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“What terrible times I had when I was the age of my kids? They don’t have to undergo the same despondent feelings my wife and me had to endure”, you lazily say to yourself as the hammock sways to and fro in the gentle breeze. You still dread the day you were diagnosed with erectile dysfunction. “Impotence won’t affect my kids”, you think reassuredly looking at the magic blue pill in your hand.
Viagra has replaced the reliance on painful surgeries and therapies with the popping habit. Viagra was the first approved prescription pill for the treatment of ED. Erectile dysfunction is the sexual dysfunction of men characterized by the inability of penis to attain and maintain sufficient erection for satisfactory and enjoyable sex.
For long, ED was considered as a potential relationship-breaker by the affected patients. Men and women were reporting emotional upheavals and other physical ailments directly to indirectly attributable to ED. The treatments available were not very popular owing to their invasive and painful nature. No oral drug was approved by the US FDA to treat ED till 1998 when Viagra came to the fore.
Actually, the advent of Viagra in itself was nothing more than accidental. Sildenafil Citrate – the active ingredient of Viagra – had been in use for the treatment of angina for the past 20 years. The results for the treatment of angina were not very positive. But sildenafil citrate proved to be a boon for the sufferers of ED. 4 out of 5 patients showed promising signs in the clinical trials. And the rest is history.
Viagra works within 14 minutes of its intake, in some cases. The effects of the drug last up to 4 hours in some cases. With minimal side effects, Viagra became overnight hit and has posted record sales since its launch. The patients, after a proper prescription from the doctor, can buy Viagra online. The privacy and convenience of the patients is generally well looked after by the sites dealing with Viagra online
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Most men and women put on weight differently. But on what makes fat settle in a preferential way, there is little evidence.
Scientists ascertained that the specific body shapes are: the android shape, or apple shape, common among men (fat deposits on the middle section of the body, mostly on the abdomen) and the gynoid, or pear shape, more common among women (fat deposited on hips and bottom). There is also the third type of body shape: the ovoid shape, not differentiating between men and women. With this type we can speak of an over-all general coverage of bodyfat.
Thinking of many cases of exceptions, I try to find out in what follows if there is a strict specific fat pattern distribution for men and women and what are the factors influencing fat distribution. And I find this interesting not in as much as the aesthetic side is concerned but from the health perspective.
Being overweight or underweight are characteristics depending on many factors: you are genetically overweight if you have a family history of overweight parents/relatives. Also, the nervous system plays an important role in balancing the body weight: serotonin and endorphins send signals to the brain that induce the need to eat or on the contrary. There is also the CCK hormone which transmits the brain signals on the state of satiety - it decreases hunger.
While generally, body weight is influenced genetically, hormonally and by the body maintenance condition (the activity routine), it seems that the fat distribution is influenced by age, genetic inheritance, race, but to a greater extent by gender specific hormones. They are responsible for the distribution of fat in certain zones of our bodies: thus, estrogens which are responsible of the typical female sexual characteristics will influence the fat deposition in the pear format, favouring its laying on the hips, thighs, and belly, while testosterone will "lead" fat mostly towards tummy and upper body.
Latest studies show that men's tendency towards the gynoid format has increased in the past 30 years (one study shows a growth of 2 inches in men's hips in the past 30 years). According to researches as John R. Lee, M.D (specialist in natural progesterone therapy), Dr. Jesse Hanley and Dr. Peter Eckhart, it seems that modern life exposes people to increased amounts of estrogen and estrogen-like substances (xenoestrogens or foreign estrogens). Sources of these substances can be plastics, plastic drinking bottles, commercially raised beef, chicken and pork, personal care products, pesticides, herbicides, birth control pills, spermacide, detergent, canned foods and lacquers. The problem is that increased estrogen levels in men not only make their hips fatten but are the main risk factor for disease such as prostate enlargement and cancer.
Also, for women, the android pattern fat distribution should raise questions with regard to hormonal imbalances, such situations being a potential cause for health problems such as polycystic ovary syndrome.
We've seen how health related problems can affect body fat, now let's take a look at how fat can induce health problems.
It is clear that increased body fat affects health, the news is that its distribution on the body influences the state of health of specific organs.
