Sexual preference and media

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Sexual preference and media

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Title: Sexual preference and media

1
Sexual preference and media
2
The dominant mode of sexual preference is
heterosexualiy

Most people self-identify as hetero
Seen as normal
Enforced through religious doctrine
Enforced through law
Enforced through violence or negative
stereotyping
Media follow/influence normative beliefs about
society and social groups

Voter exit polls in the United States found that
between 4 and 5 percent of voters in the last
five U.S. national elections identified as gay or
lesbian. While voters may constitute a large
sample of the U.S. population, they are still not
representative of the population at large.

The NHSLS found that 1.4 percent of women and 2.8
percent of men thought of themselves as
homosexual or bisexual, while more than 4 percent
of women and more than 6 percent of men report a
sexual attraction to people of the same sex.
Another analysis that combines data from the
NHSLS and several waves of the GSS finds that 3.6
percent of women and nearly 5 percent of men
report having had sexual contact with a partner
of the same sex since they were age 18. A
national survey in Canada (2003) found that 1.9
percent of men and 1.6 percent of women reported
being gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

The American Psychological Association states
that, "sexual orientation emerges for most people
in early adolescence without any prior sexual
experience. And some people report trying very
hard over many years to change their sexual
orientation from homosexual to heterosexual with
no success. For these reasons, psychologists do
not consider sexual orientation for most people
to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily
changed."

The APA adds that, "Homosexuality was thought to
be a mental illness in the past because mental
health professionals and society had biased
information about homosexuality since most
studies only involved lesbians and gay men in
therapy. When researchers examined data about gay
people who were not in therapy, the idea that
homosexuality was a mental illness was found to
be untrue."

The identical twin problem
Essentially all conservative Christian authors
who have written about homosexuality maintain
that sexual orientation is not determined by
one's genes. Most treat it as an abnormal,
unnatural, chosen, and changeable habit or
addiction. Religious conservatives often point to
studies of identical twins who were separated at
birth and raised independently. If one is gay,
then the other twin is found to be gay only about
55 of the time. They reason that since
identical twins have the same genetic structure,
then if homosexual orientation were determined by
genes, 100 of the other twins would be gay. Thus
they conclude that homosexual orientation is not
caused by one's genes.
Many gays and lesbians believe that their
orientation is caused by their genes it is
normal, natural, unchosen and unchangeable. With
the exception of one small religious association
of therapists, the vast majority of human
sexuality researchers and mental health
therapists accept that the root cause of
homosexual orientation is genetic.
The data seems to show that a small minority of
individuals -- perhaps 10 -- have a "gay gene"
or "gay genes." However, the gene is only
expressed in perhaps 55 of those individuals, as
a result of some unknown factor in the
environment. In the remainder, it remains dormant
and the person matures as a heterosexual.
Source religioustolerance.org

Gaybashing attacks represent a significant
percentage of all hate crime incidents in the
United States. For example, according to the
Human Rights Campaign, FBI statistics for 2001
show that sexual orientation-based hate crimes
constituted 13.9 of all reported bias incidents,
making it the third highest ranked category,
after crimes due to racial and religious
prejudice.
Source www.glbtq.com

A 1984 report by the National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force suggested that almost every
glbtq-identified person surveyed has experienced
some form of verbal, physical, or
property-related abuse as a direct consequence of
their sexual or gender identification.

Although statistics are not available on the
actual numbers of AIDS-related attacks, it is
significant that gaybashing incidents that
included verbal references to AIDS, as well as
attacks against people with AIDS, became more
noticeable in the late 1980s.

11
Gaybashing in the Media

It is rare that gaybashing incidents generate
major media coverage. Until the 1990s, gaybashing
was not considered a crime that warranted more
than local attention. In the 1980s, however, gay
people became visible in the media due to the
spread of AIDS in the United States. The
epidemic, and its connection to the gay
community, led to increased levels of anti-gay
fear and hatred, which, in turn, fueled increases
in gaybashing.

Two murders, motivated by homophobia and
transphobia, that occurred during the 1990s
garnered significant national media attention.
Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay University of
Wyoming student, was targeted by his assailants
because of his sexual orientation. On October 7,
1998, in Laramie, Wyoming, Shepard was lured from
a campus bar by two men who gave him a ride. The
men drove him to a remote location, savagely beat
him, tied him to a fence, and left him to die.

On Christmas Day, 1993, Brandon Teena was beaten
and raped by two men who had learned that
Brandon, whom they had previously befriended and
had believed was male, had actually been born
female. Following the attack, Teena reported the
rape to the local police, who failed to take any
action against the assailants. Almost a week
later, the two men tracked Teena down and
murdered him.

In particular, Matthew Shepard was viewed with a
great deal of compassion in the media. As a
young, white, attractive, "normal-looking"
college student who was tortured and killed with
sensational brutality, Shepard was viewed as the
acceptable face of homosexuality to whom sympathy
could be given.

