Throughout the nineteenth century, German medical, scientific and legal scholars found themselves puzzled and engaged by the diverse forms of human sexuality. Psychiatrists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing who were interested in explaining deviance encountered scientifically trained advocates for emancipation like Magnus Hirschfeld, and the result was the new--if unstable--discipline of sexual sci...

What role, authors Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton ask, does sexual pleasure play in our lives? Is the pursuit of sexual enjoyment in our blood? Our brains? Our very nature? Regardless of the source, it can be agreed that the joys of sex are widely appreciated. Why, then, is pleasure so often overlooked in discussions of sexual behavior, and why do cultural, historical, and religious treatis...

INTRODUCTION Sexual pleasure is a central aspect of human sexuality; however, no validated measurements exist that assess sexual pleasure. We present a preliminary validation study of the psychometric properties of a Sexual Pleasure Scale (SPS), based on the three items developed by Sanchez, Crocker and Boike to measure sexual pleasure. The SPS is a brief and easy-to-implement instrument that a...

This article outlines the progression of topics used to highlight gender in a clinical medical anthropology class. As the class moves through themes such as the use of high-technology medicine and doctor-patient communication, issues of the socially constructed nature of gender are brought to the fore. Included in this article are students' reflections on how they try to make sense of diverse n...

What role, authors Paul Abramson and Steven Pinkerton ask, does sexual pleasure play in our lives? Is the pursuit of sexual enjoyment in our blood? Our brains? Our very nature? Regardless of the source, it can be agreed that the joys of sex are widely appreciated. Why, then, is pleasure so often overlooked in discussions of sexual behavior, and why do cultural, historical, and religious treatis...

The modern notion of sexuality took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical-psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as perversion. From around 1870, psychiatrists shifted the...

It is well-documented thatagreatdealofpsychological research, including the study of sexual behavior, relies on undergraduate students for its study participants (e.g., Landrum & Chastain, 1999; Miller, 1981; Owen, Rhoades, Stanley, & Fincham, 2010; Saks & Seiber, 1989). In many ways, undergraduate students are an ideal sample for understanding sexual behavior as this is developmentally consist...

Youth sexuality has been primarily studied with a focus on its potential public health issues, such as sexually transmitted infections and unwanted pregnancies, and its comorbidity with other risky behaviors. More recently, it has been studied as a normative step in romantic partnerships, either pre- or post-marital, as well as outside the context of romantic involvement. In this paper, we revi...

The objective of this study is to identify the primary health care nurses' concepts about sexuality, and how this theme is integrated within the health care practices of these professionals when working with breastfeeding women. This qualitative, exploratory and descriptive study was performed with eight nurses from three primary health care units in a city in the north region of Rio Grande do ...

rabiʿa al-aʿdawiyya (717-801 a.d.) the first female sufi in the muslim world, who introduced the concept of ‘love’ into mysticism, was popular for her witticism, sharp reprimands of her contemporary male sufis and her gender-bending practices. in ʿattar’s tadhkirat al-awliya, rabiʿa is portrayed as a challenger of the established gender norms of her day. rabiʿa’s crossing of gender boundaries a...