According to its placement, fat can be subcutaneous (under the skin) or visceral (around organs). The greatest concern is generated by visceral fat that can interfere with the good functioning of vital organs. There is a relationship between overall fat deposits and specific fat deposits: fat around the body middle section is associated with visceral fat, so, abdominal fat is the most serious health risk.
The waist to hip ratio is a method of determining whether there are excessive amounts of upper body fat. It is obtained by dividing the waist measurement by the hip measurement. The upper limits are:.95 for men and .80 for women. Any exceeding values should be alarming.
Apple-shaped fat individuals are exposed to a greater risk of developing obesity-related diseases, as the fat is intra-abdominal and distributed around their stomach and chest. They risk:
Cardiovascular diseases and hypertension
Type 2 diabetes
Respiratory diseases (sleep apnea syndrome)
Some cancers
Osteoarthritis
The pear-shaped overweight persons are at greater risk of mechanical problems, as most of their body fat is distributed around their hips, thighs and bottom.
Both apple-shaped and pear-shaped obese persons are likely to develop psychological problems and alteration of the quality of life.
In any case, extra-weight cannot create but problems. Fact is that the main role in acquiring extra-fat is the food intake that the body cannot burn for various reasons (such as a decreased metabolic rate, low activity level or the physical condition), and, consequently, it creates fat deposits. The solution is a classic one: diet and exercise.
However, in shedding extra weight there are men-women differences. The process appears to be harder for women.
The total mass of the body is made up of fat mass and fat-free mass. The fat mass can be of two types: essential and excess. Essential fat is found in bone marrow, in various organs, and throughout the nervous system.
Women are at a disadvantage, as their physiological processes (childbearing and hormone functions) require a plus of essential fat, the "sex-specific fat". Thus the total percentage of body fat is higher, moreover, this part of essential fat is hard to dislodge. Secondly, women have less calorie burning muscle than men, which makes it more more demanding for the female to achieve a trimmer figure. Now, girls, don't use it as an excuse!
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Why does God need a gender? Can’t we, as creative beings come up with something more majestic than biological anatomy? Doesn’t the Holy Spirit transcend flesh? I thought that is what the resurrection was all about.
It makes me feel like we are children playing with dolls. Here is the mommy, here is the baby and here is daddy whom we obey and who punishes us when we are bad. Isn’t that a rather limiting concept? I like to think that the Grace which generates healing and love is a bit more universal, resplendent and powerful than that.
Do I believe that the Holy Spirit manifested as a human man 2,000 years ago and showed us a perception which expanded our earth-bound senses? Yes. For humans to incarnate, we have to come up with either a male or female body. I believe the Holy Spirit could just as easily be a female and in many cases has and still does reveal itself as exactly that. The point is, Spirit itself is universal, so the gender of the vessel it travels in is not even relevant.
Once again, we are feeding earthly values into our understanding of the Divine. When we do this, such values become as transitory and vulnerable as we humans are.They are further interpreted and reinterpreted by more humans who all have different earthly interests. They become superficial symbols to represent whatever a person’s own self interest is at the time. Therefore, we are back into the mire of fleshly helplessness from which the Spirit came to set us free.
Gender is a superficial aspect of an entity, almost an afterthought. Maleness (testosterone) does not even inhabit the fetus until after the fourth week of development. Our biological system is set up so that we need two opposing sexes to produce a zygote from which the fetus starts to multiply itself. End of story about gender. It has nothing to do with the soul, with the spirit, with the capacity to love, with the goodness, energy and power of the Holy Spirit. The latter is exempt from such a very carnal aspect of being.
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable with God having a penis any more than I do with God using a toilet. Also, there is no need for God to go around procreating a bunch of little offspring Gods. I understand that the notion of a mighty loving Source needs to be compared, at times, to a concept that is recognizable. It is like feeding strained food to a baby, it is reaching people at their level of understanding. Fair enough. But are we really that creatively impaired? Can’t we conceive of a force more closely related to what it really is?
