Of all the psychology blogs…this is one of them : January 2013

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Get Sexy. Get Consent.

As a continuation of the dialogue that began from the Sex Talk symposium, I attended a theater for dialogue program about consent. The event was called Get Sexy. Get Consent. and was put on by Voices Against Violence (VAV).

The program started with the actor and actresses acting out silent scenarios ranging from riding a form of public transportation to playing a friendly game of basketball. Each scenario differed in the type of sexual advances/activities as well as the enjoyment of these advances/activities. After this specific performance, we found out that these scenarios were supposed to get us thinking about the variety of ways that sexual assault could occur and how consent can play a factor in many situation that are not necessarily about sex (e.g., oral and anal). During this first performance, the scenario that really stood out to me was about a man who interjected himself between to women dancing, so he could dance with one of the women (who by the way was not enjoying the man’s attention) . When this scenario was acted out I found it to be vey ambiguous in that it would not immediately register with me that this type of interjection is a violation against consent. I see this type of move all the time in clubs, movies and shows, but no one really makes a deal about it, so I guess it never stood out to me as a big deal. But now, I am definitely going to be on the lookout for this subtle but really disturbing act. I feel like this situation shows that sexual assault (i.e., any unwanted sexual contact that is performed without consent) can happen quickly and unexpectedly. Furthermore, ambiguous situations such as this common move in clubs appear to be the hardest to detect, but often the most dangerous and most common.

From the numerous skits and the discussions after them, I also came to the realization that people need to actively try to be like detectives. Specifically, people (we) need to take an active role in reading body language and listening to verbal cues (i.e., No means no. Not, no actually means yes.) Furthermore, I feel that a major problem in this area of behavior is the mentality of “oh, they are just playing hard to get.” People need to remember that sometimes the other person is just not interested in you (I think there is a book or movie titled somewhere along the lines of “he’s just not that into you”). Furthermore, if they are interested in you, that does not mean they are interested in doing everything with you. One of the key points of VAV is “asking, not assuming.” This point then reminded me of a saying my roommate told me: Don’t mistake politeness for an invitation. In a similar way, people can’t assume that just because someone smiles at you that it means they want you to invade their personal space, be grabbing, and not know how to take “no” for an answer. Ultimately, navigating through the land of sex it all about respect, respect no only for your desires and boundaries but for those of the person you want to be intimate with.

Another issue that seemed to be problematic in the realm of getting consent was that people get caught-up in the moment and don’t’ have any type of discussion or that people are afraid that if they do bring up questions about consent then the mood is officially killed. Therefore, we spent a bit of time during this program talking about how to make asking for consent sexy. I think one of the best ways and may be the easiest way is to use your sexy voice, but I realize that not everyone sexy voice is actually considered sexy, so that may not work. As a result, I have made it a game with myself (I might drag my roommate in to it) to come up with sexy ways to ask for consent or permission to move forward from on sexual/intimate level to another. If you have any suggests, please let me know! Don’t be embarrassed, that is the whole point of starting a dialogue about these topics.

The last point I would like to talk about is how authority comes into play with sexual assault and coercion. On of the first scenarios depicted a yoga instructor repositioning a student by physically touching their legs, hips, arms, and trunk. What struck a cord with me was that the student was looked vey uncomfortable and it was really difficult to watch this play out. Later the VAV made the point that consent means feeling free and safe to say “no”. Together, these two facets reaffirm for me that there is definitely a connection between being in a position of power or authority over another person and unintentionally or intentionally using that position to coerce someone to do something they don’t want to do. I would love to better understand how an individual could properly and safely address such issues about personal boundaries with someone who has authority over them such as an instructor of some sort.

Overall, I really enjoyed this program. And although the skits and how the issues of consent were handled (i.e., the conversations between actors and volunteers) seemed more optimistic/easy than what probably actually happens between couples or two people hooking-up, I felt the general idea of how to possibly go about addressing these issues was helpful to an extent. Lastly and more importantly, I feel that VAV at least made it known that there are levels to the issues of consent and that consent is a natural facet of sex; therefore, it deserves to be talked about as a way to keep people safe.

Let's talk about sex!!!

So this post is going to be a bit different than the previous in that this is a reflection post to a symposium I attended titled, Sex Talk: A Symposium with Benefits.


This is called a Sex Talk Starter pack . It consists of quizzes, facts, and hypothetical scenarios to help start engaging dialogues about sex going!!!

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first two talks of the symposium: “Sex and Religion: What's the Connection?" and "Inter(dis)course: A Q&A on Sex and Politics". Reverend Debra Haffner was the speaker for “Sex and Religion”. I personally found her to be very welcoming and non-confrontational. As a result, I was able to distance myself from my own beliefs for a bit and really listen to what she was saying. I liked that she approached us with the fact that her goal or the purpose for her type of discussions is not to “convert” other but rather to help those people who have lost faith find something to believe in again. Although she did mention biblical references to same-sex relationships, her conversation was ultimately about how our sexuality in general, regardless of sexual orientation and marital status, is something that should be looked upon as a blessing. I think out of her entire talk, what stuck with me the most was her statement that the majority of clergies are not required to take any type of course on human sexuality. She later went onto say that she believes one of the reasons there is abuse towards congregation members by the clergy is problems in holding authority and not knowing how to mange that type of power and not fully understanding their sexuality and desire as well as other peoples sexual and physical boundaries.

