I would imagine that the reason women contract HIV so much more easily than men is because, during sex, women are more likely to get someone else’s bodily fluids into them (discharging semen into the vaginal opening) than men are to get a woman’s HIV-tainted bodily fluids into them.
Then it has nothing at all to do with psychological differences.
Are there any figures comparing the HIV susceptibility of women (through unprotected vaginal penetration by men) and gay men (through unprotected anal penetration by men)? I ask only because we tend to think of AIDS as a “gay disease,” the earliest publicized incidence in the U.S. being among gay men.
And what about other STD’s? If an uninfected man has unprotected sex with a syphilis-infected woman, is he less likely to get syphilis than an uninfected woman is to get it through sex with an infected man? If so, it’s not common knowledge. Everybody seems to think the transmission risk falls equally on both sexes.
I’m sure there are. I remember someone on this board explaining that it’s easier to pass HIV through anal sex because of bleeding.
That was sort of my point - to bring up the likelihood of contracting HIV/AIDS seems like a bad example to bring up if we’re talking about psychological differences. I would imagine that anyone who puts themselves at risk - women, be they straight or not, or men, straight or not - while having sex would contract aids more easily than someone who uses protection. That’s just common sense, not a psychological gender difference.
A hypothetical psychological gender difference, IMHO, would be along the lines of - due to certain stigmas associated with giving blowjobs, women would prefer to have unprotected vaginal intercourse with a man rather than oral sex because one is perceived as dirty, while the other is not. But that particular pattern of thought is likely one that results from cultural conditioning rather than innate conditioning (though perhaps one could argue that it has a basis in physiology because maybe all women’s bodies are made to procreate, and they will, conscious or not, seek to do so through biology and cultural conditioning (that’s just a hypothetical example, though, so please don’t flame me for it)).
Interesting…I just ordered Brain Gender, which, I am told, is a very balanced summary of what we do and do not know about how biology may or may not impact psychology and cognition, in terms of gender dimorphism. I highly doubt there are no differences. What is still clearly open to debate is how important these differences really are, and Hines has been lauded for taking a relatively “nonpartisan” approach to analysing the available data. From what I can gather, her position is that height probably shows a more significant difference than just about any neuropsychological criterion measured thus far, but I’ll have to wait until I read to comment more.
Right. With anal sex the virus can directly enter the bloodstream. Of course ordinary vaginal sex can transmit the disease. In Africa, AIDS is not thought of as a “gay plague”. The vast majority of Africans who are infected got it from old fashioned heterosexual sex. It’s mostly a matter of cultural norms. If gay men in the US almost always just gave each other blow jobs, AIDS in the gay population would be rare.
Interesting. I guess I always assumed that the contraction of HIV/AIDS was a direct result of the transmission of bodily fluids, and figured that, regardless of whether it was introduced vaginally or orally, anyone giving a blowjob would be at as much risk as anyone else having vaginal sex; however, the risk might be greater during anal sex because the disease might be directly transmitted into the blood stream.
In other words, I assumed that vaginal sex and blow jobs (whether you’re a guy or a girl giving the blow job) had equal risk associated, while anal sex might have a higher associated risk than either vaginal sex or blow jobs. Do you have a cite I can read? (By the way, I’m not asking to be an ass - I really want to know. I’m fighting my own ignorance now…)
And that “cultural conditioning” seems to be changing. I’ve read that a lot of American teenage girls nowadays are much readier to give their boyfriends oral than vaginal sex – because there’s no risk of pregnancy, but also because it allows them to remain “technical virgins.”
WHAT cultural stigmas? Dunno where you live, but most of the guys around here would be quite happy to get a blow job from a woman. The guys would willingly accept the blow job, and not verbally put the woman down for it. As for what other women might think, the female who often gave men blow jobs could just not tell them about this. Thus no stigma would attach to them. Any woman who thinks blow jobs are “dirty” sure ain’t learning this from their boyfriends. If a woman asks her boyfriend “may I suck your dick?”, he’d just drop his pants rather than argue about it. 
And these girls have figured out what guys want. How many teenage boys would consider an offer from their girlfriend to suck them off unacceptable?
And that’s how you know there’s a stigma: she doesn’t tell them because otherwise she’d be stigmatized. Yes, as much as we like getting blowjobs, there’s a trampy stigma associated with them.
Kids these days: They don’t know how good they have it. Now when I was a kid, it was nothing by dry-humping through baggy corduroys…
Only amongst some females. Simple solution: don’t tell other females.
A lot of the stigma comes from the girls’ mothers. They’re told “nice girls don’t do that” with regards to oral sex, or “only whores do that.” Some girls are even told that a pregnancy with “non-deviant sex” is preferable to oral sex.
Also, oral sex is still on many law books as a deviant form of sex. Although this may or may not be enforced, many states have laws against oral sex, either between men and women, or same sex. Oral sex was often referred to as a “deviant pathological behavior.”
Oral sex is becomming a more acceptable form of “abstinence;” however, many women still consider oral dirty and trampy. Some are still willing to do it, yet their self-image suffers.
Social stigmas are about shame and often (usually?) internalized.
One thing I forgot to mention - many people feel that if you have sex in any other way than that which can result in a child, you’re committing a very grave sin against God.
Then there are other people who think it’s unsanitary, trampy or just plain gross. Below are a few links, two with more specific examples, and one from the BBC which discusses oral sex.
BrainGlutton, sorry to bump your thread, but I recently ran into an article on the New York Times online regarding this very question, and thought you might be interested. It’s a subscription article, but with free registration if you’d like to get a membership. In case you don’t, I’ll quote a tiny bit:
From this article: Grey Matter and the Sexes: Still a Scientific Grey Area
But although scientists have concluded that boys and girls perform equally well on intelligence tests, including spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities, they have found that women’s brains are 10% smaller than men’s, even after accounting for size difference. Still, it appears that men have more white matter in their brains, while women have a higher density of grey matter (cells that do the actual thinking). But there is a significant difference in overall architecure of the brain, plus, of course, hormones.
Still, scientists have found that while in many countries, after reaching puberty, boys tend to perform better than girls on tests like the SAT, but in others, like Japan, girls are on par with boys, while in Iceland, girls exhibit even greater abilities than their male counterparts. Scientists suspect that the reason some regions’ women perform better on aptitude tests isn’t because of a regional variation in ability, but because often, other cultures don’t even take into account a genetic predisposition for math or science, but simply push their children harder if they have problems in those areas, regardless of sex.
An interesting observation, though, that the article made was that boys tend to have more learning disabilities overall than girls, which some scientists feel means that the male brain is more delicate than the female brain, but that’s still up for debate, too.
So the conclusion (according to the NY Times, anyway): no one has yet come to a definitive conclusion.
P.S. Sorry I kinda hijacked your thread earlier.
As an aside women attempt to commit suicide three times more often than men (yet men succeed in killing themselves three times more often than women). It is suspected that a larger deep limbic system in women may account for this disparity. Not sure how or if socialization would account for this.
A book devoted to the subject, by Steven Rhoads, University of Virginia – Taking Sex Differences Seriously –
Read Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”; it answers the OP’s question(s) in just under 800 pages. 