The Christians have always been hung up on male supremacy, so it makes sense that they would push the idea of God being a male. (Notice that the human, perishable, fleshly aspect of Christ is contributed by the woman.) I understand that for their particular culture at the time of incipient Christianity, the patriarchal society was considered to be most preferable. Okay. But here we are talking only of a social configuration. We are not talking about the Spirit which moves and breathes in us and in all living and non living things. We are talking about the energy which we know before we even incarnate, and which we will know after our incarnation has run its course. That seems vast and awesome to me. It seems greater, more nurturing, more loving, more dependable and more Present than the human male ever will be.
But maybe that is just my own opinion.
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Is this an all too familiar scenario? Hot and heavy loving with hungry kisses and tender caresses that promise orgasmic bliss for both you and your eager partner when all of a sudden you're one thrust past the edge, the dam bursts and it's over. You're finished, "spent" and ready for sleep. She's still waiting for more, perhaps wistfully contemplating a purchase of that acrylic vibrating dildo her friend has been raving about.
Well, you're not alone in this too-quick-for-her-climax intercourse. The "average" man makes about 50 thrusts before he ejaculates. For most women it takes approximately 10 minutes of active intercourse to reach orgasm. Even the most optimistic lover can see these numbers just don't add up! But don't roll over and nod off yet, there are some simple things you can do to bring your partner and you much closer together.
These male/female discrepancies in timing are part physiological and part habit. Physically men's and women's arousal rates vary widely, but for the most part women become fully turned on much more slowly than men. So a great way to make sure you're both happy with your love life is to include lots of foreplay. Help her reach orgasm with your fingers, tongue, and lips before you even start to have intercourse.
Secondly, most men's experience with sex starts out as rather furtive masturbation, a quick release in the bathroom or under the bedcovers before someone can see what's going on. Then onto early sexual experiences with a girlfriend in back seats of cars or in a basement rec room, again in a hurry, before she changes her mind or her parents come along to change it for her.
Now when you have the time and space for long lovemaking good old John Thomas is still back in the "I've gotta come now" days, and he's not going to slow down just because you tell him to. That's like asking a guy who's trained as a sprint champ to bring home a gold in the 5000 meter instead. He may well be able to make the shift but he's going to need coaching. You can train him with your mind, your muscles and your breath or a combination of all three. It's not entirely up to you either, your loving partner can assist, after all it's for her benefit as well!
The first step is to become aware of your own levels of arousal. Experiment, take your time and give yourself a very real self-loving exploration, not just a quick masturbatory release. Notice how your penis moves through distinct changes before orgasm and ejaculation, he's not just soft and then hard and spewing.
There are four defined stages of erection: lengthening and filling; swelling; full erection; rigid erection. The fourth stage, rigid erection, characterized by a penis that's very stiff (a boner) and very hot, signifies ejaculation is close at hand. Through attentive self-arousal and the playful hands of your sweetheart you can learn how to stay for longer periods of time in the exciting, but less explosive, third stage of firm erection. When you feel yourself moving into the hard, hot level stop stimulation, relax and pay attention to your breathing. Breathe slowly and deeply.
The Power of Breath
Conscious breathing is a key for extended lovemaking. Rapid breathing excites and arouses you. Slow, controlled breathing, way down into your belly, calms you and helps delay ejaculation. Focusing on your breath takes your attention away from your genitals. Synchronizing your breathing rhythm with your partner's strengthens your connection with each other. Adding sound to your breathing can also help you ride the edge of pleasure. As you exhale send out a deep lion roar. Feel the sound come from your scrotum, up through your belly and lungs and out your mouth as a powerful release of the orgasmic tension building inside you.
You can use some of the following "muscle techniques" to postpone ejaculation as well.
PC (pubococcygeous) Muscle Contraction
This is simply squeezing your pelvic floor muscles, around the scrotum, penis and anus as you feel ejaculation approaching. An easy way to practice this is to interrupt your urine stream when you are going to the bathroom.
Perineum Pressure
Pressing on the perineum, a spot midway between your scrotum and your anus, will help to stop ejaculation because this spot reaches through to the prostate gland. It is the prostate that contracts and expands during orgasm and then expels the ejaculation fluid. Ask your partner to apply this loving pressure for you.
Testes Tug
When a man nears orgasm his scrotum rises up closer to his body. You can delay ejaculation by gently pulling your testes down and away from your body. Your partner can also do this for you.
