Today in class,we had a discussion on the relationship between geography and sexuality. After the discussion, I was thinking about how both are connected and whether there is any relationship...so I searched the net and looked at thousands of articles which talks about geographies of sexualities.To my surprise,the 128th page of The Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behavior contains a plethora of facts and data about sex and sexuality worldwide. Unfortunately, the data used in the atlas was not often available for each country in the world .It provides a fascinating insight into the cultural geography of sex and reproduction.
Maps in the atlas provide information about the age of first sexual intercourse worldwide for several dozen countries where data was available.
According to the atlas, on any given day, sexual intercourse takes place 120 million times on earth. Thus, with 240 million people having sex daily and a world population of just under 6.1 billion (as of 2000), about 4% of the world's population (1 out of every 25 people) is having or had sex today.
Most people would expect that the discipline of geography has little or nothing to say about such topics. They think of this academic discipline as a dry almanac of remedial factoids about state capitals and the Corn Belt; or worse, they reduce it to only the physical branch of the discipline (the study of landforms and earth processes). Yet Human Geography, the social scientific and humanistic side of the discipline, actually has had quite a bit to say about sexuality issues.
Geography's main contribution to sexuality studies may be summarized in its emphasis on spatiality. Geography insists that all social relations are spatial, and that this matters profoundly. In other words, they do not exist--nor are they best understood--in some abstract purity. Instead, they must be understood relationally and situationally in both space and time, and at a variety of spatial scales from the globe to the body itself. Hence it matters where things take place in order to understand what they are.
While work on sexuality and space grew through the 1980s, it was not until the mid 1990s, with the publication of Bell and Valentine's Mapping Desire (1995) that the subdiscipline took hold. Sexuality and space is now a strong and vibrant part of urban, cultural, political, and feminist geographies.
Five themes (location, place, nature-society, movement, and regions) exemplify the geographical imagination, and illustrate how geographers have researched sexuality.
One thing that struck me was how all the sexual practices we follow unconsciously in our daily lives are important to us....starting from the colour of the dress that we choose to wear..the feminine colours ...the gendered way of looking at things.....,the institution of marriage which is nothing but the limitations put by the society to have sexual practices and to reproduce within the members of the same caste groups.I never had this insight how since childhood our sexualities are imposed by the society,through our parents and the social practices... the taboos that we have about sex ....how we never talk about it. The debates over sexual education in school, overlook or ignore at a basic physical desire though it is related to our mental wellbeing. The house can be a space of silence as nobody talks about sex in the house and the workspace,the streets can be so sexual....the billboards,the posters...
Maps in the atlas provide information about the age of first sexual intercourse worldwide for several dozen countries where data was available.
According to the atlas, on any given day, sexual intercourse takes place 120 million times on earth. Thus, with 240 million people having sex daily and a world population of just under 6.1 billion (as of 2000), about 4% of the world's population (1 out of every 25 people) is having or had sex today.
Most people would expect that the discipline of geography has little or nothing to say about such topics. They think of this academic discipline as a dry almanac of remedial factoids about state capitals and the Corn Belt; or worse, they reduce it to only the physical branch of the discipline (the study of landforms and earth processes). Yet Human Geography, the social scientific and humanistic side of the discipline, actually has had quite a bit to say about sexuality issues.
Geography's main contribution to sexuality studies may be summarized in its emphasis on spatiality. Geography insists that all social relations are spatial, and that this matters profoundly. In other words, they do not exist--nor are they best understood--in some abstract purity. Instead, they must be understood relationally and situationally in both space and time, and at a variety of spatial scales from the globe to the body itself. Hence it matters where things take place in order to understand what they are.
While work on sexuality and space grew through the 1980s, it was not until the mid 1990s, with the publication of Bell and Valentine's Mapping Desire (1995) that the subdiscipline took hold. Sexuality and space is now a strong and vibrant part of urban, cultural, political, and feminist geographies.
Five themes (location, place, nature-society, movement, and regions) exemplify the geographical imagination, and illustrate how geographers have researched sexuality.
One thing that struck me was how all the sexual practices we follow unconsciously in our daily lives are important to us....starting from the colour of the dress that we choose to wear..the feminine colours ...the gendered way of looking at things.....,the institution of marriage which is nothing but the limitations put by the society to have sexual practices and to reproduce within the members of the same caste groups.I never had this insight how since childhood our sexualities are imposed by the society,through our parents and the social practices... the taboos that we have about sex ....how we never talk about it. The debates over sexual education in school, overlook or ignore at a basic physical desire though it is related to our mental wellbeing. The house can be a space of silence as nobody talks about sex in the house and the workspace,the streets can be so sexual....the billboards,the posters...
Extremely well put forth....poignant, topical and succinct!
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