Cross-cultural Differences in Sexual Violence

In this session, I integrate my prior work in Sexual Deviance and Violence:

Publications

Schneider, Andreas. 1996. Sexual-Erotic Emotions in the U.S. in Cross-cultural Comparison. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 16:123-143.

Schneider, Andreas. 1999. "The Violent Character of Sexual-Eroticism in Cross-cultural Comparison." International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy l8:81-100.

Schneider, Andreas 2002.  “A Possible Link Between Stigmatization of Sexual-Erotic Identities and Sexual Violence”. Sexuality & Culture  6,4.

Papers Presented

Schneider, Andreas. 2001. "A Model of Sexual Emancipation and Constraint." Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Anaheim. Sociological Abstracts; full version available at Sociology*Express.

Schneider, Andreas.1998 "The Emotional Basis for Violence in Sexual-Erotic Identities: Germany and the U.S." Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco.

Schneider, Andreas.1995 "Sexual-Erotic Emotions in the U.S. in Cross-cultural Comparison." Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington D.C.

Schneider, Andreas.1994 "Cross-Cultural Differences of Authoritative and Sexual Role-identities." Table for Comparative Social Psychology. International Sociological Association, Bielefeld.

Schneider, Andreas.1994 "The Affective Basis of Sexual Role-Identities in the U.S. and Germany." Table for Social Psychology of Emotions. International Sociological Association, Bielefeld.

Data Collections:

1995. Data collection of  newsgroups with sexual-erotic content for the Kinsey Institute Indiana.

1996. Establishing a time series in the study of newsgroups with sexual-erotic content for the Kinsey Institute Indiana.

I. Identity emotion link. McKinnon

Characteristic Emotions: If a person confirms her identity, her emotions will be equal to the EPA profile of her fundamental identity.

II. Cross-cultural Differences in Sexual-erotic Identities

Classification of identities as being sexual-erotic

Affective meaning

• EPA profiles

Cognitive meaning

a) connotative meaning

• lexical categorization
  
  

b) denotative meaning

• In case of identities mainly structural properties
  
  

Categories of Cultural Agreement and Disagreement

One category of inter-cultural agreement:

Common components: Cultures agree on structural meaning to the degree to which categories of the same structural meaning share a common component.

Two categories of inter-cultural disagreement:

(a) Non-common components are the remainder of common components. They indicate cross-cultural disagreement in structural meaning. The term "non-common components" will be used if the category of the role identities of interest exists in both cultures.

(b) Overlapping components: If the same role identity reflects different structural categories in different cultures, structural meanings for this role identity overlaps.

Small Common Component And Large Non-Common Components

the small overlapping component of the sexual-erotic domain strongly indicates cross-cultural differences.

Only about 20% of the U.S. sexual-erotic identities are also in the German sexual-erotic cluster.

Large Overlapping Component

The cross-cultural interpretation of the American sexual-erotic cluster is comprehensive.

• About 80% of the American sexual-erotic cluster is identified by the German clusters of sexual eroticism and coercive deviance.
• The remaining 20% can be interpreted as the unexplained variance in the cross-cultural assignment of denotative categories. These 20% are distributed between the other four German clusters without forming any other overlapping components of significant size.

Figure 2: American and German sexual-erotic cluster and the German cluster of coercive-deviance: The common component and the overlapping component.

List of 20 Identities in the Common Component

bisexual brat callgirl concubine cynic fool gambler gigolo hippie informant lesbian pornostar prostitute runaway scamp streetwalker stripper truant weirdo whore

• Identities of the oldest profession made up three of the ten most stigmatized identities in the common component.

• Identities of the legal sexual entertainment industry, topless dancers, pornostars, and strippers, make up another three of the ten of the identities identified as highly stigmatized.

• the remaining sexual-erotic identities, the bisexual, adulterer, intimate, and the playboy

Quantitative Comparison of Sexual Erotic Identities

1. Sexual-erotic identities that are appreciated in the German population are stigmatized in the U.S. population (table 1).

Table 1 Mean Evaluation Ratings on Semantic Differential Scales ranging from -4.33 to +4.33. For American and German Identities in the Common Component (CC) of American and German Sexual Cluster (n=20).

Linking Emotions to Identities

Quantitative part: Emotions, whose affective meanings correspond most closely to the affective meanings of an ideal typical sexual identity in each culture are selected to represent each culture.

• The cluster mean of the sexual erotic cluster represents the EPA profile of the ideal typical sexual erotic identity in a culture.

Qualitative part: Emotions that match sexual-erotic identities are analyzed and compared between cultures.

Results

The identity-emotion link of Heise is used to choose emotions that fit the EPA ratings of the common component of sexual-eroticism in each culture.

• In the U.S. sexual-eroticism is associated with feeling panicked, and irate (males) and impatient and furious (females).
• In Germany sexual-eroticism is associated with feeling moved and excited (males and females)

The Model

A Cultural Model of Sexual Violence

• Modernity allows the possibility privatization of the sexual domain.
• If privatization is used as a retreat from public concern, I speak of a sexual constrain.
• If there is no public concern, nor social opposition associated with sexuality, privatization is achieved by independence. In this case I will speak of sexual emancipation.

Consequences of Sexual Constraint an Emancipation

Constraint

• People whose sexuality is observed and disapproved publicly will experience shame associated with their sexual-erotic identity.
• Privatizing the stigmatized sphere will help individuals to evade open shame. As long as external referential systems are still predominant. Privatization can only be chosen as a retreat.
• In this case only the open shame can be avoided; unacknowledged shame (Scheff 1990a) will still be present.
• According to Scheff (1990a, 1990b; Scheff and Retzinger 1991, 1997), unacknowledged shame leads to shame-violence circles.

Emancipation

• With the advanced independence from church and state, people not only evade the social repression constituted by public concern and social opposition, but see sexual eroticism as a private matter entirely.
• Here they are able to engage in experiences determined by their partner's knowledge and interest rather than by public concern and social opposition.
• In order to enter this second stage, societies have to offer opportunities for self determination and have to respect privacy. Then, referential systems start to become internalized.
• Self stabilizing quality of the second stage: If the second stage is at least partly achieved, public concern and opposition of the social environment become less relevant and the causes for retreat vanish gradually.
• However, external cultural and structural changes can lead to an increase of public concern and opposition and hereby cause a society to regress from emancipation into constraint.
• Usually we focus on the value change as a progressive force in a society (Inglehart 1997). It should be apparent that cycles of conservatism will lead to a regression of the social value system of a society.

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