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Sexual health
Published in Sally Robinson, Priorities for Health Promotion and Public Health, 2021
Rajeeb Kumar Sah, Sally Robinson
From this perspective, the authors suggest that every individual has the right to make their own decisions about their own sexual development, which will contribute to their sexual practice, identity and relationships. Any deviance from this sexual norm will result in sexual harassment, abuse, violence, rape or forced marriage.
Conclusion
Published in Kaymarlin Govender, Nana K. Poku, Preventing HIV Among Young People in Southern and Eastern Africa, 2020
Kaymarlin Govender, Nana K. Poku
Shifting gender/sexual norms for young people is complicated; there is no magic bullet. Gittings and colleagues (see Chapter 10), in their research with young men at risk for HIV, suggest that interventions also should consider the dynamics of engagement (demographic and personal qualities of facilitators, participants, researchers, and programme workers) and contextual mediators (socio-economic, cultural and geographical) that work to influence gender norms. Social change is not linear, rather it is refracted through fluctuating life circumstances of participants, their sexual relationships and the communities in which they live in that ultimately shape HIV risk. Interventions that rely on gender transformative principles through employing critical thinking and learning activities in process-type engagements with participants are more likely to see shifts in social norms. These authors also raise an ethical issue: what does it mean to be working with young men for HIV prevention in settings where women and girls are more biologically and socially vulnerable to HIV infection, especially if such work is seen to compete for the same resources? Interventions with men therefore also needs to be able to articulate how its methods and objectives are aligned with broader feminist principles of inquiry (see, Govender, 2012).
The question of sex and modernity in China, part 2
Published in Vivienne Lo, Michael Stanley-Baker, Dolly Yang, Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine, 2022
From interviews and personal memoirs, Emily Honig found that youths sent down to the countryside or those remaining in the cities in the 1960s and 1970s – often freed from parental supervision and familial control – had a range of new opportunities and sexual experiences from brief encounters to prolonged cohabitation with youths of the same or the opposite sex. There were indeed records of abuse and harassment from local cadres but also accounts of consensual sex. Even though some youths were reprimanded or punished for pursuing romantic relationships, and young women were particularly vulnerable to sexual attack and scapegoating, repression and subjugation were only part of a wider landscape of Chinese sexuality during the Cultural Revolution decade. People might have been censured for their ‘transgressions’ of sexual norms but at the same time such ‘transgressions’ were commonplace and ultimately difficult to police. The presence of a discourse of purity was as much a symptom of the fact that people’s behaviour was often ‘impure’. None of this was to make light of the sufferings of victims of sexual assault and persecution but to highlight the flaws of narratives that simplistically reduced sexuality in Communist China to nothing but state oppression. Such simplistic narratives served political purposes: to legitimise the post-socialist economic reforms in the Deng Xiaoping era by condemning the Cultural Revolution as a period of total darkness and ‘sexual blindness’ (xingmang 性盲), or more generally to reinforce the ideology that capitalism, unlike socialism, was the only social configuration that did not run contrary to ‘human nature’.
Relationship Between Self-Esteem and Risky Sexual Behavior among Adolescents and Young Adults: A Systematic Review
Published in American Journal of Sexuality Education, 2023
This study found that early sexual debut was positively associated with self-esteem in adolescents, whereas condom use was negatively associated with self-esteem. Self-esteem was not associated with having multiple sex partners. However, most studies have reported that self-esteem is not associated with RSB in adolescents. Therefore, caution is warranted to simply assert that self-esteem should be enhanced to prevent the risk of sex behavior without considering the characteristics of adolescents and contexts. The results of the included studies may also be attributable to varying self-esteem types across domains, and sexual norms and traditions. Hence, subsequent studies should develop instruments that can measure self-esteem for each specific domain pertinent to sexual behaviors among adolescentsor divide self-esteem into trait and state self-esteem to investigate their relationship with RSB. Further research on the relationship between self-esteem and RSB in different countries and a meta-analysis of these studies to calculate effect sizes are required. The differential effects of self-esteem on risky sexual behavior informs practice educators and coaching parents to develop and boost self-esteem in the field of adolescent sexuality.
A Thing like a Human? A Mixed-Methods Study on Sex Doll Usage
Published in International Journal of Sexual Health, 2022
In a variety of publications, scholars discuss the ethical implications of sex dolls (for an overview see Döring et al., 2020, p. 9; Ray, 2016). Most critics of sex dolls follow the symbolic-consequences argument (for an overview see Danaher, 2017). Proponents of such claims suggest that “ethically problematic sexual norms” (p.9) will have negative effects on society, even though the ethically problematic actions creating these norms are only acted out on dolls. Harper et al. (2022) are the first to statistically explore whether sex doll owners indeed score higher on related measures such as rape proclivity. They conclude that although sex doll owners do have more fantasies about coercive sex, they are less likely to act on those fantasies. Depending on some moderating variables, sex doll ownership can even be a protective factor for sexual aggression. While these results have to stand the test of replication, they run against the symbolic-consequences argument.
The Estrangement of U.S. Colonialism from Counseling Discourses on Social Justice: Examining Intimacy and Care as Strategies to Sustain Democratic Citizenship
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2022
Counseling discourses on social justice are considered a technology of U.S. colonial imperialism. This is primarily due to the apolitical and neutral stance it reifies in discussions on justice and equality as well as the prioritization of agentic or self-control over understanding structural patterns across time and space. Embedded in the morality of racial, gender, and sexual norms, intimacy becomes a categorical branch to maintain social control. In this section, counseling is defined more critically as a technology of biopower (Ong, 2003)—one that sustains certain colonial policies and mentalities regarding sexual, gender, and racial identification processes, practices, and inequalities. More broadly, when we examine intimacy, sex, and sexuality as areas of private life, we begin to see how the notion of private life becomes legitimized. This legitimacy of the private life is based upon differentiating discourses that remain behind closed doors from those that are manifested publicly, and how secrets come to take a life of their own.