Blanchard's Autogynephilia Theory: A Critique

Over the last 20 years, Ray Blanchard, Ph.D., with a variety of coauthors and collaborators, has proposed a theory that links the sexual orientation of male-to-female transsexuals with the presence or absence of autogynephilia (erotic arousal by the thought or image of “himself” as a woman). Blanchard's Autogynephilia Theory suggests that the association between sexual orientation and autogynephilia among male-to-female transsexuals is clinically important and the association is always (or almost always) present. Although the theory has been criticized by clinicians, researchers, and transsexuals themselves, it has not been critiqued in a peer-reviewed article previously. This article will attempt to fill that gap. Key studies on which the theory is based will be analyzed and alternative interpretations of the data presented. I conclude that although autogynephilia exists, the theory is flawed.     

Observing Erotic Videos With Heterosexual Content Induces Different Cerebral Responses in Homosexual and Heterosexual Men

ABSTRACT

To determine the cerebral functionality associated with the perception and processing of erotic stimuli in men with different sexual orientation, this work evaluated the electroencephalographic activity (EEG) from several cortical areas, as well as subjective arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men during observation of an erotic film with heterosexual content. The heterosexual men rated the erotic video with higher general and sexual arousal than the homosexual participants. During observation of the neutral and erotic videos, both groups showed a decreased amplitude of the alpha band in prefrontal and parietal cortices, indicating increased attention. When watching the erotic video, the homosexual men showed an increased amplitude of the theta and fast bands only in the prefrontal cortex, which could be related to the cognitive processing of the erotic stimulus. These EEG results should broaden our knowledge of the cortical mechanisms related to the different perception and processing of erotic stimuli in men with different sexual orientations.     

Chicks,Dicks, and Contradictions

This essay examines Playgirl as a rich, yet overlooked, archive in the history of American pornography. Although the magazine often is dismissed as the token attempt of a masculinist industry to equalize its representational politics, I argue instead that a significant synergy exists between Playgirl and entwined debates over pornography, gender, and commercialized sexuality in 1970s America. Employing established conventions of the women's magazine, Playgirl utilized that form toward granting women access to explicit images. Yet given its “better lifestyling” advice on how the sexually liberated woman might find empowerment by viewing male nudes, Playgirl's reluctance to display full-frontal nudity until the midpoint of its first year fashioned an initially compromised aesthetic. Not only were women interpolated as untutored viewers within this regime of genital obstruction, but models also were all but emasculated. Consequently, the degree of male exposure that could be handled by both viewers and models was questioned, critiqued, and debated across Playgirl's letters to the editor section, aptly entitled “In-ter-course.” As an artifact of sexual media history, Playgirl is invaluable because readers are able to trace throughout its pages the ways in which changing tides of gendered power began to problematize pornography's routine dichotomy between masculine subjectivity and female objectification.     

Women’s experiences of their maternity care: A principle- based concept analysis

BackgroundDespite many countries employing the use of national and large scale regional surveys to explore women’s experiences of their maternity care, with the results informing national maternity policy and practice, the concept itself is ambiguous and ill-defined having not been subject of a structured concept development endeavour.AimThe aim of this review is to report on an in-depth analysis conducted on the concept of ‘women’s experiences of their maternity care’.MethodsUsing the principle-based method of concept analysis by Penrod and Hupcey (2005), the concept of ‘women’s experiences of their maternity care’ was analysed under the epistemological, pragmatic, linguistic and logical principles. The final dataset included 87 items of literature published between 1990 and 2017 retrieved from a systematic search of the MEDLINE, CINAHL, EMBASE and PSYCinfo databases.FindingsThe epistemological principle identified that a theoretical definition of the concept is elusive with a variety of implicit meanings. The pragmatic principle supports the utility of the concept in scientific literature, however the lack of a theoretical definition has led to inconsistent use of the concept, as highlighted by the linguistic principle. Furthermore, the logical principle highlighted that as the concept lacks definition blurring is identifiable when theoretically positioned with related concepts.ConclusionThe outcome of this concept analysis is a theoretical definition of a previously undefined concept. This definition highlights the subjective nature of the concept, its dependency upon a woman’s individual needs, expectations and circumstances and the influence of the organisation and delivery of maternity care.     

How old is old? Revising the definition based on life table criteria

Sixty‐five has long been thought of as the point of entry into “old age.”; We propose a number of life table criteria for answering the following questions: If 65 was considered appropriate four decades ago, what is the corresponding age today? If 65 was (implicitly) a male‐oriented definition four decades ago, as we believe it was, what would have been the appropriate definition for women at that time, and what is it today? We address these questions by applying our criteria to Canada, using 1951 and 1991 life tables, but the criteria could be applied equally well to other countries. For other developed countries we would expect broadly similar results.     

