ABSTRACT
Questionnaire data about criminal victimization experiences were collected from 2,259 Sacramento-area lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals (N = 1,170 women, 1,089 men). Approximately 1/5 of the women and 1/4 of the men had experienced victimization because of their adult sexual orientation. Hate crimes were less likely than nonbias crimes to have been reported to police. Compared with other recent crime victims, lesbian and gay hate-crime survivors manifested significantly more symptoms of depression, anger, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress. They also displayed significantly more crime-related fears and beliefs, lower sense of mastery, and more attributions of their personal setbacks to sexual prejudice than did nonbias crime victims and nonvictims. Comparable differences were not observed among bisexuals. The findings highlight the importance of recognizing hate-crime survivors' special needs in clinical settings and in public policy.
Subject(s)
Bisexuality/psychology , Crime Victims/psychology , Crime , Depressive Disorder, Major/psychology , Hate , Homosexuality/psychology , Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic/psychology , Adult , Depressive Disorder, Major/diagnosis , Female , Humans , Male , Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic/diagnosis , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
ABSTRACT This research addressed how lesbians are influenced by and respond to beauty constructions of dominant culture while they simultaneously redefine and create their own meaning of beauty within lesbian communities. A sample of 181 lesbian and bisexual women from the Sacramento area completed a survey examining their reasons for exercising, amount and type of exercise, body image and satisfaction with weight, eating disorder symptoms, perceptions of lesbian health threats, degree of feminist identification, appearance as a form of lesbian identification, and change of appearance after coming out. Whereas feminism served as a buffer against negative body image, the body image results found lesbians to be bound to dominant culture's thinness expectations. Other findings, however, also suggest that lesbians define beauty in their own unique way. Moving beyond simply responding to traditional beauty pressures, lesbians in this study also used beauty markers as a creative strategy to find and identify each other, suggesting that one purpose of lesbian beauty is functional.
ABSTRACT
We examined the results of a stratified random sample of 50 weight-loss studies conducted in the 1980s for weight change, change in overweight percentage, and improvement in physical health during treatment and follow-up. The typical participant was a White, middle-class woman 48% over her average weight before treatment, who lost 12.8 lb during a 13-week treatment program and then regained 4.3 lb over the next 6.5 months. Treatment efficacy was not improved when only the most successful treatment conditions were examined or when the studies conducted at the end of the decade were compared with earlier studies. Only one study examined change in physical health during weight loss, and only one study showed that participants moved from clinical to nonclinical levels of obesity. In light of these results, we argue that treating obesity through dieting techniques may be a misdirected goal.