Penis Tip Squeeze
Squeezing your penis just below the head or glans can help to stop oncoming ejaculation. It necessitates withdrawing completely from your partner during intercourse, but is an excellent way to begin practice on your own with masturbation.
Passion Pump
This technique, which combines squeezing the PC muscles, rolling your eyes upward, touching your tongue to the roof of your mouth, and visualizing your sexual energy flowing up through your body while you practice controlled deep breathing is one of the most effective ways of delaying ejaculation. It's a Taoist sexual kung fu technique that has the added benefit of helping you circulate your sexual energy through your body rather than having it remain hot and heavy in your genital region.
Special Tip
It is easier to delay ejaculation by focusing on moving your sex energy through your body rather than focusing on not ejaculating. Stopping movement, relaxing a little and breathing deeply and slowly will all aid with this practice.
The Importance of the Prostate Gland
When you practice delaying ejaculation it is very important to massage the prostate gland, so that it doesn't become sore. You can do this by pressing on the perineum. The prostate can be felt as a bumpy walnut shape beneath your fingers. Especially delightful is massaging in circular motions, first clockwise and then counterclockwise, with a piece of folded silk on the perineum spot.
Thrusting Technique
A superb thrusting technique that brings great pleasure to a woman and helps a man to last is a combination of deep and shallow thrusts. By shallow thrusts we mean your penis only enters 11/2 to 2 inches inside your partner. These first couple of inches are the most sensitive part of a woman's vagina. Deep thrusts mean your penis enters as fully as you can.
In this technique you combine a series of nine fairly quick shallow thrusts with one slow deep one. The shallow thrusts stimulate your partner's most sensitive vaginal tissues and at the same time create a vacuum effect that makes her ache for the deep thrust to come. And because most of your thrusts are shallow ones, exciting only the first few inches of your penis, you're able to rock on for much longer!
Mind over Muscle
Practicing squeezing your PC muscles will enable you to gradually become so familiar with your genitals, that you will be able to discern each separate muscle group and contract/relax them at will. At first you will tighten your genitals and everything will contract at once. Later you will be able to contract your anal muscles without moving your penis or scrotum, or pull up your scrotum while your anus and penis remain relaxed, or bob your penis up and down while nothing else moves. Eventually just a thought will relax everything, especially your smooth genital muscles, sending your hot sexual energy shooting through your body, not out the end of your penis, but instead into your partner through eye contact, intercourse, or touching.
Smooth muscles are internal muscles over which you normally have no conscious control. You may not have been aware that you have smooth muscles. They're muscles like your heart muscle, the muscles that push your food through your digestive tract and the muscles that push the sperm and semen out the end of your penis. Becoming aware of your smooth muscles and eventually gaining enough mastery to be able to consciously keep them relaxed will enable blood to flow into the penis, maintaining an erection almost indefinitely - certainly long enough to satisfy the most demanding partner, through and through. Gaining control over the smooth muscles in your genitals is the key to maintaining your peak sexual arousal for long periods of time -- even long enough to experience whole body orgasms, rather than simply genital orgasms. In a whole body orgasm your entire body becomes an exquisite erogenous zone, much like your genitals always are. You can actually reach orgasm when your lover is rubbing your chest, or sucking on your toes and fingers, or nibbling your ears and throat. The magical key to opening the doorway into multiple whole body orgasms is relaxation of your smooth muscles, no matter how aroused, excited, or turned on you are.
Train your mind to think of something other than ejaculation. Thinking "I don't want to ejaculate" is still thinking about ejaculation. You must have something else to focus your attention. We don't recommend reciting sports stats or in any way diverting your attention from lovemaking. It is essential that you be fully present from moment to moment. But instead of thinking about ejaculation, or worrying about ejaculating too quickly, we suggest you think about pleasing your partner. Learn to take pleasure for yourself in the pleasing of your partner. Notice how she reacts when your tongue is exploring around her clitoris, but also notice how her clitoris feels on your tongue. Notice how she enjoys when you suck on her nipples, but also notice how her breasts feel pressed against your face. Notice how she moans when you gently run your fingers up the inside of her thighs, but also notice how her skin feels so soft and warm against your fingers. With your attention fully engaged in this way - on your partner, your breath, your genital muscles -- you are going to last a long time. As your lovemaking goes on, and on, and on... perhaps for hours, the energy within you and between you and your lover will accumulate to such an intense level that you may spontaneously experience the opening of your higher "spiritual" centres. With this opening comes an experience of ecstasy, bliss, joy, and wonder. This is where mastery of ejaculation can lead you and your satisfied partner.
