Chapter 10 - Sex, Gender, and Sexuality

Sociology

Body Consciousness

how a person perceives and feels about their body.

Comparable Worth

(or pay equity) : the belief that wages ought to reflect the worth of a job, not the gender or the race of the worker.

Crossdresser

a male who dresses as a woman or a female who dresses as a man but does not alter his or her genitalia.

Feminism

the belief that men and women are equal and should be valued equally and have equal rights.

Gender

the culturally and socially constructed differences between females and males found in the meanings, beliefs, and practices associated with “femininity” and “masculinity”.

Gender Bias

behavior that shows favoritism toward one gender over the other.

Gender Identity

a person’s perception of the self and their gender.

Gender Role

the attitudes, behavior, and activities that are socially defined as appropriate for each sex and that are learned through the socialization process.

Homophobia

extreme prejudice and sometimes discriminatory actions at hays, lesbians,, bisexuals, transgender persons, and others who are not perceived as not being heterosexual.

Intersex Person

an individual who is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that does not correspond to the typical definitions of male or female; in other words, the person’s sexual differentiation is ambiguous.

Matriarchy

a hierarchal system of social organization in which cultural, political, and economic structures, are controlled by women.

Patriarchy

a hierarchical system of social organizations in which cultural, political, and economic structures are controlled by men.

Pay Gap

the display between women’s and men’s earnings.

Primary Sex Characteristics

the genitalia used in the reproductive process.

Secondary Sex Characteristics

the physical traits (other than reproductive organs) that identify an individual’s sex.

Sex

the biological and anatomical differences between females and males.

Sexism

the subordination of one sex, usually female, based on the assumed superiority of the other sex.

Sexual Orientation

an individual’s preference for emotional-sexual relationships with members of the different sex (heterosexual), the same (gay or lesbian), both sexes (bisexual), or neither sex (asexual).

Sexualization

the act or process whereby an individual or group is seen as sexual in nature or persons become aware of their sexuality.

Transgender Person

an individual whose gender identity (self-identification as women, man, neither, or both) does not match the person’s assigned sex at birth (identification by others as male, female, or intersex baed on physical/genetic sex.)