Attitudes Toward Same-Sex Parenting: An Effect of Gender

The definition of family in Australia has been continuously changing over the past four decades. The 21^st century has brought with it various images of family, with an increase of awareness to same-sex families; however, the acceptance of such family structures does not appear to be widespread and is often determined by sex. Substantive literature demonstrates differences between men and women in attitudes toward same-sex parenting, with theory suggesting that gender role norms may explain this. Despite large efforts to determine sex differences in attitudes toward same-sex parenting, little research, and even less in Australia, has been done to investigate whether there are differences in reasons behind negative attitudes toward same-sex parenting between men and women. To further this understanding, an Australian sample (N= 790) ranging in age from 18-78 completed a survey regrading attitudes toward same-sex parenting, in addition to relevant demographic information. Participants reported more positive attitudes about parenting by lesbians as compared to parenting by gay men. Reasons behind attitudes toward same-sex parenting also differed between males and females. Results suggested that the impact of socially prescribed gender norms may affect prejudice toward same-sex families. Despite an increase in tolerance for sexual minorities recently, policies that continue to discriminate against same-sex parenting rights demonstrates the importance of continuing to identify potential influences of same-sex family prejudice to reduce the potentially negative impacts associated with the prejudice.     

Striving for Prestige in Samoa: A Comparison of Men,Women, and Fa’afafine

ABSTRACT

In numerous non-Western cultures around the world, a small but meaningful proportion of individuals occupy alternative gender categories beyond the man/woman binary. A substantial body of past research has shown that feminine, same-sex attracted males in Samoa—a nonbinary gender known as fa’afafine—are more altruistic toward their nieces and nephews than are Samoan men and women. The present study examined the degree to which these kin-directed altruistic tendencies of fa’afafine are motivated by striving for prestige, and hence demonstrating value, within their family. Results showed that cisgender men and women do not differ in the degree to which they seek familial recognition of their altruistic behavior toward nieces and nephews. However, compared to men, fa’afafine sought significantly more acknowledgment of this altruism. These results illustrate one proximate cognitive mechanism for the elevated kin-directed altruism of fa’afafine and highlight the importance of the sociocultural context in which these motivations develop.     

How old is old? Revising the definition based on life table criteria

"Sixty-five has long been thought of as the point of entry into ?old age'. We propose a number of life table criteria for answering the following questions: If 65 was considered appropriate four decades ago, what is the corresponding age today? If 65 was (implicitly) a male-oriented definition four decades ago, as we believe it was, what would have been the appropriate definition for women at that time, and what is it today? We address these questions by applying our criteria to Canada, using 1951 and 1991 life tables, but the criteria could be applied equally well to other countries. For other developed countries we would expect broadly similar results." (EXCERPT)     

Xena and the Warrior Poets: Audre Lorde,Monique Wittig,and the myths of lesbian origins

This paper explores the connections between the television show Xena: Warrior Princess, and the myths of lesbian origins which were created by a loose collection of writers known as warrior poets. It argues that the show contains significant components of those myths as imagined by Audre Lorde and Monique Wittig. In particular, both show and myths share the presence of irresponsible gods; ideas of destiny; and women-centredness, which includes parthenogenesis, love, desire, and rivalry between women. The paper suggests that the transformative power of the show comes largely from the erotic connection between women that is at the core of these lesbian origin myths.     

“The String of This One Story”: Erotica,HIV, and the Construction of Safe Sex in Gay Male Popular Memory

Recalibrating the critical consideration of popular memory, this essay rehabilitates the erotic narrative as an object of critical study and as a political practice via an examination of John Preston's (1985b) print collection, Hot Living: Erotic Stories About Safer Sex. It considers this collection as a use of the erotic genre to produce a popular memory within its reading community to support safer sex practices in the “Age of AIDS.” It examines this collection as a communitarian project that articulates a new erotic rhetoric in response to HIV and considers its individual epistemological and epidemiological implications.     

“Last Night,I Did a Striptease for My Husband”

Representations in popular media at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first suggest that North American culture idealizes a kind of femininity constituted in erotic display while at the same time disavowing the parallel performance of that femininity in strip culture. This paper begins to consider why femininity is so insistently constituted on these terms, focusing in particular on women's advice media, self-help, and exercise programs of erotic dance as a domestic activity, and working to identify and understand the implications of that representation, for women who work as erotic dancers and for women who do not, with reference to the ways in which these two categories of femininity are constituted and maintained as separate categories through representation and to the effects of this separation for the labour of erotic dance and for the performance of femininity in the everyday. This paper undertakes to understand this complicated relationship and to determine what precisely is at stake in such representations, how to read them, and what they mean.     

