![]() ![]() Leaders of the Jewish faith promote sexual activity between married couples to reinforce the marital bond and produce children. The Catholic Church asserts that homosexuality is unholy. For example, many evangelical Christians value abstinence and believe that men and women should wait until marriage to engage in sexual activity. Given that most religions seek to instruct their followers on the proper and holy ways in which to live life, it follows that most religions seek to offer guidance on the proper ways to sexually comport oneself. ![]() Heterosexual couple: Heterosexuality is a social norm. So how is it that one becomes socialized into certain sexual behaviors and proclivities? The rest of this section seeks to explore how socializing agents impress sexual norms into their members by looking at three primary agents of socialization: religion, the law, and the media. It is misleading to say that homosexuality was tolerated in Ancient Greece rather, the Ancient Greeks conceived of sexuality in completely different ways than the current Western norm. Men could be either active or passive, but women could only be passive. In this sense, biological gender was obviously relevant, but not in the same way as evaluating homo- or heterosexual orientation. What was salient for the Ancient Greeks was whether one took an active or passive sexual position, whether one was the penetrator or was penetrated. In contrast, the Ancient Greeks categorized sexuality not in terms of homosexuality and heterosexuality, but in terms of active and passive sexual subjects. Obviously, this is a basic schematic it does not capture all of the existing ways in which people behave sexually, but it is the basic rubric by which sexual behaviors are evaluated. At the current moment in Western societies, sexuality is evaluated along a continuum of heterosexuality and homosexuality, with heterosexuality as the privileged mode of sexual expression. Rather, an individual is taught sexual norms of their particular cultural and historical moment through socialization. This indicates that there are no universal sexual norms. There is extreme variation in sexual expression across historical periods and cultures. While homosexual unions are the types of unions most commonly marked in opposition to normative heterosexual unions, heteronormativity marks any type of non-heterosexual sexual activity as deviant, as heterosexual sexual acts are considered the norm. and Western countries most notably adheres to heteronormativity, or the marking of heterosexual unions as normal and homosexual unions as socially abnormal and deviant. In regards to sexuality, socialization in the U.S. Socialization necessarily implies the inculcation of norms, or behaviors that society marks as valued as opposed to those marked as deviant. As such, sexual expression is part of socialization, the lifelong process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs, and ideologies and providing an individual with the skills and habits necessary for participating within one’s own society. One learns from society how to express one’s sexuality. While they often targeted sexual acts between persons of the same sex, many statutes employed definitions broad enough to outlaw certain sexual acts between persons of different sexes as well, sometimes even acts between married persons.
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