letter “Q” stands for all sexual identities outside the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual identities, and was no longer based on gender but rather sexuality. This included: gender-queer, pansexual, auto-sexual, asexual and other identities. In some societies, the LGBT Community may be referred to as LGBTI where the “I” refers to Intersex, or LGBTHI where the letter “H” refers to a ‘new’ third or ‘some other’ gender known as “hijras” that do not identify themselves as a gender that is already known to society.

A few weeks ago in class, we talked about “how far we had progressed towards acceptance and acknowledgment of the inclusive model.” As many students mentioned in class, we have progressed somewhat, after all we are able to have this conversation in an academic format among young adults. However, we may not even be aware of all the sexual identities people may associate themselves with. My suggestion would be educating the youth about this. When I asked several of my friends to define asexuality, they could not. They were unable to define it in even loose words. The concept of not feeling sexually aroused by another human is something that exists, however, many of us, are not even unaware of it.

Citations:

A. Graham Cynthia and Prause, Nicole. Asexulaity: Classification and Characterization.

Angelides, Steven. Introducing Bisexuality.

It has been argued that Disney and its competitors, such as Pixar and DreamWorks, have used children’s movies to transmit subliminal messages to adolescent minds about various different topics.  In the past, I have studied how FDR, who when faced with the rapid spread of Nazism in the 1930s, created the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs within the Motion Picture section of the State department to promote the image of “the American way”.  The “American way” was used to promote the President’s Good Neighbor Policy, which reinforced the idea that the United States would be a “good neighbor” and engage in reciprocal exchanges with Latin American countries. FDR hired Hollywood to create propaganda, most notably in Disney films, to promote his policy, when in reality our country’s interest lied in being able to exploit the countries of Latin America in the wake of WWII.

The pro-Pan-America and the love thy neighbor propaganda campaign allowed the film industry to market the people of the “Americas” for US entertainment. With Europe shut off for business, America needed a look elsewhere for an economic partner. FDR wanted film studios to create movies about Latin Americas in order to bridge the cultural divide.  Instead, this resulted in film studios marketing a heightened stereotype of Latinos with pulsating music and oozing sexuality.  Most notably in Disney’s The Three Caballeros, the film studio portrayed the South of the Border as a thrilling, provocative, and intensely sexual culture, through characters such as Carmen Miranda.

The portrayal of Latinos in these films also reinforced the “typical” American social order.  In these movies, whoever came out on the top was a strong male who was civilized, ready to conquer, and play the roll as the savior in society.  Those who were often left behind were the females who were there to serve the sexual desires of men.  Latin men and women were shown as having hypersexual tendencies to the point of being flamboyant.  This goal was to show that this could in no way be a productive society, but rather a society that was dependent on the US to be civilized.

When I read in the article “School’s Out: Asexy teens” how Disney movies “feed the narratives that give [children] a narrow sense of their options when it comes to forming social, romantic, and sexual attachments,” I thought of Carmen Miranda.  Asexuality and “atypical” relations are rarely mentioned in children’s movies, as this is not perceived as ”normal”.  I would assume that if Disney marketed a movie where two princes fall in love, very few parents would be rushing to take their children to the movie theater to see it.  Not only do we see Disney highlight sexuality in American social policy, but also there are many other sexual references in the company’s movies.  There are countless examples of images and lyrics in Disney songs that have a sexual connotation.  The many hidden messages that Disney includes in its movies reinforces the notion that sex sells, and engrains in children’s minds that this is the “normal” lifestyle to lead.

Interesting Reads:

http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/tcom/faculty/ha/tcom103fall2003/gp13/gp13.pdf (about sexual images in Disney movies)

http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC39folder/3caballeros.html (about FDR’s Good neighbor policy and the sexualization of Latinos in Disney films)