Jill Meagher CCTV

“Jill Meagher CCTV,” the security camera recording of Melbourne woman Jill Meagher's last minutes alive, registered more than 677,000 views on YouTube by early 2014. Little happens for most of its 232 seconds and, as would be expected with surveillance footage, there is no sound. In Australia, “Jill Meagher CCTV” forms part of a haunting iconography of a rape and murder victim that not only resonates with fictional narratives in other places, but also influences the way the Jill Meagher story, as a whole, is read. As Melissa Jane Hardie (2010) suggests of the “true crime” story (citing Bronski 2005, 29), the public reaction to high profile stories of violent crime “is often an emblematic cultural citation that represents a social problem or fixation.” This article considers “Jill Meagher CCTV” as such a cultural citation and goes further by highlighting its gothic tendencies. Highlighting the gothic aspects of “Jill Meagher CCTV” resonates with surrounding narratives of violence and gender justice, which have material consequences for women in the way that the most prevalent forms of violence against women continue to be downplayed in those narratives.     

Representing sex workers in video games: feminisms,fantasies of exceptionalism,and the value of erotic labor

This article critiques the representation of sex workers in “AAA” video games, with a focus on the devaluing of erotic labor. Existing feminist commentary has interpreted these representations as examples of the objectification of female game characters, perpetuating harmful misconceptions of sex work as fundamentally exploitative. By contrast, taking cues from feminist media studies, porn studies, and sex workers rights activism, I argue that what makes these representations of sex workers problematic is not their engagement in erotic labor but the ways that the games in which they appear devalue that labor, through both dialogue and interactive elements. Across their many appearances in AAA games, it is strikingly common for sex workers to offer their services to player-characters for free or at a discount, or for games to allow players to take their money back after erotic labor has been performed. This contributes to a gendered fantasy of exceptionalism in which a player-character’s masculinity is tied to being too attractive or too powerful to pay for sex. Critiquing these representations demonstrates how AAA video games prompt players to reenact widespread cultural biases against sex work. It also points toward the need for a diversity of feminisms within game studies.     

Is the outcome of frailty syndrome gender dependent?

ABSTRACT

We assessed the relationship between the stages of the frailty syndrome and the development of limitations in the activities of daily living, hospitalization, and death among women aged ≥80 as compared to men over the course of 12 months. The Fried criteria and selected tests of comprehensive geriatric assessment were performed in 213 participants (phase 1). After 12 months, detailed feedback on the general health and functioning was collected (phase 2). Statistically significantly higher mortality (p < .05) was found among men as compared to women. The number of deaths in the frail group was higher among frail men than frail women (p < .007).     

Beyond Simple Differences: Moderators of Gender Differences in Heteronormativity

ABSTRACT

Heteronormativity is a culturally embedded system defining acceptable identities and behaviors in romantic relationships. Recent literature has suggested that heteronormativity is strongly associated with political attitudes, personality characteristics such as tolerance of ambiguity, and key demographic variables such as gender and sexual orientation. However, interactions between gender and other factors have not been thoroughly explored as predictors of heteronormative attitude and beliefs. The current study (N = 306) expands the understanding of predictors of heteronormativity, particularly as they interact with gender. In the current study, higher education was associated with lower heteronormativity among women, but not among men, and expressiveness was associated with lower heteronormativity among men, but not among women. Finally, a 3-way interaction showed that the relationship between education and heteronormativity for men (but not women) depended on trait expressiveness. Future studies are recommended, including observation of changes in heteronormativity over time and exploration of mechanisms that reinforce or reduce heteronormativity.     

Pregnancy,Then It's “Back To Business”

This essay theorizes the contours of a post-feminist gender regime that utilizes figures such as Beyoncé in order to hail women as self-governing subjects who make the right choices with respect to career, marriage, motherhood, and the disciplining of their bodies. As a black woman, the narrative about Beyoncé's life and choices has specific implications; it positions professional black women as ideal citizens and mothers and also seeks to reconfigure and normalize representations of the black family. The body, specifically the black female body, plays an important role in attempting to transform and normalize these representations. This essay offers one of the few examinations of black women's relationship to post-feminism. Although post-feminism has been conceptualized in ways that ignore black women, I aim to demonstrate why further consideration of black women's relationship to post-feminism is needed. It is my contention that with successful black women increasingly in the public eye, what they say about feminism and how they relate to feminist politics have important implications for how all women, but especially young black women, engage in types of activism that go beyond placing value on individualism at the expense of the collective.     

