SEX DIFFERENCES – ADOLESCENCE

With adolescence changes appear in the behaviour and the temperament of boys and girls. These changes are not due to innate sexual differences, or to hormones, but more to the way in which girls have been reared. Girls have been conditioned, by parents, by peers, by society, and through the media, to believe that they should be attractive, co-operative, sympathetic, and loving, while boys are taught to be competitive, ambitious, energetic, practical, and powerful. By adolescence, girls have been taught, and accept, that boys are better achievers (which is not true). They accept that boys will get the more interesting jobs and will rise to higher levels in their jobs (which is true).

In stories and on television most good things happen to the male characters, and they are usually the result of the man’s own initiative or action. When a good thing happens to a female character (and this occurs much less frequently) it is usually because of someone else’s initiative, or grows out of a situation in which the woman finds herself.

Many adolescent boys fear failure, but many, perhaps most, adolescent girls fear both failure and success. They fear success because it puts them into direct competition with men and may diminish their attractiveness to men. By accepting these views many girls diminish their potential; they believe that they have less ability than boys and will never achieve as much. They accept that women are ‘inferior’ to men. They accept the inevitability of patriarchy – that men will always dominate society, and that women will always be submissive.

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SEXUALITY IN ADOLESCENCE

One of the matters which concerns many people, who are now parents and nudging into middle age, is the more open sexual behaviour of contemporary adolescents. It is likely that the change is less, in reality, than in most people’s fantasies; but it is true that today sexuality is more open and more discussed and that attitudes to it are more honest.

Sexuality includes sexual arousal, sexual behaviour, and sexual relationships, and each of these needs consideration.

For many people, the touch of body contact is the most sexually exciting of all the senses. Most people experience increased sexual excitement if they have the opportunity to kiss or hug a person by whom they have been sexually aroused. This excitement is increased if the erotic parts of the body are touched. In our culture, the breasts, the genitals, and the buttocks are strongly erotic for most people. Some people are sexually excited from having their feet massaged, their backs rubbed, or their hair stroked. It depends on the scenario each person has created.

By late adolescence the person’s sexual arousal scenario is largely complete, and it is less likely to be re-written as the person grows older. For most people the culmination of sexual arousal is orgasm, by either masturbation, or erotic stimulation by a partner, or sexual intercourse.

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PHYSICAL CHANGES: TESTOSTERONE

A boy’s testicles increase in size because of the effects of the gonadotrophins. These brain hormones induce special cells, called Leydig cells, within the testis, to produce the male sex hormone, testosterone. Testosterone, together with the gonadotrophins, leads to the production of sperms in the ‘nests’ in the testes. Testosterone enters the boy’s bloodstream in increasing quantities and begins the masculinization of his body. The blood carries the testosterone to his brain where it ‘stimulates’ his sexual interest, so that it becomes more intense. Once so stimulated, testosterone has no further effect on his sexual desire or activity, provided the amount secreted by his testicles remains within a wide ‘normal’ range. It is for this reason that injections of testosterone are of no value in improving a man’s sexual performance or in treating most cases of impotence.

The first obvious sign that a boy has reached puberty is that his penis grows in length and in circumference, so that it is bigger in both dimensions. At first the growth is slow, but by the age of 13 or 14, a boy’s penis grows more rapidly and pubic hair begins to appear.

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THREE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE SEXES 3

At present, women are disadvantaged in opportunities for jobs. They obtain less interesting jobs, get less pay, and achieve lower levels of promotion. This is not due to lack of ability or of desire, but to the patriarchal structure of society. In a male-dominated society, women have to expend more effort, more time, and more skill to achieve a position a less qualified man achieves more easily. This biases the competition strongly in favour of a man: it ceases to be true competition. The lack of success of women in high-status jobs may also be affected by the way girls are reared. Females take orders from authority more easily and comply with them more readily, they are less likely to protest and are slower to become angry, so they are easier to exploit by men and more ready to take less interesting, lower-status jobs.

The subordinate position of women to men, which is initiated by the way the two sexes are reared, tends to be self-perpetuating. Women, brought up in this way, believe that they are inferior to men in both intelligence and ability. Even when the work of men and women is of identical quality, women tend to denigrate that of their own sex and to rate a man’s work more highly. In an experiment conducted in America, a group of women university students were given six scientific papers to rate. The name of the author of each paper was manipulated by the investigator so that half of the women thought the author was a man and the other half thought the author was a woman. The women were asked to judge the quality of each paper for style, for professional competence, for conviction, and for over-all impact on the reader. Invariably, whatever the subject of the paper, if the name of the author was male, it was rated higher than if the women thought it had been written by a woman.

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HOW DOES A SMALL CHILD LEARN THAT IT IS A BOY OR A GIRL?

How does a small child learn that it is a boy or a girl, and feel that it is of a particular sex? In other words, how does it develop its gender-identity? Linked to this is the question of how and when a small child begins to behave to others to demonstrate to them that it is male or female. In other words, how and when does it develop its gender-role?

If you observe small babies, you will find that they show no awareness of belonging to either sex, at least until they are more than 9 months old. During these months most people are unable to tell what the sex of a baby is except by the way it is dressed or, for accuracy, by looking at the baby’s genitals and seeing if it has or has not got a penis.

Because parents know their baby’s sex from the time of its birth, it is inevitable that they start forming a gender-role in the infant from its very first days, by their behaviour to it.

Child psychologists believe that children develop their attitudes and learn to behave in specific ways only by contact with other humans. They also believe that most of this learning occurs by ‘role-taking’, that is we learn the attitudes of others by putting ourselves in their shoes, and by imitating what they do so we may obtain their approval.

Obviously, when the baby is very small it can only learn about its gender-identity from the way it is treated by its parents.

From about 9 months of age the baby becomes more mobile and begins to receive a much wider variety of information from its observations. These observations suggest to it its sex, and fix ‘memory traces’ on its brain. But the exact way in which a boy can say with conviction, ‘I am a boy’ (in other words establish his gender-identity), is unclear.

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