march in Washington, D.C., in August 1970, from
Farragut Square to
Lafayette Park march in London, UK, 1971. A
Gay Liberation Front banner is visible. Location is believed to be Trafalgar Square. Human sexuality can be understood as part of the social life of humans, which is governed by implied rules of behavior and the status quo. This narrows the view to groups within a society.
Sex education The age and manner in which children are informed of issues of sexuality is a matter of
sex education. The school systems in almost all developed countries have some form of sex education, but the nature of the issues covered varies widely. In some countries, such as Australia and much of Europe, age-appropriate sex education often begins in pre-school, whereas other countries leave sex education to the pre-teenage and teenage years. Sex education covers a range of topics, including the physical, mental, and social aspects of sexual behavior. Communities have differing opinions on the appropriate age for children to learn about sexuality. According to
Time magazine and
CNN, 74% of teenagers in the United States reported that their major sources of sexual information were their peers and the media, compared to 10% who named their parents or a sex education course. Proponents for an abstinence-only education believe that teaching a comprehensive curriculum would encourage teenagers to have sex, while proponents for comprehensive sex education argue that many teenagers will have sex regardless and should be equipped with knowledge of how to have sex responsibly. According to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, many teens who intend to be abstinent fail to do so, and when these teenagers do have sex, many do not use safe sex practices such as
contraceptives.
Sexuality in history Sexuality has been an important, vital part of human existence throughout history. All civilizations have managed sexuality through sexual standards, representations, and behavior. These changes in sexual ideology were used to control female sexuality and to differentiate standards by gender. With these ideologies, sexual possessiveness and increases in jealousy emerged. While retaining the precedents of earlier civilizations, each classical civilization established a somewhat distinctive approach to gender, artistic expression of sexual beauty, and to behaviors such as homosexuality. Some of these distinctions are portrayed in sex manuals, which were also common among civilizations in China, Greece, Rome, Persia, and India; each has its own sexual history. During the 12th century, hostility toward homosexuality began to spread throughout religious and secular institutions. By the end of the 19th century, it was viewed as a pathology. According to Freud, a person's orientation depended on the resolution of the Oedipus complex. He said male homosexuality resulted when a young boy had an authoritarian, rejecting mother and turned to his father for love and affection, and later to men in general. He said female homosexuality developed when a girl loved her mother and identified with her father and became fixated at that stage. This definition remained the professional understanding of homosexuality until 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their list of diagnoses for mental disorders. and her findings played a pivotal role in shifting the scientific community away from the perspective that homosexuality was something that needed to be treated or cured.
Sexuality, colonialism, and race European conquerors/colonists discovered that many non-European cultures had expressions of sexuality and gender which differed from European notion of
heterosexual cisnormativity. These would include
transgender practices. In North America and the United States, Europeans have used claims of sexual immorality to justify discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. Scholars also study the ways in which
colonialism has affected sexuality today and argue that due to
racism and
slavery it has been dramatically changed from the way it had previously been understood. In her book,
Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race, and Morality in Colonial Asia, Laura Stoler investigates how the
Dutch colonists used sexual control and gender-specific sexual sanctions to distinguish between the rulers from the ruled and enforce colonial domination onto the people of
Indonesia. In America, there are 155 native tribes that are recorded to have embraced
two-spirit people within their tribes, but the total number of tribes could be greater than what is documented. Two-spirit people were and still are members of communities who do not fall under Western gender categories of male and female, but rather under a "
third gender" category. This system of gender contradicts both the gender binary and the assertion that sex and gender are the same. Instead of conforming to traditional roles of men and women, two-spirit fill a special niche in their communities. For example, two-spirited people are commonly revered for possessing special wisdom and spiritual powers. Historically, European colonizers perceived relationships involving two-spirited people as homosexuality, and therefore believed in the moral inferiority of native people. Within reservations, the Religious Crime Code of the 1880s explicitly aimed to "aggressively attack Native sexual and marriage practices". In the United States people of color face the effects of colonialism in different ways with stereotypes such as the Mammy and Jezebel for Black women;
lotus blossom and dragon lady for Asian women; and the spicy Latina. These stereotypes contrast with standards of sexual conservatism, creating a dichotomy that dehumanizes and demonizes the stereotyped groups. An example of a stereotype that lies at the intersection of racism, classism, and
misogyny is the archetype of the
welfare queen. Cathy Cohen describes how the welfare queen stereotype demonizes poor black single mothers for deviating from conventions surrounding family structure.
