The Body Gender and Sexuality - Essay Example

?Critically discuss the argument that in contemporary society medical technology has rendered the body a product of reconstruction. INTRODUCTION: Right from the study of elementary science, we are aware that body is constructed with tissues. Cells organised into tissues form the body. Groups of similar cells work together to perform specific functions. (Clark, 2005: p.58) Body is the identity for species. Gender is the identity for individual beings. And sexuality is the broadest aspect of life style itself. Kids and children are the best scholars who understand these concepts especially the first two aspects of body and gender. They understand on the first sight of a human and animals by their bodies. Gender is best understood by kids through moms and dads. The body parts inside and outside are almost similar. Thoughts and feelings are common for both genders. Hopes, dreams and activities in several arenas are the same for both genders. The knowledge of gender is conceived fairly well even by a school going boy or girl. (Annunziata and Nemiroff, 2002, p.6) It is the sexual orientation which is the complex subject for kids – in fact for the whole human race – to understand in its fullest depth. The personal wishes, desires, aspirations and goals manifest in establishing the sexuality of human beings. For example, consider the following statement: The baby boy is fondled and kissed in his sleep. Can we ascertain from this sentence ‘who fondled and kissed?’ Was it a father or a mother? Was it by a man or woman? But the baby boy would exactly find who did it. How? The way and style of fondling or kissing are best differentiated by the baby. Thus it is the life style in which we establish our manliness and womanliness which decides our sexuality. We the human ever like pleasure, despite the fact that the other way is also true to be faced. We wish to derive pleasure in everything including our body. This kind of bodily pleasure deriving is named sexual by many folks. But it is quite natural for any living being to derive pleasure from body. Because, it is through the senses centred in the body we are to derive pleasure. Pleasure normally is asexual. It is purely psychological. In our going after pleasure, we find pleasure often comes from the style of being rather than in any other technique. (Bhattacharyya, 2002, p.82). No human being can think anything out of his/her body. Just because one is sane and healthy, his/her ideologies need not be out of body experience. Physique is always physique. But the social norms often get confused with physical and mental health issues. As we have already put pleasure derived from body is completely relished and experienced by the self/soul through senses. This is well established by one Caroline’s (who is physically disabled) encounter with a physician who poisoned her mind with a prescription that she might not have loved her husband. She had just approached the physician to get medical relief for her hip pain suffered during her sexual intercourse with her husband. The price in terms of mental pain she paid for her approaching the physician is horrible. Social crippling of the psyche is more painful than physical disablement, which is medically curable.(Shakespere, 2002, p.145) MEDICAL PERCEPTION OF BODY AND SEXUALITY: Chemical composition of human body was described in the second half of 18th century dealt with chiefly the chemical composition of food. Different body tissues were compared with various types of food. However, the concept of reference man and reference women developed in late 19th century especially during 1970 when body composition was begun to be measured with the fat mass and fat-free mass for man and woman. While a reference man was gauged with 3% essential fat, a reference woman was found to be composed of 12% essential fat. Essential fat in women includes the fat in mammary glands and pelvic region.(Gropper et al, 2009, p.283) Medicine and chemistry thus has begun to view human body as a product of reconstruction. The analysis of metabolism and food sciences rendered much supportive atmosphere to this concept of human bodies. The difference between a man and a woman is simply viewed as the chemical changes occurred within the bodies, cells and genes. But sexuality is not restricted merely to these physiological structures of human body. Body has been given different meaning in different discourses. Cossman (1997: p.23) had sharply quoted Weeks in saying, “what we know about sexuality and history of sexuality is (just) a history of our discourses about sexuality. UNDERSTANDING HUMAN SEXUALITY: The general type and trend of our activities can not express our sexuality. This is because sometimes our acts are manly and sometimes the other way. We assume some roles as manly and some as womanly. But this assumption could not at all be considered definitive for the entire mankind. Manly actions and womanly actions get overlapped on several occasions. The overall complexity in understanding human sexuality emerged from this kind of inappropriate assumptions. The terms homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality are all the words coined out of our inability to understand sexuality in general. Unable and unwilling to break our previous connotations, beliefs and assumptions, we evolve new terms. Although values and ethics are subjected to constant change mechanisms throughout generations, the sexual movements that sprang four decades before are considered to pose radical change, questioning the values. Questions about sexual practices, relationships, lifestyles raised by feminism and gay/lesbian politics have flown in to the mainstream of culture impacting a change in the forms of fashion, representation, sexual techniques, political strategies and moral debate. Whatever changes the culture saw, a main question about identity remains the same and unanswered. “who we are, why we are, in what way should we live, how should we love and have sex…” ( Weeks, 2003, p.122) J. Week’s assertion