Environmental influences on sexuality and gender identity formation

Influences on a Person’s Experience of Their Sexuality and Gender
Introduction
Sexuality and gender are experienced differently by all different people. It is a personal, unique interaction that is impacted by one’s environment—i.e., one’s peers, the media one consumes, and the groups and organizations with which one associates (school, church, clubs, work, etc.). These agencies operate on a person’s perception by providing the inputs that form the individual’s sense of expectation and acceptance. That is the gist of social and cognitive learning theory (Bandura). This paper will examine these various environmental influences and show how they impact a person’s experience of sexuality and gender.
Environmental Influences
Peers
Peers make up a large percentage of one’s environment: they are the people one hangs out with, the individuals one associates with at work, friends one sees during leisure times, acquaintances one meets at church. They are family members, brothers, sisters, parents, cousins. They all have opinions and very often share those opinions. They all have behaviors that are very often passed on to impressionable individuals who are always somewhere observing. When it comes to how one experiences sexuality and gender, peers play a big factor in influencing that experience. They share their own ideas and experiences about sex. Because they are real and immediate, their influence is considerable: individuals look to their peers for validation and respect, information and support. The measure their own experiences by what their peers do and say and think. An individual is more likely to follow the example of his peers when it comes to experiencing sexuality and gender than any other example given (Potard, Courtois & Rusch).
Media
Media also plays an important part of one’s environment. From billboards and magazine covers in the grocery store check-out lane to TV shows, advertisements, Internet news, movies, music videos and songs, people spend a significant portion of their day consuming media. However, how one interacts with and consumes media is mediated by one’s environment—one’s socio-economic background, one’s race, one’s ethnicity, one’s peers, and so on (Durham). As Durham noted in a late 20th century study, peer context and mass media are crucial to understanding gender identity formation and how gender identity is “consolidated via reference to mediated standards of femininity and sexuality, though these standards differ according to race and class factors” (193). Today, mass media consumption is pervasive as a result of the Internet, mobile devices, and people’s ability to log onto the Web from virtually anywhere. Additionally, expressions of gender and sexuality are now more pervasive throughout mass media than in previous decades. All manner of expression is also found: from pornography to sentimental romances, from queer normalization, to traditional gender and sexuality theories and standards—one can find virtually any representation of gender and sexuality under the sun on the Internet. The ability of persons to consume that media has an impact on their experience of gender and sexuality in their own lives.
Groups
Groups are the third environmental agent to impact cognitive and behavioral impulses in individuals, according to Bandura. Groups can be work groups, church groups, school groups, clubs, neighborhood groups, and so on. A group is likely to have its own code of conduct, ethics, principles and standards. Groups are very impactful and influential on people because they represent norms in their own rights. A church, for example, is likely to teach its parishioners about morality, and that is likely to influence one’s experience of gender and sexuality. In a church with a traditional perspective on gender, an individual is more likely than not to feel that gender is determined by one’s sex and that men and women have defined roles that should be embraced. In a church with a more progressive view, the teachings may be more liberal and may promote a positive acceptance of LGBTQ+ issues. Sexuality may be viewed in such a church with more open tolerance and less restrictive rules. Thus, groups are important to shaping one’s perspective. A person’s experience of gender and sexuality is likely to be formed by the norms and standards that one learns from such groups. A person who experiments with sexuality in a traditional church may feel guilty and confused. A person who experiments with sexuality in a progressive church may feel no qualms whatsoever. In this manner, groups mediate standards of sexuality and gender, just as the mass media does, as Durham noted.
The Cultural Theory of Society
The cultural theory of society posits that human beings exchange ideas and pattern their behaviors and attitudes, predicated upon engagement with one another, communication, and cultural expression. Meaning, value and principles are expressed and shared in this manner. Culture develops as a result or is passed down by this method of exchange. Over time, culture becomes the guiding force in any society: it shapes the environments in which people live through a serious of processes that ultimately shape the views and experiences of individuals (Ellwood). In today’s globalized world, however, so much information is constantly pouring into communities and environments at all times and from all directions thanks to the Internet, that culture is now likely to be a hodgepodge of confusion, depleted in an oblivion of Big Data, if anything.
