ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the potential for change, and sexuality as an important issue for the development of gender equality in maritime organizations. It discusses the gender imbalance at sea and in the maritime sector – with a few notable exceptions. The analysis in the chapter shows that there is reason to question the fairly widely held notion that women and men have become sexual equals. In some contexts and arenas, one can see a temporary concurrence of modernity's sexual culture as characterized by gender duality and ideas of natural gender difference and the surrounding late-modern sexual culture. Female seafarers create disorder in the established male heteronormative homosociality. Our interviews show that cultural notions about men's and women's heterogeneous sexuality are coupled with an understanding of men as more lustful than women. The ship is an enclosed social organization, which means that culturally recognizable and stereotyped features of heterosexual dynamics have more dramatic consequences than on land.
