Evidence that heterosexuality is a western concept

"It should come as no surprise that these cultural differences can also affect patterns of intimacy. Passionate love is typically emphasized in individualistic cultures, but in collectivist cultures, passionate relationships are often viewed negatively because they may disrupt family traditions (Kim & Hatfield, 2004). For example, although Americans often equate love with happiness, the Chinese have equated love with sadness and jealousy (Shaver et al., 1992). This is because collectivist cultures, such as that of china or Japan, traditionally marry for reasons other than love. Passionate love dies and is not viewed as stable enough to base a marriage on. In a study of France, Japan and the United States, intimacy style was directly related to whether the culture was individualistic, collectivistic, or mixed (France) and also to how much the culture had adopted stereotypical views of gender roles (how much it tended to see men as assertive and women as nurturing: Ting-Toomey, 1991). The Japanese, with a collectivistic culture and highly stereotypical gender roles, had lower scores in measures of attachment and commitment and were less likely to value self-disclosure than the French or Americans (Kito, 2005). Americans also have stereotypical gender roles, but because of the highly individualistic culture in the United States, Americans tend to have high levels of confusion and ambivalence about relationships. Interestingly, the French, who have a culture with high individual motivation yet with a strong group orientation, and who also have a more balanced view of masculine and feminine gender roles, had the lowest degree of confliect in intimate relationships.
culture also affects one's sense of self. For example, in China people's sense of self is entirely translated through their relationships with others. "A male Chinese would consider himself a son, a brother, a husband, a father, but hardly himself. It seems as if ... there was very little independant self left for the Chinese" (Chu, 1985, quoted in Dion & Dion, 1988, p. 276). In China, love is thought of in terms of how a mate would be received by the family and community, not in terms of one's own sense of romance. Because of thsi, the Chinese have a more practical approach to love than do Americans (Sprecher & Toro-Morn, 2002).
Finally, a cross-cultural study of college students from Brazil, India, Philippines, Japan, Mexico, Australia, the United States, England, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Pakistan studied the perceived significance of love for the building of a marriage (we talk more about marriage in chapter 9). Researchers found that love is given highest importance in Westernized nations and the lowest importance in the less developed Asian nations (R.Levine et al;, 1995). Thus, culture plays a role in how we experience and express both love and intimacy."

'Sexuality Now: Embracing Diversity,' by Janell L. Carroll

Gender identity disorder and psychosexual problems in children and adolescents

By Kenneth J. Zucker, Susan J. Bradley

Excerpts from page 5:

It is important to uncouple the conept of sexual orientation from the concept of sexual identity. A person may, for example, be predominantly aroused by homosexual stimuli, yet may not regard himself or herself as a "a homosexual," for whatever reason. Sociologists (particularly those of the "social sripting" and "social constructionist" schools) have articulated this notion most forcefully, arguing that the incorporation of sexual orientation into one's sense of identity is a relatively recent pphenomenon, is culturally variable, and is the result of a complex interplay of sociohistorical events (e.g. Boswell, 1982-83, 1990; Chanucey, 1994; Epstein, 1987, 1991; Escoffer, 1985; Gagnon % Simon, 1973; Greenberg, 1989; Interdisciplinary Centre for the study of Science, Society, and Religion, 1989; McIntosh, 1968; Weeks, 1985, 1991). For example, several historians have pointed out that the word homosexual was first used as a noun only in the middle of the 19th century; it was coined by a German man known as Karl Maria Kertbeny (born Karl maria Benkert) in 1869 (Bullough, 1990; Herzer, 1985). Anthropologists such as Herdt (1980, 1981, 1984, 1990a), who have described ritualized, age-structured homosexual behavior in non-Western cultures, note that such behavior is not at all tied to a homosexual sexual identity, but rather is a rite of passage to mature adult heterosexuality. In contemporary Western culture, there are many individuals (e.g., married men) who are primarily or exclusively sexually responsive to same-sex persons, yet do not adopt homosexual or 'gay' identity (see, e.g., Ross, 1983). There are also individuals who engage in extensive homosexual behavior but who are not predominantly aroused by homosexual stimuli or do not consider themselves to "be" homosexual (e.g., male adolescents who have sex with men for money).

Male homosexuality in modern Japan: cultural myths and social realities

By Mark J. McLellandd

Excerpts from page 3

Throughout the book I have had to resist the temptation to oppose the relatively fluid understandings of sexuality held by many of my Japanese interviewees with a monolithic 'gay identity' supposedly held by western homosexual men and women. ...

Yet, although it was clear by the mid-1980s that, as Gayle Rubin famously pointed out 'in modern, western, industrial societies, homosexuality has acquired much of the institutional structure of the ethnic group' (1998: 112), empirical studies of so-called 'gay communities' have failed to give coherent content to the notion of a 'gay' or 'homosexual' identity. In fact, studies of homosexuality and AIDS transmission such as those carried out by Dowsett (1966) in Australia and Coxon (1996) in Britain question the usefulness of identity labels such as 'gay' altogether and instead speak of 'men who have sex with men.' In their extensive interciews with partners in 'non-heterosexual relationships' Heaphy et al. (1998) also found that the terms 'lesbian,' 'gay,' and 'bisexual' were often resisted by their interviewees and that the understandings of these terms sometimes different between interviewee and interviewer. They also discovered that the different partners in a relationship also sometimes differed in their acceptance of labels. That these differences in interpretation can to a large extent, a common culture, should draw attention to the problems which arise when 'sexuality' is analysed across cultures.

Although the 'ethnic' self-characterization of lesbians gand gays in the US may have made sense given that society's long history of civil rights struggles and widespread legal restrictions on the expression of same-sex sexuality there is no reason to assume that this particular formulation will endure. As Altman states, 'the idea of "gay/lesbian" as a sociological category is only about one hundred years old, and its survival even in Western developed countries cannot be taken for granted' (1996: 79) (see also Altman et al. 1988). As Neil Miller (1993) comments in his journalistic account of 'gay life' around the world 'the terms "gay" and "straight" revealed themselves to be Western cultural concepts that confused more than they elucidated' (1993: 68-9). It is therefore ironic that some Japanese gay-rights activists look to western models, the efficacy of which are already disputed in some western societies. The role of these imported models in Japan is unclear: 'America' serves as a sign of liberation for many Japanese homoesxual men whilst simultaneously being rejected by others. It is misleading, then, to set up 'gay identity' as something that the west has developed which Japan somehow lacks, despite the fact that some Japanese homosexual men, gay rights activists in particular, do present this argument.