Understanding sexual identity is basic to understanding human behavior. Sexual identity has three components. The first is anatomic identity, simply a person's identity is either male or female. The scond is gender role behavior or masculinity or femininity. These are culturally fixed signals that discriminate males from females. The last component is sexual orientation, which is the anatomical category of persons one finds erotically exciting. This is otherwise known as heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality.
The following elements may contribute to the social construction of sex differences in children: Play patterns, early peer relations, parents behavior toward male and female children, peers and siblings, gender constancy and stability. Play patterns deal with the idea that boys and girls differ in play styles and toy differences. Boys are encouraged to play rambunctiously and with stereotypically "boy" toys, while girls are encouraged to play with "soft" toys. Young boys often play more aggressively than do girls. Researchers concluded that greater aggression and rough-and-tumble play among young males has "a biological foundation". The higher incidents of boys aggression, rough-and-tumble play, and attempts to dominate is closely parallelled by similar behavioir among monkeys and apes(Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974).
Play patterns with other children are another early sex difference. Girls showed more "passive" behavior when paired with a boy. The preference for same sex playmate also emerges early.
Parents respond differently to specific behaviors of boys and girls. For example, parents will give positive responses to girls for playing with dolls and negative responses to boys. Fathers more than mothers give negative responses to girls playing with dolls (Fagot, 1978). As a result, young children (as early as 3 1/2 years) were found to have socially constructed gender roles (Haugh et al, 1980). This indicates that parents are highly influential over their children's perception of gender roles.
In general, males receive more criticism when they engage in "female" activites than females for engaging in "male" activities from their peers and siblings. Siblings also serve as social models for maleness and femeleness.
A lot of the research we found regarding biology and male/female gender roles indicate a strong bias in that the researchers assume that all people are born heterosexual. Thus, they imply that homosexual behavior is abnormal and is a result of some type of error in their socializing.
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