The effects of children on divorce and re-marriage: a multivariate analysis of life table probabilities

Summary Using proportional hazards models and multiple decrement life tables to analyse data from the 1973 National Survey of Family Growth, this study tests the hypotheses that, net of the effects of such factors as age at separation or divorce, the probabilities of divorce after separation and of re-marriage after divorce would be lower for women with larger numbers of children or younger children, and that these transitions would take longer than for women with fewer or older children or women who were childless; and that there would be an interaction between number of children and age of youngest child. Results included: (1) the probability that mothers of two or more children would divorce after separation was significantly lower than for childless women, or those with only one child; (2) among whites, mothers of three or more children were at a significant disadvantage regarding their chances of re-marriage, whereas the probability that a black mother of three or more children would re-marry was no smaller than that of a woman with fewer or no children; (3) among whites, the presence of a youngest child aged between two and five years at separation decreased the probability of divorce after separation; (4) there was no interaction effect between number and age of children; and (5) in each category of family size and age of youngest child, the probability that a black woman would divorce after separation or re-marry after divorce was lower than for white women. The results have important implications for the study of divorce and re-marriage, and for understanding of problems of single-parent families.     

Mumbling Beauty: Louise Bourgeois—portraits of the artist as a much older woman

Abstract

This article examines how Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) plays with different modes of self-presentation in Mumbling Beauty (2015), a photo book consisting of 81 photographs of the artist taken in the final years of her life by Alex Van Gelder. I start by outlining connections and divergences between these self-presentations and interpretations of Bourgeois’ late style. As the portraits make the artist hypervisible as a much older vulnerable woman, I ask how Mumbling Beauty can resist abjection. I will argue that strategies of performance, masquerade, and displacement, in combination with playful interactions with mirror surfaces and images, and flirtations with photography’s death drive, enable these portraits to diversify notions of self and beauty. Furthermore, through the concepts of the ethical stare and the holding gaze, I interpret the relational, intercorporeal, and affective potential of this particular photographic practice. To conclude, I speculate on how these particular portraits of the artist as a much older woman can be inspirational in terms of conceptualizing creative skills that even people who are not professional artists may need in their quest for meaning in later life beyond hegemonic discourses of “successful” and “healthy” ageing.     

Discriminating taste: maintaining gendered social hierarchy in a cross-demographic fandom

To explore the role of hierarchical taste culture discourses in cross-gender media fandoms, this article considers “Bronies,” the adult, largely male fandom of girls’ animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. This fandom’s presence has often been identified as a significant gender taste norm violation with positive feminist implications. The authors’ open-ended qualitative survey of 2915 Bronies reveals this fandom extensively uses discourses of “quality” and hierarchical value to legitimate their interest in the series, and that in articulating its value, the fan culture reinscribes taste and gender hierarchies. Our findings show that by deploying masculinized taste norms, Bronies maintain traditional taste hierarchies within their gender-atypical fandom and marginalize the very audience and viewing culture from which My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic originated. Rather than indicating an open-minded, stereotype-defying attitude toward girls’ media culture more broadly, fans often articulate the series’ value by denigrating other girls’ media texts. While unexpected fandoms may support cross-demographic viewing, we argue that these fandoms can nonetheless maintain gendered taste hierarchies that have marginalized women and are not as feminist as they appear at first glance.     

The “Sassy Woman” and the “Performing Man”: Heterosexual casual sex advice and the (re)constitution of gendered subjectivities

Media forums that provide “sex advice” are a rich source of (sexual) information for heterosexual individuals and have been critically examined for the ways in which they construct heterosexuality (and sexual subjectivities). The representations of (heterosexual) casual sex are also prevalent across the mass media. This paper uses a Foucauldian/poststructuralist mode of discourse analysis to explore how casual sex “advice” in three self-help books (two aimed at women, one aimed at men), and online advice articles, constituted casual sex and masculine and feminine heterosexual subjectivities. Four main (profoundly gendered) subject positions were identified in the texts: the “strategic man”; the “performing man”; the “sassy woman”; and the “vulnerable woman.” It is argued that although some alternative ways of constituting heterosexual identities were provided (particularly for women), gender difference was not only implicated in such advice but also, at times, crudely exaggerated. The implications of these representations are discussed in relation to contemporary heterosexualities, heterosexual sexual identities, and heterosexual power relations.