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Alan Pease, author of a book titled "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps", believes that women are spatially-challenged compared to men. The British firm, Admiral Insurance, conducted a study of half a million claims. They found that "women were almost twice as likely as men to have a collision in a car park, 23 percent more likely to hit a stationary car, and 15 percent more likely to reverse into another vehicle" (Reuters).
Yet gender "differences" are often the outcomes of bad scholarship. Consider Admiral insurance's data. As Britain's Automobile Association (AA) correctly pointed out - women drivers tend to make more short journeys around towns and shopping centers and these involve frequent parking. Hence their ubiquity in certain kinds of claims. Regarding women's alleged spatial deficiency, in Britain, girls have been outperforming boys in scholastic aptitude tests - including geometry and maths - since 1988.
On the other wing of the divide, Anthony Clare, a British psychiatrist and author of "On Men" wrote:
"At the beginning of the 21st century it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that men are in serious trouble. Throughout the world, developed and developing, antisocial behavior is essentially male. Violence, sexual abuse of children, illicit drug use, alcohol misuse, gambling, all are overwhelmingly male activities. The courts and prisons bulge with men. When it comes to aggression, delinquent behavior, risk taking and social mayhem, men win gold."
Men also mature later, die earlier, are more susceptible to infections and most types of cancer, are more likely to be dyslexic, to suffer from a host of mental health disorders, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and to commit suicide.
In her book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man", Susan Faludi describes a crisis of masculinity following the breakdown of manhood models and work and family structures in the last five decades. In the film "Boys don't Cry", a teenage girl binds her breasts and acts the male in a caricatural relish of stereotypes of virility. Being a man is merely a state of mind, the movie implies.
But what does it really mean to be a "male" or a "female"? Are gender identity and sexual preferences genetically determined? Can they be reduced to one's sex? Or are they amalgams of biological, social, and psychological factors in constant interaction? Are they immutable lifelong features or dynamically evolving frames of self-reference?
Certain traits attributed to one's sex are surely better accounted for by cultural factors, the process of socialization, gender roles, and what George Devereux called "ethnopsychiatry" in "Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry" (University of Chicago Press, 1980). He suggested to divide the unconscious into the id (the part that was always instinctual and unconscious) and the "ethnic unconscious" (repressed material that was once conscious). The latter is mostly molded by prevailing cultural mores and includes all our defense mechanisms and most of the superego.
So, how can we tell whether our sexual role is mostly in our blood or in our brains?
The scrutiny of borderline cases of human sexuality - notably the transgendered or intersexed - can yield clues as to the distribution and relative weights of biological, social, and psychological determinants of gender identity formation.
The results of a study conducted by Uwe Hartmann, Hinnerk Becker, and Claudia Rueffer-Hesse in 1997 and titled "Self and Gender: Narcissistic Pathology and Personality Factors in Gender Dysphoric Patients", published in the "International Journal of Transgenderism", "indicate significant psychopathological aspects and narcissistic dysregulation in a substantial proportion of patients." Are these "psychopathological aspects" merely reactions to underlying physiological realities and changes? Could social ostracism and labeling have induced them in the "patients"?
The authors conclude:
"The cumulative evidence of our study ... is consistent with the view that gender dysphoria is a disorder of the sense of self as has been proposed by Beitel (1985) or Pfäfflin (1993). The central problem in our patients is about identity and the self in general and the transsexual wish seems to be an attempt at reassuring and stabilizing the self-coherence which in turn can lead to a further destabilization if the self is already too fragile. In this view the body is instrumentalized to create a sense of identity and the splitting symbolized in the hiatus between the rejected body-self and other parts of the self is more between good and bad objects than between masculine and feminine."
Freud, Kraft-Ebbing, and Fliess suggested that we are all bisexual to a certain degree. As early as 1910, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld argued, in Berlin, that absolute genders are "abstractions, invented extremes". The consensus today is that one's sexuality is, mostly, a psychological construct which reflects gender role orientation.
