SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response

SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL NURSING PAPERS Unformatted Attachment Preview 3 Sex Can Wait, Masturbate The Politics of Masturbation Training The ???? Australian ?lm The Black Balloon narrates the story of teenager Thomas (Rhys Wake?eld) and his older brother, Charlie (Luke Ford), as they adjust to life in a new town in New South Wales.? Charlie is autistic, and his autism is presented as causing obstacles to sexual self-ful?llment and brotherly unity. In particular, Charlie’s masturbatory habits provide dramatic obstacles to Thomas and his budding relationship with classmate Jackie (Gemma Ward). Unlike the scene in Yolk discussed in the preceding chapter, wherein Lena uses a stolen copy of The Joy of Sex to explore her own body, Charlie’s public masturbation at a dinner table birthday celebration falls back on the trope of inappropriate public masturbation perpetrated by individuals with the label of intellectual disability. At the celebration for his sixteenth birthday, Thomas’s parents, Maggie (Toni Collette) and Simon (Erik Thomson), present their son with L-plates, thus signifying their formal acknowledgment of Thomas’s transition into adulthood, marking a time in the not-sodistant future when Thomas can drive without supervision, which he imagines as a time of freedom.? At this moment, the promise of freedom—from parents and disabled brothers—highlights the di?erent life options for the brothers. After the presentation of gifts, Maggie and Simon proceed to cut the birthday cake and dish up ice cream, not noticing that Charlie has his hand down his pants masturbating. Jackie ?rst notices Charlie masturbating, exclaiming, “Oh, my God!” Almost immediately, Charlie’s parents spring into action, signing, and vocalizing that Charlie is supposed to masturbate in his bedroom. The viewer gets the idea that Charlie’s public masturbation is a regular occurrence. In the process of restraining and redirecting Charlie, Thomas’s birthday cake and celebration are ruined. Quite literally, Charlie’s sexual behavior becomes an obstacle, foreshadowing a time 83 84 Sex Can Wait, Masturbate when Thomas will have to watch over his disabled brother, which is imagined as infringing on his impending freedom and his own exploration of sexuality with Jackie. Charlie’s public masturbation in The Black Balloon is not just an action of a disabled adolescent, but also is con?gured in the ?lm as signifying a threat to Thomas and his future life. SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response Charlie’s sexual behavior, as we will see below, would seem to facilitate placement into a masturbation-training program. Eve Sedgwick in “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” writes: I want to argue here that the status of the masturbator among these many identities was uniquely formative. I would suggest that as one of the very earliest embodiments of “sexual identity” in the period of the progressive epistemological overloading of sexuality, the masturbator may have been the cynosural center of a remapping of individual identity, will, attention, and privacy along modern lines that the reign of “sexuality,” and its generic concomitant in the novel and in novelistic point of view, now lead us to take for granted. It is of more than chronological import if the (lost) identity of the masturbator was the proto-form of modern sexual identity itself.? Additionally, in Abnormal, Michel Foucault discusses the emergence of the “masturbator” as a universal subject in the eighteenth century, naming masturbation as “the universal secret shared by everyone but disclosed to no one.”? Taken together, these arguments convey the notion that masturbation and the masturbator are foundational in the development of sexual identity, but beyond that, surveillance, study, and discourse surrounding masturbation illustrate the potential seismic force contained within the practice itself. Put simply, claiming masturbation as a sexual practice and identity challenges conventional understandings of sexuality and sexual identity as binary or categorical. Given the productive materiality of masturbation, including mention in ?lm and theories of sexuality, this chapter traces the ways in which it has been studied and subsequently regulated through sexology and sex education in Western contexts as a way to manage the sexuality of people with intellectual disabilities. Masturbation training in sexology and sex education represents one of the few sanctioned approaches for individuals with intellectual disabilities, and similar approaches to masturbation emerge in prisons, nursing homes, and Sex Can Wait, Masturbate 85 residential institutions. The complicated relationship between HIV and masturbation also plays an important role in this discussion. The discourse around disease and infection prevention at times reinforces masturbation as a suitable sexual activity. In exploring how and why masturbation is either promoted as an appropriate sexual activity or as a sign