Journal
SEXUALITY & CULTURE-AN INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL
Volume 22, Issue 3, Pages 685-705Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s12119-018-9498-2
Keywords
Hookups; Undesired sex; Sexual subjectivity
Categories
Funding
- Vanderbilt University College of Arts and Science Social Science Dissertation Fellowship
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Young people's sexuality is often discursively constructed within the confines of a masculine/feminine binary that minimizes young women's sexual subjectivity (i.e., desire, pleasure, and agency) while taking young men's subjectivity for granted. Accordingly, young women who acknowledge themselves as sexual subjects are constructed as bad girls who incite males' purportedly uncontrollable desire and, thus, invite undesired sexual attention. However, there is reason to hypothesize that young women who view themselves as sexual subjects may be less likely than other women to engage in undesired sexual activity (i.e., sex that their partners desire, but they do not desire for themselves). In this study, I used data from the Online College Social Life Survey (N = 7255) to explore relationships between two measures of sexual subjectivity (i.e., pleasure prioritization and sexual agency) and college women's participation in undesired sexual activity during hookups (i.e., performance of undesired sexual acts to please a partner and succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse). Logistic regression analyses suggest that pleasure prioritization and sexual agency are associated with lower odds of performing undesired sexual acts to please a partner-and sexual agency is associated with lower odds of succumbing to verbal pressure for intercourse. These findings point to the importance of sexuality education that includes discussions of women's sexual subjectivity.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available