Sexuality and Technology

1. Sexuality and Technology Sexuality has always been linked to technology Most forms of birth control have involved an implicit understanding of the nature of barriers to conception or the elimination of the fetus Art, literature, music, the use of aphrodisiacs, the particular physical stimuli used to promote pain or pleasure during sex has involved forms of technology The 20th century, however, has vastly increased the application specifically of scientific technology to sexuality Birth control products are perhaps the most familiar aspect of technology, but others have been made available, too.

2. What is possible today? • The use of male and female hormone therapies • Augmentation and reduction of genitals • Use of plastic surgery to make people younger, and more attractive • Dating over the internet • Use of drugs to enhance sexual experience—Viagra only the latest one • People giving procreating after death

3. Why has science been placed in the service of sexuality? • Desire to remain young • People seek to reproduce at later years • Desire of people who don’t engage in reproductive sex to have children • People live longer • Increased infertility • Desire to shape bodies according to desire, not heredity—includes cosmetic surgery to repair damage due to accident, war, birth, cancer, body assignment

4. History of Plastic Surgery • What is plastic surgery?-The altering of skin, muscle, and bones to create greater beauty or repair damage—can range from facelifts to repairing cleft palates, to reconstructing limbs to make them functional • Evidence of plastic surgery as early as 4,000 years ago to repair facial injuries, and skin grafts were recorded in ancient India 800 B.C. • Originally war was the major factor in the evolution of plastic surgery, particularly to treat extensive facial injury. Burn victims were another group of patients because of the extensive scarring.

5. Surgery for beauty • Plastic surgery means to mold or give form. • Many improvements learned on the battle field were then applied to civil society, e.g. internal wiring for facial fractures, new ways to rectify skin deformities. • Term coined in 1818 by German physician writing about how to correct nasal problems • Aided by the invention of anesthesia in the 19th century

6. Silicone • Invented at about the same time that the oral contraceptive was made commercially—1962 • Soon adapted to concept of implants, especially breast implants • Yet even before silicone was used for breast implants, another form of surgery, one that would utilize silicone and other types of procedures, had already been performed: a sex change

7. The History of Christine Jorgensen • In the 1940s David Oliver Cauldwell began to write about the prospects of physically altering someone’s sex because he had been asked for such an operation by a patient. • He believed that those who requested them were “products, largely, of unfavorable childhood environment and overindulgent parents and other relatives.”—Thus he refused to recommend surgery. • In contrast Dr. Harry Benjamin, who arrived in the US in 1913, by the 1930s defended prostitutes and advocated sex changes.

8. Sex changes in Europe • Prior to Christine Jorgensen, people seeking sex changes had to go to Europe where several were performed, on both men and women, in the 1940s. • Christine Jorgensen was born in U.S. as George, and was always unhappy with his body. U.S. doctors would not help him out, so he went to Denmark in 1950 where he persuaded a doctor to perform the operation for the first time. Doctor had to obtain a permission to castrate. • Then Christine had to make her way through the bureaucracy to change her sex designation on her passport. • Received surgical and hormone treatments, but did not have her genital area reconstructed.—often an issue.

9. How did Christine become so famous in the United States? • Began when she applied for a marriage license in New York in 1952—created a scandal • Was very physically attractive, became a night club act, and wrote her autobiography • Her body raised the question of whether science should triumph over nature

10. Christine Jorgensen

11. Reactions to Christine • Newspaper columnists asked whether she was “really a woman” • People with the same feelings about their body finally realized that something could be done about it • She inspired people to write to each other about it—an early form of chat group! Helped create new identities for themselves as transgendered people. • Specialists began to ask what the difference was between sex and gender, and who was legally a man or a woman.

12. Statistics on Plastic Surgery • In the United States in 2000, there were 7.4 million cosmetic procedures performed. • 34% of all American women said they would like plastic surgery • Not just an American phenomenon—found all over the world. • Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has long been famous for its plastic surgeons, as is Buenos Aires, Argentina