Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  I returned to work one day and discovered my office had been moved. Well, I really didn’t have an office anymore. I asked a friend, "what happened?" She mentioned something about the new boss. I did not have plans to find different employment so I put up with what turned out to be a loss of social status and privileges, which I had the year before. No one complained about my work. This was one example of a location in the United States when I was not privileged for being a white man.  White men can point to examples of discrimination. Perhaps that's what makes it hard to deal with generalizations about race and privilege. As I read the a  WP story  of a man who lost his teaching job allegedly because he taught his students that white privilege was a fact and that conservatives are acting to censor what teachers can say about race, I began to think about the lack of nuance in the story. For the most part, I have not experienced discrimination based on my ethnici...

 Sexual  Attraction In my previous post, I wrote about sexual orientation . This week I take a look at factors that influence sexual attraction. I'll take a look at recent research and consider how the findings might relate to the concerns of people working to integrate their religious faith with beliefs about sexuality. Over the years I have consulted with organizations. Not surprisingly, Christians who supervise housing (e.g., colleges, group homes, residential treatment programs) express concern about appropriate sexuality. They focus most on keeping men and women apart. Despite a common occurrence, it is rare for a Christian organization to discuss same sex activity within their residences or among coworkers. It does not seem to occur to many that two persons of the same sex may find each other sexually attractive. The leaders would not think of assigning a man and a woman to the same room but they do not consider the assignment of two same-sex oriented persons...

Sexual Orientation Sexual Identity Sexual Attraction Christians in the United States continue to write and speak about sexual orientation and same-sex relationships as if condoning or condemning same-sex relationships were the keys to Christian identity. The terms referring to human sexuality can interfere with communication when people use the terms inconsistently or imprecisely. In addition, new research changes our understanding of human sexuality such that older terms may carry meanings that are no longer substantiated by evidence. I take a look at some terms and cite a study to illustrate the complexity of sexuality. Given the confusion and misinformation, I hope to return to the topic. Sex  In the context of identity, sex refers to a person’s biological status as male, female, or intersex. Intersex is a biological state that includes an infrequent set of features linked to being male or female. The common indicators of biological sex include external gen...