of unanswered questions on human identities try to elucidate the kind of smudge we have affixed on the understanding – and many times it is misunderstanding – of sexuality on every walk of our life. That is, a daring inability to establish our roles on our way of life is exposed. We can ascribe this to our attempt to attach gender roles/sexuality to every activities of life which require being simply human rather than gender centred. When I like to drink a goblet of wine and drink the same people accept it. When I want to drink a cup of tea, then also people accept. When I wish to have sex with other gender, people accept. When I wish to have the same with same gender, then the society refutes. It means that the society is not ready to look at my wish/desire/need for pleasure but focuses chiefly on the values and ethics fixed by a generation previous to mine. If at all the health aspects and consensus issues are the ones to be concerned, then we can well form or adapt to relevant laws and medical safety measures alone. Are we to blame feminism, which influences and paves way to create a lesbian identity? This identity provides easy approach to certain communities and discourses conforming to historical and localised norm of being a lesbian.(Stein, 2003, p.132) Why this has been fixed as cultural and social norms of living? It is simply because of confusion and misunderstanding of our sexuality. SEXUALITY AND SOCIETY: The outlook on sexuality in the current century is much developed. It has fairly come away from the previous century’s views, which allowed only biomedical and population sciences to study sexuality. This was because; in those periods of time sexuality was just related to ‘body and sex’. At the end of 20th century and more precisely the beginning of 21st century has seen that the age old marginalisation of sexuality (Parker and Aggleton, 2007, p.1) has given way for far reaching social and political analysis. Sexuality and society are intertwined. Nowhere in the globe is a society able to exist without sexuality. All human traits are based on sexuality. Masculinity and femininity are the undertone of all the deeds we do. Any one can laugh. But a girl’s laughter and that of a boy are will not be viewed alike. Any one can dance. But a woman’s dance and a man’s dance are seen with different perception only. Likewise, traits and qualities such as bravery, affection, and love also are subjected to be perceived through the connotations of masculinity and femininity. No one can challenge that identity is our soul mate. The very existence of ourselves is based on identity alone. Sexual identity too is hence inevitable. Thus, sexuality and society are intertwined. Citing Biddy Martin, Jacqueline Taylor (Taylor, 2003, p.212) asserts that ‘sexual identity not only modifies but essentially defines a life, providing it with predictable content and an identity possessing continuity and universality.’ Thus, when we wish to establish our identity – sexual identity too – in society, we must live along with the sexual promiscuity too. Rather we can consider this promiscuity a ‘process of understanding sexuality’ as such. CONCLUSION: Except the one and only role of reproduction, where succinct difference between the genders is established, all human beings are the same. All the sexual connotations we adhere to in our worldly activities are all quite imaginary which have been precipitated on our psyche through ages. Nature ( or God?) has sent transgender mechanism to get a clear understanding of human sexuality. Can a transgender be segregated as something like belonging to animal kingdom? Are we prepared for that? Just because they can not reproduce the bodies of human beings are we ready to call them a different animal? We may not be able to name them distinctively either as a man or woman. But they are just human. Isn’t it? We do not blame a printer for giving out a misprint. But we endeavour to change the programming for getting accurate and correct imprints. Likewise, we can learn much form Nature’s misprint of transgender to have a better understanding of human sexuality and live just as human beings. == End == Reference list – Annunziata. J and Nemiroff. M (2002) Sex and Babies: First Facts, Magination Press Children’s Books, American Psychological Association, Washington. Brenda Cossman (1997) Bad Attitude/s on trial: Pornography, Feminism and Butler decision, University of Toronto Press, London. Bhatacharyya. G (2002) Sexuality and Society: An Introduction, Routledge, London. Parker R. and Aggleton P. (2007) Culture, Society and Sexuality: A Reader, Second Edition, Routledge, New York. Robert K. Clark (2005) Anatomy and Physiology: Understanding the Human Body, Jones and Bartlet Publishers, London. Sareen S. Gropper, Jack L. Smith and James L. Groff (2009) Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism, Fifth Edition, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, Belmont, USA Shakespere. T, (2002) I haven’t seen that in Kama Sutra: the sexual stories of Disabled People, in Eds. Jeffrey Weeks, Janet Holland and Matthew Waites, 2002, “Sexuality and Society: A Reader”, Polity Press, Cambridge in association with Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK. Stein. A. (2002) Becoming Lesiban:Identity Work and the Performance of Sexuality in Eds. Jeffrey Weeks, Janet Holland and Matthew Waites, 2002, “Sexuality and Society: A Reader”, Polity Press, Cambridge in association with Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK. Taylor. J (2003) On Being Exemplory Lesbian: My Life as a Role Model in Eds. Lynn C. Miller, Jacqueline Taylor and M. Heather Carver, 2003, “Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women’s Autobiography”, University of Wisconsin Press, USA. Weeks. J. (2003) Necessary Fictions: Sexual Identities and the Politics of Diversity in Eds. Jeffrey Weeks, Janet Holland and Matthew Waites, 2003, “Sexuality and Society: A Reader”, Polity Press, Cambridge in association with Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK. Read More