Reproductive and sexual rights Reproductive and sexual rights encompass the concept of applying
human rights to issues related to reproduction and sexuality. This concept is a modern one, and remains controversial since it deals, directly and indirectly, with issues such as
contraception,
LGBT rights,
abortion,
sex education, freedom to choose a partner, freedom to decide whether to be sexually active or not, right to bodily integrity, freedom to decide whether or not, and when, to have children. These are all global issues that exist in all cultures to some extent, but manifest differently depending on the specific contexts. According to the Swedish government, "sexual rights include the right of all people to decide over their own bodies and sexuality" and "reproductive rights comprise the right of individuals to decide on the number of children they have and the intervals at which they are born." Such rights are not accepted in all cultures, with practices such criminalization of consensual sexual activities (such as those related to homosexual acts and sexual acts outside marriage), acceptance of
forced marriage and
child marriage, failure to criminalize all non-consensual sexual encounters (such as
marital rape),
female genital mutilation, or restricted availability of contraception, being common around the world.
Stigma of contraceptives in the U.S. In 1915,
Emma Goldman and
Margaret Sanger, leaders of the birth control movement, began to spread information regarding contraception in opposition to the laws, such as the Comstock Law, that demonized it. One of their main purposes was to assert that the birth control movement was about empowering women with personal reproductive and economic freedom for those who could not afford to parent a child or simply did not want one. Goldman and Sanger saw it necessary to educate people as contraceptives were quickly being stigmatized as a population control tactic due to being a policy limiting births, disregarding that this limitation did not target ecological, political, or large economic conditions. This stigma targeted lower-class women who had the most need of access to contraception. Birth control finally began to lose stigma in 1936 when the ruling of
U.S. v. One Package declared that prescribing contraception to save a person's life or well-being was no longer illegal under the Comstock Law. Although opinions varied on when birth control should be available to women, by 1938, there were 347 birth control clinics in the United States but advertising their services remained illegal. The stigma continued to lose credibility as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly showed her support for birth control through the four terms her husband served (1933–1945). However, it was not until 1966 that the Federal Government began to fund family planning and subsidized birth control services for lower-class women and families at the order of President Lyndon B. Johnson. This funding continued after 1970 under the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act. Today, all Health Insurance Marketplace plans are required to cover all forms of contraception, including sterilization procedures, as a result of The Affordable Care Act signed by President Barack Obama in 2010.
Stigma and activism during the AIDS epidemic In 1981, doctors diagnosed the first reported cases of
AIDS in America. The disease disproportionately affected and continues to affect gay and bisexual men, especially black and Latino men. The
Reagan administration is criticized for its apathy towards the AIDS epidemic, and audio recordings reveal that Ronald Reagan's press secretary
Larry Speakes viewed the epidemic as a joke, mocking AIDS by calling it the "gay plague". The epidemic also carried stigma coming from religious influences. For example, Cardinal Krol voiced that AIDS was "an act of vengeance against the sin of homosexuality", which clarifies the specific meaning behind the pope's mention of "the moral source of AIDS."
Activism during the AIDS crisis focused on promoting safe sex practices to raise awareness that the disease could be prevented. The "Safe Sex is Hot Sex" campaign, for example, aimed to promote the use of condoms. Campaigns by the U.S. government, however, diverged from advocacy of safe sex. In 1987, Congress even denied federal funding from awareness campaigns that "[promoted] or [encouraged], directly or indirectly, homosexual activities".
Gay men from San Francisco and New York City created the Denver Principles, a foundational document that demanded the rights, agency, and dignity of people living with AIDS. These interactions allowed western gay "culture" to be introduced to gay men in countries where homosexuality was not an important identifier. Thus, group organizers self-identified as gay more and more, creating the basis for further development of gay consciousness in different countries. ==Sexual behavior==