Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. Contact: N. While gendered sexual scripts are hegemonic at the cultural level, research suggests they may be less so at dyadic and individual levels. Through interviews with 44 heterosexually active men and women aged , we delineated ways young people grappled with culture-level scripts for sexuality and relationships. Specifically, we found three styles of working with sexual scripts: Conforming, in which personal gender scripts for sexual behavior overlapped with traditional scripts; exception-finding, in which interviewees accepted culture-level gender scripts as a reality, but created exceptions to gender rules for themselves; and transforming, in which participants either attempted to remake culture-level gender scripts, or interpreted their own non-traditional styles as equally normative.
Changing sexual scripts can potentially contribute to decreased gender inequity in the sexual realm and to increased opportunities for sexual satisfaction, safety, and wellbeing, particularly for women, but for men as well. Sexual scripts are cognitive schema that instruct people how to understand and act in sexual situations. But because sexual scripts also operate on inter- and intra-personal levels, there can be areas of discontinuity between people's dyadic or individual scripts for gendered behavior in heterosexual relationships and their cultural scripts.
At the individual or dyadic level, people may desire or enact very different gender scripts for sexuality than those they observe as being cultural norms. Assessing sexual scripts empirically is one way of understanding the larger gender structures that shape heterosexual behavior, and potentially even contributing to change in these structures. Likewise, mainstream, traditional cultural scripts are not a given, but require maintenance and reinforcement at personal and dyadic levels to persist.
These interactions between sexual scripts at the cultural level and those on inter- and intrapersonal levels do not occur automatically; both change and continuity are active processes involving significant human effort. Research on sexual scripts at all three levels, and on disjunctures between culture level and individual and couple level scripts, has contributed valuable knowledge of what these scripts and disjunctures look like. Thus, this study's aim was to delineate the ways young people worked with culture-level sexual scripts by examining disjunctures between scripts at different levels in their accounts of their own sexual behavior and relationships.
Actual characteristics and behavior of men and women — in both sexual and other realms — run along a continuum such that there can be as much within-group as between-group difference. At the same time, beliefs regarding masculine and feminine characteristics and behavior tend to polarize them Connell, Thus, sexual scripts can be thought of as one point of interaction between individuals and gender structures.
