Gender and Sex Lecture Notes 2

Hopefully you could follow Freuds theory on the Oedipus Complex and
the Electra Complex Electra complex the girl looks to father as love
object and denies mother.
Oedipus complex the son is competing with the father for mothers
love, but then is afraid of castration when he sees that female does not
have a penis. The phallic stage relates to gender socialization where
the penis is a symbol of power denied. Men develop a stronger
superego because of the psychic turmoil during the phallic stage.
Kinda out there
When we look at Essentialism and Arapesh we see that both sexes
participated in maternal behavior.
In Mundugumor - children become aggressive and measured tribal
success by aggression.
In Tchambuli women held the power.
Mead concluded that masculine and feminine are culturally rather than
biologically determined.
In terms of evolution it was adaptive for women to care for children
and for men to be promiscuous which then evolved to attributes to
increase reproductive success.. Aggression enabled men to compete
for women. Men spread sperm widely in order to increase reproductive
success as well.
Girls are taught not to be physically aggressive so we do it more
verbally (relationally) but we have the same rate of aggression as
boys.
Though Cognitive biology says men have more spatial ability, and
women have more verbal ability, critics say the differences are due to
environment and culture more so then biology.
When looking at gender and health women have higher rates of
sickness and men have higher rates of death. Globally women out live
men, and Japan has the highest life expectancy rate for men at the age
of 77, and 85 for women.
The double bind of PMS is that women arent allowed to just be
irritated by something its automatically assumed that it must be that
time of the month, which is why we are irritated.

As for eating disorders when we look at culture bound syndromes an

example is Fiji in 1995 T.V. was introduced, all of a sudden thin is in
where as before big was beautiful. Why? This speaks to the power
of the media!