The first gathering of its kind in Ireland is set to address a wide range of sexuality- related issues, writes ALISON HEALY
IT CERTAINLY is a conference with a difference. More than 60 speakers will spend two days talking about sex when the Sexuality Studies, Self, Selves and Sexualitiesconference opens in Dublin on Friday.
Academics and other speakers from around the world will address issues such as homophobia in the workplace; sexual issues for the terminally ill; de-sexualising sex work and the portrayal of sex in art, literature and the media.
Archbishop John Charles McQuaid would surely be turning in his grave, particularly as it is all happening at Dublin City University (DCU), just a few kilometres from the Archbishop’s House in Drumcondra.
“I think it would have been impossible to hold this conference 20 years ago,” says Dr Mel Duffy of DCU’s School of Nursing. He is organising the conference with Jean-Philippe Imbert of DCU’s School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies.
Duffy says it is only possible to hold the conference now because the power over sexuality issues has been yielded by the Catholic Church.
“Once the power has been relinquished, we can speak about issues that have never before been spoken about.”
And it is the shift in power between the church and the media that will be explored by Sara Stokes of NUI Galway when she addresses the conference on Friday. The PhD researcher will suggest that the popular media has replaced the Catholic Church as our regulator of sexuality.
She says the decline in the church’s hold on sexuality can be seen as a progressive step but warns that we are moving towards accepting another oppressive sexual regulator without questioning it.
Stokes says “raunch” culture has had a rapid and extremely pervasive influence on mainstream popular culture. Raunch is a culture in which the image of strippers and porn stars embodies the ideal female sexuality. The image portrayed by celebrities such as Jordan, and the sexualisation of young girls’ clothes personify the culture.
“Such are the lengths that people go to in order to prove their willingness to embrace raunch, that over 25,000 users of social networking site Bebo have deployed the term ‘slut’ in their usernames – identifying themselves first and foremost as sexually available,” she says.
In this culture, virginity is seen as an affliction and the virgin acts as a frequent figure of fun, she says, citing the example of Judd Apatow's comedy The 40 Year Old Virgin.
Stokes says it is ironic that this “anything goes” sexuality can be as oppressive as the Catholic Church had been in the past.
“Raunch culture and the attitudes it perpetuates have not been widely challenged in Ireland and no alternative models of sexuality have been put in place, aside from those informed by traditional Catholic values and moral panic,” she says.
People may be afraid to be branded as “a prude”, or they may accept this hyper sexualisation as a backlash to the culture of fear and silence that traditionally plagued Irish sexuality.
Stokes believes the speed at which our society changed and raunch culture took over left little time for us to form a new national sexual identity.
And while we once entered a darkened box to confess our sins, we are now compelled to expose our secrets through social networking pages, reality television and blogging, she says.
On a similar theme, Rachel Hills from the University of New South Wales will talk about the pressure on people to have “amazing, effortless sex” and the suggestion in television and cinema that everyone is having “more sex and better sex than we are”.
Where people once feared that they would damage their reputation by getting pregnant at the wrong time, they now fear that they cannot measure up to ever higher standards of sexual attractiveness, she says.
“We live in a culture that tells us that sex reveals pretty much everything about who a person is, especially when what it might reveal is a deficiency: that we’re too slutty, a prude, incompetent, unsexy, too sexual, not sexual enough.”
Meanwhile, the gender stereotyping of children in the nine to 13-year-old age group will be examined by Carol Barron, lecturer at DCU’s School of Nursing. She says that most computer and console games are designed “by males to please males”. They emphasise boy-related values such as victory, competition and speed over girl-related values such as justice, collaboration and empathy. But her research has found that girls and boys do not accept such stereotypes and girls enjoy playing the same PlayStation games as boys.
Girls are drawn to virtual pet games such as Nintendogs but she says boys enjoy these animal games as much as girls. “When boys and girls do not have a real-life pet, and in particular a dog, they use virtual pets as a replacement,” she says.
Throughout the conference, about a dozen academics will be displaying their research findings on posters. They will include Aaron Glassenberg who studied psychology at Harvard University and will demonstrate the facial features that are most attractive to the heterosexual and homosexual populations.
He says evolution has biased heterosexual men to find women with feminine faces more attractive because they are seen to be more fertile and have better immunity.
Heterosexual women tend to be attracted to men with masculine features such as a wide jaw and broad cheekbones.
He wanted to find out if the same principles applied to gay and lesbian people, when reproduction was not a consideration. His research found that gay men preferred masculine male faces. There was less consistency among women but lesbian women showed a stronger preference for masculinity in female faces than did straight women.
Some 160 people with backgrounds in health, social care and academia are expected to attend the conference. Duffy says it all fits in with work being done by DCU’s Faculty of Nursing and Faculty of Humanities and Social and Sciences to set up a one-year MA in Sexuality Studies.
While there have been conferences on lesbian and gay issues before, Duffy says this conference is a first for Ireland.
“We aim to provide the first ever Irish platform on which to discuss, in an open fashion, the varied processes and variations in sexual cultures, sexual identities and gender role formation,” he says.
See dcu.ie for the full conference agenda
