ABSTRACT
Western cultural traditions have created two idealized catego ries, called Man and Woman, that co-align gender roles, sexual activities, and anatomy. In everyday and vivid words, Men enact masculine gender roles, have sex with Women, and have big muscles, penises, and testicles. Women enact feminine gender roles, have sex with Men, and have breasts, vaginas, and clitorises. More specifically, gender roles refer to social and self expectations, atti-
tudes, feelings, and forms of non-copulatory behavior that tradi tionally have been assigned to males and females. Sexual activities pertain to the partners one has, the acts one performs or prefers, and internal sexual fantasies and desires. Anatomy directs our at tention to the individual’s primary and secondary sexual morphol ogy and is related to endocrinology, embryology, genetics, and the associated phenomena of biology. (The literature is huge; classics include Money & Ehrhardt, 1972, and Ortner & Whitehead, 1981 ; for recent ideas see McCormick, 1994, and Tiefer, 1995, among others.)
Non-Western societies also widely recognize the existence of male and female roles in reproduction and in society. Details differ about how gender roles, sexual activities, and anatomy coalesce in different societies, as do native definitions of gender nonconfor mity (for details of normative and dysphoric gender in thirty-two societies, see the three volume collection edited by Francoeur, 1997; for an example involving the Navajo, see Epple, 1998). In this ar ticle, we shall focus on Western traditions.