I was fortunate enough to be able to have lunch with Rev. Haffner, and we were able to talk more about why it is essential that we need to be able to have an open dialogue about sexuality/sex. We discussed statistics that show a disparity between the percentage of women who say they have been forced to have sex and the percentage of men who say they have forced a woman to have sex. Based on these statistics it seems that something is going on between how women view sex and sexual activities versus how men view these activities. After a few days of thinking about on our talk, I firmly believe that regardless of our religion we owe it to ourselves and to our fellow humans (cheesy I know) to make sure that we are as safe as possible in all aspects of life. Sex is a thing, it is not going to go away just because someone thinks it is immoral in certain situation, and the true is that abstinence doesn’t always work. I always hear from friends or from people’s testimonies on talk shows that if they had known more about sex they probably would not have started having sex at 15 or 16 years old; they would have waited until they were much older. To me, this just reaffirms the possibility that so many people are having sex (especially at a young age) because they really don’t know anything about it; they don’t understand the extent of psychological effects or some physical effects that comes with sex, all they are told is to not do it and are given a list of STIs they could contract. Furthermore, because young people are not being taught to be safe and smart if they do have sex, many people are victims of sexual assault because of issues of consent (I will post about this later). Ultimately, as a person who sees others as my equals and regardless if my religion tells me that certain acts are immoral, I want people to be as safe as possible when it comes to sex. Sex has so many physical and psychological layers, and so many people are hurt needlessly because it is taboo to talk about sex (even with the person who you are having sex with!) and because it is taboo, there are very few dialogues happening about sexual boundaries and how to negotiate correctly through them.

So obviously I have a lot to say on this matter, or at least a lot of thinking going on in my head. I probably have not put my thoughts into words as eloquently as I should have, but the idea of talking about sex without it being taboo or without being judged is a touchy and complex topic that I am still working my way around.

Now on to talk number two!

"Inter(dis)course: A Q&A on Sex and Politics" was a Q&A with Dan Savage (who I think is most known for is sex column “Savage Love” and for establishing the “It Gets Better” project). What I found most interesting about this session was a statement that seems to possibly be related to a concept in social psychology. At one point Dan talked about homophobia and mentioned how there are studies that show a correlation between level of homophobia in men and their arousal to same-sex erotic/pornographic images. Obviously we can’t say all homophobia men are secretly gay, but I feel that a social psychology concept might get close to what is going on with these men. Maybe they are angry at themselves for having such “impure thoughts” (according to some people) or terrified about what people will do to them if they found out about their sexual responses and they decide to hate on those who openly embrace their desires? Maybe it’s jealously? Whatever the reason may be, Dan says that he always used this opportunity to tell people that if they harbor desires for the same-sex then the best way to not get caught is not to be hateful, but to be the biggest supporter of the gay community :) After hearing all this, I guess there must be some truth to Shakespeare’s “The lady [or man] doth protest too much, methinks.”

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Compared to you, I am…

The concept that really struck a cord with me this week was social comparison theory. According to Festinger (1954), because we are social beings, we learn about ourselves from other people. Specifically, when objective standards are unavailable, we evaluate our abilities by comparing these abilities to those of other people in similar situations as ourselves in order to receive the most accurate information (Festinger, 1954). However, some studies (e.g., Klein 1997) have shown that social comparison theory is still applicable in situations that do offer objective standards, such as grading rubrics.

Upon learning about this theory, I immediately thought back to my AP English IV class in high school. In high school, English was my thing (and everyone knew it, apparently). I was always the one who usually got the highest grade in class (e.g., a 99 because our teacher didn’t believe in 100s), even when I thought I did horribly and thought I didn’t write they way the teacher wanted us to write. When we would finally get our graded papers back, my friends always asked what my grade was. If it was higher than theirs, they didn’t seem too surprised because it was expected. We had known each other for six years after all; my writing abilities were not anything new.

It wasn’t until about two months into the school year that I found out that I was part of a grading spectrum. In other words, if writing ability was scored on a scale from 1 to 10, I was 10. This spectrum became known to me when I heard one of my friends suggest to the teacher that instead of putting numerical grades on our paper, the teacher should score our papers from Samantha to RJ. I was shocked to hear about this scale, and I immediately asked my friend to elaborate. He told me that I was at the higher-end of the scale, while RJ, who was a friend in the same grade as us, was at the lower-end. What amazed me was that everyone in class agreed with this scale.

Although it should have been flattering, there was a downside to being considered the top of the grading scale in this class. When my grade was lower than another student’s, even by one point, everyone had a field day because someone did better than me. Furthermore, certain people in the class would make a show of how shocking it was that I got an 88 instead of a grade in the 90s. According to Festinger’s theory (1954), these comparisons about grades allowed my peers to be able to evaluate where they stood in writing ability on a particular assignment. If they did better than me, then their ability to write well was reaffirmed. On this note, the comments my friends made about my grades in relation to their grades were always made in jest, and I never took offense to anything they said about my grades. However, I could not help feeling sympathetic to RJ; here’s hoping to him not knowing about this scale.

I believe this memory still stays with me because I find it humorous and probably because it is suppose to be flattering that I was considered the highest point on the writing ability spectrum. I feel that overall this situation is a good example for illustrating social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) in that even though almost all the students received passing grades on all their papers throughout the year, what they were interested in (myself included) was how they did in comparison to others on each assignment. Maybe they weren’t as good as Samantha this time around, but at least they were still better than RJ.

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Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.

Klein, W.M. (1997). Objective standards are not enough: Affective, self-evaluating, and behavioral responses to social comparison information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 763-774.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Welcome to my blog

Hi there,

I’m Samantha. I am currently a junior in college and am working toward a major in Psychology with a minor in English. As part of my social psychology course, I will be dedicating this blog to the psychology of our social world. I will use personal experiences to illustrate some of the main theories in social psychology. At times there will be pictures (personal and from the Internet), videos, and if I get creative, maybe even graphs and charts.

I thought that I would start off this blog with a few images I found online that psychology majors and lovers could hopefully relate to.