Joanne Meyerowitz, a professor of history at Indiana University and the editor of The Journal of American History observes, in her recently published tome, "How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States", that the very meaning of masculinity and femininity is in constant flux.
Transgender activists, says Meyerowitz, insist that gender and sexuality represent "distinct analytical categories". The New York Times wrote in its review of the book: "Some male-to-female transsexuals have sex with men and call themselves homosexuals. Some female-to-male transsexuals have sex with women and call themselves lesbians. Some transsexuals call themselves asexual."
So, it is all in the mind, you see.
This would be taking it too far. A large body of scientific evidence points to the genetic and biological underpinnings of sexual behavior and preferences.
The German science magazine, "Geo", reported recently that the males of the fruit fly "drosophila melanogaster" switched from heterosexuality to homosexuality as the temperature in the lab was increased from 19 to 30 degrees Celsius. They reverted to chasing females as it was lowered.
The brain structures of homosexual sheep are different to those of straight sheep, a study conducted recently by the Oregon Health & Science University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sheep Experiment Station in Dubois, Idaho, revealed. Similar differences were found between gay men and straight ones in 1995 in Holland and elsewhere. The preoptic area of the hypothalamus was larger in heterosexual men than in both homosexual men and straight women.
According an article, titled "When Sexual Development Goes Awry", by Suzanne Miller, published in the September 2000 issue of the "World and I", various medical conditions give rise to sexual ambiguity. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), involving excessive androgen production by the adrenal cortex, results in mixed genitalia. A person with the complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (AIS) has a vagina, external female genitalia and functioning, androgen-producing, testes - but no uterus or fallopian tubes.
People with the rare 5-alpha reductase deficiency syndrome are born with ambiguous genitalia. They appear at first to be girls. At puberty, such a person develops testicles and his clitoris swells and becomes a penis. Hermaphrodites possess both ovaries and testicles (both, in most cases, rather undeveloped). Sometimes the ovaries and testicles are combined into a chimera called ovotestis.
Most of these individuals have the chromosomal composition of a woman together with traces of the Y, male, chromosome. All hermaphrodites have a sizable penis, though rarely generate sperm. Some hermaphrodites develop breasts during puberty and menstruate. Very few even get pregnant and give birth.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, a developmental geneticist, professor of medical science at Brown University, and author of "Sexing the Body", postulated, in 1993, a continuum of 5 sexes to supplant the current dimorphism: males, merms (male pseudohermaphrodites), herms (true hermaphrodites), ferms (female pseudohermaphrodites), and females.
Intersexuality (hermpahroditism) is a natural human state. We are all conceived with the potential to develop into either sex. The embryonic developmental default is female. A series of triggers during the first weeks of pregnancy places the fetus on the path to maleness.
In rare cases, some women have a male's genetic makeup (XY chromosomes) and vice versa. But, in the vast majority of cases, one of the sexes is clearly selected. Relics of the stifled sex remain, though. Women have the clitoris as a kind of symbolic penis. Men have breasts (mammary glands) and nipples.
The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition describes the formation of ovaries and testes thus:
"In the young embryo a pair of gonads develop that are indifferent or neutral, showing no indication whether they are destined to develop into testes or ovaries. There are also two different duct systems, one of which can develop into the female system of oviducts and related apparatus and the other into the male sperm duct system. As development of the embryo proceeds, either the male or the female reproductive tissue differentiates in the originally neutral gonad of the mammal."
Yet, sexual preferences, genitalia and even secondary sex characteristics, such as facial and pubic hair are first order phenomena. Can genetics and biology account for male and female behavior patterns and social interactions ("gender identity")? Can the multi-tiered complexity and richness of human masculinity and femininity arise from simpler, deterministic, building blocks?
Sociobiologists would have us think so.
For instance: the fact that we are mammals is astonishingly often overlooked. Most mammalian families are composed of mother and offspring. Males are peripatetic absentees. Arguably, high rates of divorce and birth out of wedlock coupled with rising promiscuity merely reinstate this natural "default mode", observes Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. That three quarters of all divorces are initiated by women tends to support this view.