Information that influences one’s actions is likely to be based on experiences and environmental factors that are both reinforced by one’s cultural and instrumental in shaping one’s culture. Culture, media, groups and peers are all integrated in one’s environment. This theory has been explained by Bandura, who examined what it means for people to be influenced from a cultural sociology point of view. When it comes to forming and making decisions about one’s sexuality or gender, or how one wishes to view sex or whether one becomes sexually active, or whether one associates positive or negative views with premarital sex—it is all mediated by one’s environmental influences, which are going to be related and/or integrated with one’s culture, media, groups and peers. This was how Bandura used his cognitive learning theory to show that “social cognitive theory is founded on an agentic perspective”—i.e., that personal experiences are the fruit of agency operation in a “triadic codetermination process of causation” (130). In this way, there are individual, proxy and collective agencies that impact a person’s inner sense of reality and form the perspective and ideas that motivate personal behavior. An individual’s psychology and behavior is predicated and dictated by his or her exposure to these agencies over time—which is why to discover the origins how individuals construct their sense of gender and sexuality it is necessary to understand how they interact with their environment—their culture, the media they consume, the peers they interact with, and the groups they belong to. Understanding these aspects of environment and how individuals are influenced by them is crucial to understanding how a person experiences gender and sexuality.
When Personal Experiences Clash with Influences
According to Festinger, people aim for harmony with their environment and if they feel a clash—i.e., cognitive dissonance—they will react negatively to the situation and try to find a remedy in one of three ways: 1) they will change their actions, 2) they will change their beliefs or 3) they will change their perceptions in order to obtain harmony. So an individual who feels at odds with his or her environment as a result of some personal experience with gender or sexuality may change perceptions or beliefs about their gender and sexuality to reduce the dissonance in the mind and achieve a more harmonic state. That is, however, sometimes easier said than done.
One’s environment, for example, may consist of a traditional culture (a family that has strong traditional, religious mores; friends who share the same traditional values and principles when it comes to gender norms and sexuality; and so on); yet one may be simultaneously influenced by an alternate stream of information that comes from popular media. One may discover, for example, pornography on the Internet at a young age and be drawn to it for inexplicable reasons that the individual does not fully understand. If the person is a young teen, he or she may experience feelings of guilt about viewing pornography or about masturbating. Feeling guilty and confused, the teen my try to find an explanation for these experiences, but sensing that there is nowhere to turn since the environment is totally traditional and seemingly unsympathetic to the experiences the teen is having, the person may try to bury or repress the experiences and act as though they are not happening. This would be an example of a person experiencing cognitive dissonance as a result of having a personal and unique experience of human sexuality that is outside the mode of standard or acceptable conduct with that person’s immediate environment.
Media is perhaps one of the strongest influences when it comes to cognitive dissonance for people whose personal experience of gender and sexuality falls outside the standardized norms of a traditional community. Media’s long arms extend outside the walls and sanctuaries of traditional environments and cultures. Media are shaped by their own culture industry leaders, as the Frankfurt School put it. And so, as Kellner states, “radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of ‘us’ and ‘them’” (7). Media can be the strongest force in one’s life determining and shaping one’s experience of gender and sexuality.
But if one who is exposed to media senses that the values propagated by that media and the experiences that one enjoys as a result of consumption of that media do not align with one’s other inputs, norms and standards, one is likely to experience cognitive dissonance to a high degree. At that point, one will change one’s actions, perceptions or sense of what is right and what is wrong. Depending on how they go about resolving their issues of cognitive dissonance with regard to gender and sexuality, they may embark on a period of denial, repression, hiding (which is where the phrase “being in the closet” comes from—people are afraid of “coming out” and revealing their sexuality for fear of violating a social norm within their environment), or running away. Many teens who end up on the streets do so as a result of feeling that they no longer fit in in their own environments anymore (Kidd). This unfortunately occurs with some regularity in today’s culture. Stigma and taboo are still found in societies—and even in personal selves, one can carry around a sense of guilt that is so strong—more accusing than anything that anyone else might show. For that reason, it is important to understand why people act the way they do and how one’s environment can create tension and dissonance within the mind of a single human being. Because there are so many different inputs coming towards a person at any one time, these multiple inputs and factors within a given environment are likely to create diverse and often conflicting notions and standards with respect to how one should think about or experience gender and sexuality. Advertising alone is so powerful in terms of how it introduces people to body images, how it associates happiness with sex or sexuality, how it typifies, reinforces or subverts traditional gender norms, etc., that mere exposure to an hour or two of television each day will have a profound impact on one’s mind and the way one experiences his or her own gender and sexuality. To understand the influences, one has to look at one’s environment.
Conclusion
The influences that impact a person’s experience of sexuality and gender have to be viewed in terms of one’s environment. One’s environment consists of one’s family, friends, school, work, groups, media, and community. All of these will factor into how one forms impressions and beliefs about gender and sexuality. All of them will play a part in informing one’s experience of gender and sexuality. If conflicting inputs shape a person’s perspective, that individual is likely to experience a form of cognitive dissonance, which can lead to feelings of guilt or shame or confusion. Understanding this is essential for helping people to navigate their experiences of gender and sexuality in a positive and effective manner.

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