Introduction - What is sexual behavior?

Current Meanings of the Term 1: Gender Role Behavior

Summary Table: Gender

Gender

• Gender is defined as a person's femininity or masculinity. It is determined on the basis of certain psychological qualities that are nurtured in one sex and discouraged in the other.
   
• People are feminine or masculine to the degree in which they conform to their genders.
  Most individuals clearly conform to the gender appropriate to their physical sex.
   
• However, a minority partially assume a gender that contradicts their physical sex (transvestism), and for an even smaller minority such an inversion is complete (transsexualism).

Of course, as cultural historians know, the content of gender roles may vary considerably from one country and century to another. Thus, in the past, people may have had concepts of femininity and masculinity quite unlike our own. Even today, these concepts may vary in different parts of the world. In other words, “sex” is a biological category, but “gender” is mostly culturally determined. While femininity and masculinity do have some biological basis, their exact meaning and expression can change and has changed over time. However, no matter how they happen to be defined in a particular society, they determine all human sexual interaction to a very great extent.