There is most certainly a discrepancy for women alluded to by Susan Brownmiller, Whitney Walker, Emilie Morgan, and Ariel Levy between the performance of sexuality and the experience and pleasure of it. Young women are being fed incredibly divergent messages, as Levy points out, as to how they should experience their sexuality, but nowhere are they being told to embrace themselves as sexual creatures who have the right to seek sexual pleasure. Instead, women are maintained second class citizens by the double standard that they should both embody sex and not have it.
From a young age, women are internalizing these conflicting notions and disregarding the experience of pleasure as something they should either not expect or as something unrealistic to attain. These ideas are reinforced not only by our sexualized media and culture, but also by the way we educate young men and women about sex. 'Abstinence only' sex education is driven by a cultural ideal of removing teens from the sexual sphere, but it conflicts harshly with the messages sent by our profit-driven media corporations. These messages serve as a double-edged sword that always seems to disadvantage the woman.
It is becoming more and more apparent that our culture is advancing itself as a culture of rape and violence. Women are being blamed because of their miseducation within the patriarchy while men escape scrutiny of their behaviors. As all of the authors allude to, women and men would be better served by a sex education curriculum that includes emphasis on the experience of sexual pleasure. If the institution of education adopted a more realistic position on sex and its emotional and physical implications, our youth might be influenced to make different choices with respect to their sexuality.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I completely agree with Alexandra; education is the best way to both target all youth and make an impact. An interesting thing to note, in regards to female pleasure, is that it doesn't take long for boys to figure out how to masturbate, but it's a bit more complicated for girls. If and when girls figure out how to masturbate on their own, having an orgasm is the next problem. Men and women are simply built differently and, while it's almost impossible for men to not enjoy sex, pleasure just isn't as straight-forward for women. Unfortunately, I think the fact that it takes women so much longer to understand what they like and don't like results in their not recognizing their own ability and entitlement to enjoy sex.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Alex and Hilary: women should be encouraged to be more in-touch with themselves as sexual beings (pun intended), rather than just sexual objects. I think the value of knowing what you want and how to achieve it is something that is lacking in our cultural discourse on sex, especially for women. Like Hilary said, 'sex' as it is typically defined (i.e. intercourse) is pretty much conducted on the guy's terms: when he's done, it's done. A woman's orgasm isn't inevitable like a man's (usually) is, so female sexual pleasure has to be made a priority on its own. Another interesting point is that very few women can orgasm from 'sex' as it is culturally defined without other stimulation. As such, activities that give women pleasure (or, indeed, that exist outside the realm of heteronormative, patriarchal sex) are devalued as tangential to the main act. In this way, activities that guarantee male sexual pleasure are privileged over those that encourage female sexual pleasure.
ReplyDeleteI, also, agree with Alexandra. The double standard women experience, in which they are forced by the media to be comfortable with sex while simultaneously they are taught by our education system not to have sex, is extremely detrimental to their experience as women. Teen girls feel as though they must seem sexually comfortable in order to fit in and be attractive to boys, however this comfort is often artificial as their true understanding of sexual pleasure is often lacking as girls are not given any valuable lessons on how they should truly enjoy sex. Education must help girls truly feel comfortable so that they don't feel as though they must fake a comfort that does not truly exist.
ReplyDelete