of deviant sexuality for people with intellectual disabilities, a larger analysis is required in order to connect the organizational, political, and spatial contexts of masturbation training for individuals with intellectual disabilities. How is masturbation, as well as other forms of sexual activity, regulated, thus manifesting sexual ableism? Sex education materials for individuals with intellectual disabilities generally promote appropriate sexuality as nonreproductive, solitary, yet oriented toward the opposite sex. Expectations of pleasure and desire are absent from sex education, perhaps because educators’ discomfort with disabled sexuality results in limited promotion of sexual activity. Neoconservative ideologies of family, reproduction, and disease masquerade as discourses of prevention while dictating speci?c kinship structures for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Re?ecting these educational ideologies and methods, masturbation training in the case of individuals with intellectual disabilities reveals similar assumptions about nonnormative sexuality, discipline, and surveillance. Masturbation training teaches individuals how to masturbate in safe, appropriate, and e?ective ways. SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response Using as a point of departure two scenes from a ???? American ?lm, The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables, in which two people are either praised or reprimanded for masturbating, I show how sexuality for individuals with intellectual disabilities is simultaneously programmed, restricted, and professionalized by di?erent training methods for the purpose of curbing public masturbation.? The assumption that individuals with intellectual disabilities ought not to masturbate publicly or with multiple partners underscores most discussions. Generally, denying individuals the ability to consent to mutual or more public forms of masturbation results in the promotion of masturbation as a private, solitary act. Eugenic thinking—that the reproduction of generations of people with intellectual disabilities is against social evolution—also in?uences the discussion. Finally, expectations of appropriate sex/gender roles in?uence discourses about how to practice “appropriate” masturbation. The restrictive binaries 86 Sex Can Wait, Masturbate of good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate, dominate discussions of sexuality for people with intellectual disabilities, and they demand explanation and critique. In the end, a paradoxical question arises: where can one masturbate in private when one is incarcerated in a facility that denies, disallows, and prohibits privacy? Obtaining privacy to express sexuality as an extension of personhood becomes a necessity for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Masturbation and the promotion of the training for individuals with intellectual disabilities provide, I argue, a unique vantage point to discuss how the sexuality of institutionalized groups such as prisoners, people in group homes, and other types of residential institutions falls under regulation and restriction in everyday life, and reveals underlying assumptions of sexuality as grounds for institutionalization. The ABCs of Sex Education: Masturbation as Sex Events in the ????s changed public perceptions of sexuality and reproduction in the United States. These events are commonly called the sexual revolution. Sandra Leiblum and Raymond Rosen describe the ????s as displaying a “burgeoning of enthusiasm for all things sexual—from ‘masturbation training groups’ to Sexual Attitude Reassessment seminars, from ‘sex shoppes’ and California hot tubs to ‘swinging clubs,’ from ‘open marriage’ to the ?ourishing of casual and anonymous sex.” ? Roe v. Wade legislated a woman’s right to choose an abortion to end a pregnancy in the ?rst trimester while the Hyde Amendment restricts federal funding for these abortions, the result being that even with legal abortion, poor women and women of color still are subjected to reproductive control and sterilization abuses in the United States.? Half of U.S. states removed sodomy statutes from their laws, and the American Psychiatric Association in ???? removed homosexuality as a diagnosable mental disorder.? Pornography was also highly visible, with “thousands of movie houses featuring triple‘X’-rated ?lms” and adult bookstores selling “hard-core sex magazines and paperbacks” throughout the United States.? This rede?nition of sexual practices and norms was made possible partly through the development of a market for sex, pornography, sex therapy, and other things related to sexuality. With this new market came consumers with their purchasing power.SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response Simultaneously, many in the United States also saw individuals with intellectual disabilities Sex Can Wait, Masturbate 87 living in deplorable conditions, particularly because of Geraldo Rivera’s investigative reporting about Willowbrook State School. Allison Carey describes how during the ????s additional focus was given to the sexual needs of individuals with intellectual disabilities.?? Accordingly, attitudes toward masturbation and individuals with intellectual disabilities softened in the ????s. For example, professionals advocated the use of lemon juice as opposed to electric shock therapy to “correct” masturbation behavioral issues.?? In one such intervention, parents and teachers would carry portable containers of lemon juice that would be squirted into an individual’s mouth when he masturbated in a public location.?? Lemon juice was also used when an individual would masturbate “excessively.” J. William Cook and colleagues conclude that lemon juice as a masturbatory deterrent is both e?ective and more humane that subjecting individuals to electric shock therapy. Abby Wilkerson quotes an example from ???? that reports an instance where residential sta? taped sandpaper inside a boy’s thighs to prevent public masturbation.?? This more contemporary example helps to complicate Sedgwick’s claims that masturbation and “the history of masturbation phobia—the astonishing range of legitimate institutions that so recently surveilled, punished, jawboned, imprisoned, terrorized, shackled, diagnosed, purged, and physically mutilated so many people, to prevent a behavior that those same institutions consider innocuousness itself—has complex messages for sexual activism today.”?? Sedgwick, writing around the same time the sandpaper example is published, overlooks the continuous regulation of masturbatory practices of individuals with intellectual disabilities. The language of disability utilized in her prose—diagnosed, physically mutilated, purged, surveilled—underscores the ways in which management of disability facilitates prevention of masturbation. While the linkage between masturbation and genesis of disease has been discredited, the desire to prevent masturbation has not. The control and restriction of masturbation for some individuals but not others illustrates how sexual ableism depends on assessments of ability and competency interlaid with notions of appropriateness. In ????, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania helped produce a ?lm titled The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables. ABC acts as a training ?lm—instructing sta? members about sex education while also providing content to teach. An older white professional man, 88 Sex Can Wait, Masturbate Richard Dix, a television actor from the ????s and ????s, narrates the ?lm. At the beginning the A, B, and C of sex education are explained as: (A) awareness of bodies and feelings, (B) the mechanics of reproduction, and (C) training in responsibilities and social behavior. The twenty-minute ?lm is divided into three sections, often cutting back to the narrator in between reenactments of professionals teaching and individuals with intellectual disabilities learning about sex. The ?lm currently has a fairly signi?cant cult following. For example, the movie can be viewed on websites such as YouTube. There are also groups dedicated to the ?lm on Facebook that keep appearing and then being shut down, often because of mocking and ableist language that appears in these spaces. This international attention, fueled by the Internet, is not coming from individuals with intellectual disabilities, but rather from nondisabled individuals who are interested in the ?lm for its content. Much in the same way that the movie Reefer Madness is viewed and openly mocked for its portrayal of the harmful e?ects of marijuana usage, ABC is likewise mocked for showing the sexuality of intellectually disabled individuals.?? The Internet response to the ?lm displays how the sexuality of people with intellectual disabilities is received in this age of globalized sexual identities.?? One of the better-known scenes in the ?lm involves a female teacher asking a group of co-ed students with disabilities the various names for penis. The students shout out the following: prick, peter, cock, rod, dick, meat, ding-dong, wand, wiener, tool, and joint. The ?lm recommends this naming activity as an appropriate and effective training technique to reduce apparent stigma around the male sex organ. However, many in the Internet communities referenced above ?nd this scene pejoratively hilarious, thus pointing to one way in which the sexuality (or sexual knowledge) of intellectually disabled individuals is ridiculed by the larger public. These comments are often layered with discriminatory and hateful language based on ableism and male superiority that not only sees sexual knowledge as objectionable but also evokes historical sentiments about sterilization and elimination as e?ective ways to manage the sexuality of people with intellectual disabilities. SOC 451 CSU Northridge The Aspect of Human Sexuality Reading Response In one of the reenactments in the ?lm, there is a younger-looking white man, perhaps in his middle to late teens, lying alone on his bed with a blanket covering all of his body except his face. The boy, identi- Sex Can Wait, Masturbate 89 ?ed