Sexual behavior and culture.

Culture determines to a large extent attitudes toward women who participate in premarital sex. Traditional and conservative cultures still view chastity as having a great value for women. Valuing virtue has caused real conflict between conservative Muslim societies and the more globalized societies in Europe and the United States. The gate keepers of Muslim culture seek to prevent what they see as corruption of modern society and Western cultural influences and subversion brought into the society through movies, television and books. Typically attitudes toward sexuality in traditional societies are connected to concepts of family honor where the woman commits serious transgressions by having intimate relations with a man not approved by the family, or by marrying a non-believer. As noted in some cases this perverted sense of honor has produced honor murders, the ultimate form of male control over female family members.

Male control in conservative cultures is also exerted in other sexually related behaviors especially in the case of female genital mutilations. When a female child reaches puberty in many societies in Africa, Middle East, Asia and other cultures she faces the practice of genital mutilation by the removal of external female organs. Often these “surgeries” are performed under very painful and unsanitary conditions. The objective is obvious, by removing genital organs society expects that women will not enjoy or participate in sex except for child bearing reasons. Sexual mutilations along with enforcement of the veil are means used to keep female sexuality under male control. Yet because the practice is connected to family honor not performing the mutilation can affect the girl’s chance for making a good marriage in some societies. Even among Egyptian student nurses some 60% favored genital mutilation of their own daughters (Whitehorn, Ayonrinde, & Maingay, 2002; Dandash, Refaat, & Eyada, 2001). For people raised in more egalitarian cultures that practice seem not only to belong to a dark past, but barbaric in the suppression of natural sexual behavior of females.

It is difficult even under egalitarian conditions to obtain true estimates of gender differences in sexual behavior. Even though society has changed significantly in the Western world sexual permissiveness for females is not as acceptable as for males. That fact causes females to be less than truthful on surveys that seek information about premarital or extra marital sexual behavior. For example men typically report engaging in sexual behavior at an earlier time, more frequently and more promiscuously compared to females. Research shows that the distinctions between the genders may in reality not be as large as those reported in the literature, because females do not always give truthful answers when the behavior in question is considered embarrassing or shameful. In one study about sexual behavior the experimenters told the participants that a lie detector test would detect untruthfulness in their responses to a survey on sexuality. The responses of the women in that study closely paralleled that of the men in the lie detector condition, whereas under other conditions not including lie detection there were large male-female differences in reported sexuality (Alexander & Fisher, 2003).

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 792