The Brandon Teena Story (1998) Kimberly Peirce's
feature film Boys Don't Cry (1999)
Moises Kaufman and the Techtonic Theater
Project's play The Laramie Project (2000, made
into an HBO motion picture in 2002) and NBC's
The Matthew Shepard Story (2002).

there are clear changes in the media of the past
ten years or so, which bring certain ideas much
more into the mainstream than they ever were
before -- the visibility of gays and lesbians,
for example (even though it's still limited)
Source David Gauntlett
http//theoryhead.com/gender/interview1.htm

KP Umm, I'm not sure. For the sake of polemic,
I'm going to say not necessarily. In the 1970s,
Soap had a gay character and high ratings, and
disco allowed for more sexual expression. Going
all the way back to the 1920s, there were two
lesbian plays and one gay play on Broadway!
Again, I think that at certain times the culture
is more willing to support alternative
sexualities. Maybe because I fancy myself a
historian of a certain stripe I'm going to insist
on a cyclical pattern eruptions at different
points rather than a progression. On the other
hand, I'm not going to insist blindly that there
hasn't been a transformation of some kind in the
way we think and live sexuality certainly at
this moment there does seem to be a more liberal
and less sexist attitude to sex.

Change at every level
The prominence of these questions of identity in
modern society is both a consequence and a cause
of changes at the institutional level. Typically,
Giddens sees connections between the most 'micro'
aspects of society - individuals' internal sense
of self and identity - and the big 'macro'
picture of the state, multinational capitalist
corporations, and globalisation. These different
levels, which have traditionally been treated
quite separately by sociology, have influence
upon each other, and cannot really be understood
in isolation.
Take, for example, the changes in intimate
relationships which we have seen in the last
sixty years - the much greater levels of divorce
and separation as people move from one
relationship to another, the substantially
increased openness about sexuality, and much more
conspicuous sexual diversity. These changes
cannot be understood by assuming they were led by
social institutions and the state, not least of
all because traditional thinking on both left and
right has been that both capitalism and the
'moral authorities' of the state would prefer the
population to have stable monogamous family
lives.
Source Gauntlett ( ) www.theory.org.uk

Anthony Giddens The reflexive project of the
self
Making a narrative
If the self is 'made', rather than inherited or
just passively static, what form is it in? What
is the thing that we make? Giddens says that in
the post-traditional order, self-identity becomes
a reflexive project - an endeavour that we
continuously work and reflect on. We create,
maintain and revise a set of biographical
narratives - the story of who we are, and how we
came to be where we are now.
Self-identity, then, is not a set of traits or
observable characteristics. It is a person's own
reflexive understanding of their biography.
Self-identity has continuity - that is, it cannot
easily be completely changed at will - but that
continuity is only a product of the person's
reflexive beliefs about their own biography
(Giddens 1991 53).

Anthony Giddens Lifestyle
Choose your future
In the post-traditional era, since social roles
are no longer handed to us by society, we have to
choose a 'lifestyle' - although the options are
not, of course, unlimited. 'Lifestyle choices'
may sound like a luxury of the more affluent
classes, but Giddens asserts that everyone in
modern society has to select a lifestyle,
although different groups will have different
possibilities (and wealth would certainly seem to
increase the range of options). 'Lifestyle' is
not only about fancy jobs and conspicuous
consumption, though the term applies to wider
choices, behaviours, and (to greater or lesser
degrees) attitudes and beliefs.
Lifestyles could be said to be like ready-made
templates for a narrative of self. But the choice
of one lifestyle does not predict any particular
type of life story. So a lifestyle is more like a
genre whilst movie directors can choose to make
a romance, or a western, or a horror story, we -
as 'directors' of our own life narratives - can
choose a metropolitan or a rural lifestyle, a
lifestyle focused on success in work, or one
centred on clubbing, sport, romance, or sexual
conquests.

Beyond tradition
... The choices which we make in modern society
may be affected by the weight of tradition on the
one hand, and a sense of relative freedom on the
other. Everyday choices about what to eat, what
to wear, who to socialise with, are all decisions
which position ourselves as one kind of person
and not another. And as Giddens says, 'The more
post-traditional the settings in which an
individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the
very core of self-identity, its making and
remaking' (1991 81).
... The importance of the media in propagating
many modern lifestyles should be obvious. ...
The range of lifestyles - or lifestyle ideals -
offered by the media may be limited, but at the
same time it is usually broader than those we
would expect to just 'bump into' in everyday
life. So the media in modernity offers
possibilities and celebrates diversity, but also
offers narrow interpretations of certain roles or
lifestyles - depending where you look.

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KP In a related question, gay rights, or even
freedom of sexual orientation are certainly more
visible in popular culture than they were five or
certainly ten years ago. At the same time, does
this increased visibility really lead to
increased acceptance? Or, are the media gains
made to stand in for real, political gains.

DG Well of course we should never confuse
changes in the media with changes in real life.
However I do think that popular media can take a
leading role in this kind of social change. On
its own, the media can't transform people's
attitudes, but I think it can help to chip away
at people's prejudices. To take up an example you
mentioned, intolerance towards lesbians and gays
is slowly decreasing (I've got statistics about
this in the book). By no means has it gone away,
but it's in decline. I think that one part of the
reason for that is that TV has allowed people to
'get to know' some pleasant gay characters. That
doesn't always work of course -- some people are
so intolerant that they just get even more angry
when they see people from groups they hate on
screen. But I think that over time, popular media
is bound to be able to slowly affect attitudes.