ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how culture, gender, and socialization impact individual sexualities. By studying the intrapsychic realm of sexual fantasies, one can gain a better understanding of how sexual expectations, rules, and proscriptions take root and affect us. Girls tend to experience menarche, the onset of the menstrual cycle that may persist from about 12 until 50, or older. Boys tend to experience semenarche, the technical term for first ejaculation. The chapter examines menarche, or onset of first menstruation, and semenarche, onset of first ejaculation, and then discusses masturbation and sexual fantasies. The purpose is ultimately to understand the implications and consequences of socialization and gender messages. Girls can easily come to view their bodies as enemy territory, a landscape of pain, discomfort, and at the least, monthly annoyance. Boys can come to view their bodies as 'exciting', though also unpredictable terrains of exploration. Social psychologists, sociologists, and feminist scholars would explain gender differences with a different point of view.
