| This dissertation consists of three studies exploring the role of seminal events in structuring global life-course patterns. The first study is an investigation of the life-course roots of masturbatory practices, in urban China today. Results suggest that Chinese women's masturbation responds strongly to both "hard" factors such as age and health status, and to more socially-rooted factors such as negative early life-course experiences and current values. Men's masturbation patterns, in contrast, seem simpler---linked to fewer background conditions than for women, and less organized around a culturally-embedded personality system. Similarly, the second chapter explores the life-course roots of lifetime workplace sexual harassment among U.S. women and men. In contrast with extant literature, among both genders workplace harassment has at least as much to do with a system of "routine activities" mechanisms---a victim's sexual signaling and exposure to potential harassers, and a perpetrator's lower cost of harassment---as with unobserved power-differentials between victim and perpetrator. The final chapter is on late-life, and investigates the role of marital transitions and statuses in shaping health careers and outcomes among U.S. elderly. In this study, I present, for the first time, evidence from a nationally-representative dataset that elderly women and men lacking a partner---whether through widowhood, divorce, or because they have never married---do substantially worse on a variety of non-psychological health dimensions, ranging from impaired metabolism to adverse health behaviors and poor functional capacity. Women's health patterns are ethnically differentiated, with widowed black women doing better than their white counterparts on a number of outcomes. Underlying mechanisms are explored. |
