Culture and Sexual Orientation Social Sciences Essay (Essay Sample)

Culture and Sexual Orientation
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The gender roles have turned out to be personal and cultural. They have been instrumental in society as they determine how a female and a male should speak, dress, and interact within the context of society. It is through the gender roles that traditional responsibilities and tasked assigned to different genders were determined. While sexual behavior and gender roles were socially constructed, sexual orientation was not. Sexual orientation exhibited itself as a pattern of sexual and pattern emotional attraction that was based on the gender of one’s partner. With the cross-cultural data depicting that sexuality changes its form and meaning based on the cultural context, the text will seek to discuss how sexual orientation and gender roles exhibited themselves in Native American and African American cultures.
Native American culture
The Native Americans, commonly depicted as the indigenous Americans or the American Indians, are the indigenous people in the United States whom by the time the United States was being formed, their ethnic groups were regarded as semi-independent populations and normally lived in societies detached from the British colonisers. To the eyes of the Europeans, the Native American society lacked the complexity of their own community, a perception that is disapproved by the complexity of how both gender roles and sexual orientation exemplified themselves in the culture. Traditionally, the roles of both gender, men and women, were clearly defined with their responsibilities equally being crucial to the functioning and survival of their societies. The Europeans had come from a culture that viewed women as creatures that should be cloistered and protected, a factor that made them astonished at the workload that Native American women carried (Kottak and Kozaitis, 2012).