as Ricky, is clearly masturbating, although the viewers only see the blanket rise and fall around his waist. As Ricky is masturbating, his mother suddenly appears from behind the closed door to his room. His mother tells Ricky that she saw what he was doing and that she knows it feels good. She then tells him that it is respectable that he is doing it in the privacy of his own room and that she will knock next time before she enters the room. As a whole, the scene is reminiscent of many younger males’ experiences of being discovered masturbating; however, since Ricky’s mother walked in on him masturbating, the mood is especially embarrassing. Of course she is not acting appropriately in this scene, as she enters his room without knocking, but she uses her violation of personal privacy as an opportunity to teach a lesson that is already known, as Ricky is not masturbating in public. This scene contrasts with a later scene in which a group of individuals with intellectual disabilities are drawing. As the group members draw pictures of their choosing, one individual, Sandy, a white woman, is touching her genital area on top of her clothes while seated at the table with the others. Sandy is told by the professional overseeing the drawing activity that her behavior is not appropriate in this public setting. Sandy ignores the prompting of the professional and resumes touching her clothed genital area. At this moment, the narrator explains that sometimes individuals need to be removed from public settings for displaying sexual activities. The ?lm Dealing with Sexually Inappropriate Behavior: Masturbation and Sexually Provocative Behavior promotes a similar type of management for public masturbation in nursing homes.?? While the ?lm explains that sexual activity is a need, it also encourages nursing home sta? to send residents who masturbate publicly to their rooms. The ?lm also discusses how residents have little to no privacy in the nursing home, thus e?ectively making private masturbation more di?cult because nursing sta? have unrestricted access to patient rooms. Moreover, one nursing supervisor in the ?lm comments that nurses have observed male patients urinating and quickly assumed they were masturbating, suggesting that some sta? members are always on the lookout for “inappropriate” sexual activity. Much like disabled people’s sexuality, older people also face discriminatory views from various professionals as well as the general public about their sexuality.?? Barriers to sexuality for elderly 90 Sex Can Wait, Masturbate persons, especially in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, include privacy, lack of information, and sta? oversight.?? In ABC Sandy is represented as inappropriately sexual, while Ricky is displaying his sexuality properly. The presence of other people and the spatial di?erence between Ricky’s bedroom and Sandy’s workshop are important factors in determining the appropriateness of masturbation highlighted in the ?lm. In addition, the combination of female gender and intellectual disability frequently results in intellectually disabled women being seen as exceedingly sexual, thus recalling histories of eugenic regulation of sexuality for this population, whereas physically disabled women often report being seen as asexual.?? These two scenes highlight a binary between “tolerable” and “intolerable” sexual activities within a limited parameter of masturbation. While good sexuality happens in private, individuals are not always a?orded privacy, even when they are in their own rooms. There is no guarantee that mothers, nurses, roommates, and sta? will not enter one’s room. A lack of privacy re?ects an individual’s status as disabled, where “professionalization hinges on being able to invade privacy while divorcing that invasion for its sexual associations.”?? In certain locations, including nursing and group homes, the relationship between sexuality and privacy is directly related to professional assessments about competence and assumed dangerousness. Benign activity has the potential to be considered sexual. Touching of the genitals is seen as sexual regardless of the intent. Even if the touching is sexual in nature, individuals are often moved to their rooms without an explanation of why the activity is inappropriate. The binaries of good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate, private and public, point to the contested terrains in which many individuals with intellectual disabilities negotiate their sexuality. Frequency of Masturbation Masturbation issues, including frequency and location, are often discussed in the professional literature. While ABC does not address how to teach individuals masturbation techniques, masturbation tra … Purchase answer to see full attachment Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10

Read more
Enjoy affordable prices and lifetime discounts
Use a coupon FIRST15 and enjoy expert help with any task at the most affordable price.
Order Now Order in Chat

We now help with PROCTORED EXAM. Chat with a support agent for more details