Page 42 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

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Gender and Sexuality

Gender is a mix of nature and culture, of biology and learned behavior.
At the grocery checkout counter in North America, for example, one
is more likely to encounter magazines with physically attractive women
adorning the covers than men. The faces in such images possess a
symmetry that is not simply aesthetic; biologists argue such symmetry is
associated in men ’ s unconscious minds with a greater possibility of repro-
ductive success. Culture would seem, therefore, to have a natural basis. But
our gender lives also have a social dimension; those images of women on
magazine covers are more likely to be seen by the women who in most
societies are charged with the labor of shopping. It is a culturally designated
women ’ s task. Savvy producers of magazines know what their audience is

and where to find them. But even this qualification can be said to return us
to nature – to, in this instance, the drive to accumulate resources for oneself
as a means of survival. And since men possess more of those resources
than women and have access more readily to them than do women, the
magazine culture of sexual attractiveness could be read as having to do
with the need women feel to make themselves attractive to men with power
over resources in a world in which those resources are inequitably and
unevenly distributed between and amongst the genders. Women ’ s survival
may depend on beauty. If you go online, you will find sites devoted to Sugar

Daddies (such as SeekingArrangement.com), who look for younger women
to support financially in exchange for sexual favors, but few if any sites for

women endowed with similar economic, social, and sexual power.
Culture thus can express nature in many ways. But in recent years,
scholars of culture have also explored the ways in which culture shapes
nature.
Our biological gender usually expresses itself in cultural forms such as
dress and hairstyle in a way that might convince us that gender identity is