Furthermore, gender identity is determined during gestation, claim some scholars.
Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii and Dr. Keith Sigmundson, a practicing psychiatrist, studied the much-celebrated John/Joan case. An accidentally castrated normal male was surgically modified to look female, and raised as a girl but to no avail. He reverted to being a male at puberty.
His gender identity seems to have been inborn (assuming he was not subjected to conflicting cues from his human environment). The case is extensively described in John Colapinto's tome "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl".
HealthScoutNews cited a study published in the November 2002 issue of "Child Development". The researchers, from City University of London, found that the level of maternal testosterone during pregnancy affects the behavior of neonatal girls and renders it more masculine. "High testosterone" girls "enjoy activities typically considered male behavior, like playing with trucks or guns". Boys' behavior remains unaltered, according to the study.
Yet, other scholars, like John Money, insist that newborns are a "blank slate" as far as their gender identity is concerned. This is also the prevailing view. Gender and sex-role identities, we are taught, are fully formed in a process of socialization which ends by the third year of life. The Encyclopedia Britannica 2003 edition sums it up thus:
"Like an individual's concept of his or her sex role, gender identity develops by means of parental example, social reinforcement, and language. Parents teach sex-appropriate behavior to their children from an early age, and this behavior is reinforced as the child grows older and enters a wider social world. As the child acquires language, he also learns very early the distinction between "he" and "she" and understands which pertains to him- or herself."
So, which is it - nature or nurture? There is no disputing the fact that our sexual physiology and, in all probability, our sexual preferences are determined in the womb. Men and women are different - physiologically and, as a result, also psychologically.
Society, through its agents - foremost amongst which are family, peers, and teachers - represses or encourages these genetic propensities. It does so by propagating "gender roles" - gender-specific lists of alleged traits, permissible behavior patterns, and prescriptive morals and norms. Our "gender identity" or "sex role" is shorthand for the way we make use of our natural genotypic-phenotypic endowments in conformity with social-cultural "gender roles".
Inevitably as the composition and bias of these lists change, so does the meaning of being "male" or "female". Gender roles are constantly redefined by tectonic shifts in the definition and functioning of basic social units, such as the nuclear family and the workplace. The cross-fertilization of gender-related cultural memes renders "masculinity" and "femininity" fluid concepts.
One's sex equals one's bodily equipment, an objective, finite, and, usually, immutable inventory. But our endowments can be put to many uses, in different cognitive and affective contexts, and subject to varying exegetic frameworks. As opposed to "sex" - "gender" is, therefore, a socio-cultural narrative. Both heterosexual and homosexual men ejaculate. Both straight and lesbian women climax. What distinguishes them from each other are subjective introjects of socio-cultural conventions, not objective, immutable "facts".
In "The New Gender Wars", published in the November/December 2000 issue of "Psychology Today", Sarah Blustain sums up the "bio-social" model proposed by Mice Eagly, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University and a former student of his, Wendy Wood, now a professor at the Texas A&M University:
"Like (the evolutionary psychologists), Eagly and Wood reject social constructionist notions that all gender differences are created by culture. But to the question of where they come from, they answer differently: not our genes but our roles in society. This narrative focuses on how societies respond to the basic biological differences - men's strength and women's reproductive capabilities - and how they encourage men and women to follow certain patterns.
'If you're spending a lot of time nursing your kid', explains Wood, 'then you don't have the opportunity to devote large amounts of time to developing specialized skills and engaging tasks outside of the home'. And, adds Eagly, 'if women are charged with caring for infants, what happens is that women are more nurturing. Societies have to make the adult system work [so] socialization of girls is arranged to give them experience in nurturing'.
According to this interpretation, as the environment changes, so will the range and texture of gender differences. At a time in Western countries when female reproduction is extremely low, nursing is totally optional, childcare alternatives are many, and mechanization lessens the importance of male size and strength, women are no longer restricted as much by their smaller size and by child-bearing. That means, argue Eagly and Wood, that role structures for men and women will change and, not surprisingly, the way we socialize people in these new roles will change too. (Indeed, says Wood, 'sex differences seem to be reduced in societies where men and women have similar status,' she says. If you're looking to live in more gender-neutral environment, try Scandinavia.)"
