Female Sexuality is not a commodity
I've really been trying to figure out what to write about today. My brain has been zooming around a million different ideas. I had a student/teacher conference with my "Theories and Methodologies in Gender Studies" professors last night and so my capstone project has been domination a lot of those thoughts.
I shared one of my preliminary ideas here. I've also talked a lot about the SlutWalk movement. I thought, why not take my interest in sexuality and talk about the Slut Walk movement? However, I felt there was a problem. There's no scholarly work on this grassroots movement! So I decided to compare the birth control movement to the Slut Walk movement. It seemed simple enough. Fortunately, my professors had a better idea. "Why not talk about Slut Walk?" the asked. "Well, because there's no scholarly work about the movement," I said. "Well, build your base with internet sources and then use that to support some scholarly pieces about rape culture," the countered. I was delighted! Five months focusing only on Slut Walk, what could be better!? '
I'm not only focusing on that. I also have to take two other courses, work full-time, and somehow manage to be a domestic goddess.
So, today I've been getting an idea of what's out there. What direction can I take with this? This article about the similarities between Slut Walk and Occupy Wall Street got me thinking about focusing on the commodification of female sexuality. Many people compare scantily clad women who are raped to men who wear Armani suits that are mugged when they walk through the inner city. Apparently rape = theft? And yes, it's true that something is being stolen from victims of sexual violence. But I wouldn't compare losing dignity, self respect, and a feeling of safety with having some cash taken from you.
The final thing that drove me to action in writing about these thoughts was something I saw on Facebook. One of my friends posted this article about the negative side-effects to the HPV vaccine. My friend's comment to this article was "maybe we can teach our girls to be virtuous, thereby significantly lowering their risk of this cancer." And then two days later said, "OH- and we should be teaching our sons the same thing." I'm not saying that I disagree with this idea. I think that people should be cautious in regards to any sexual encounter they have. My problem is that teaching boys about being cautious about sex is almost an afterthought in this situation. Why is safe sex up to women? And why is female sexuality viewed as a commodity when male sexuality is not?
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://rachelahanson.blog/2011/10/27/female-sexuality-is-not-a-commodity/
The female reproductive system is time sensitive, and so sexual market value is a thing.
It is a commodity most women don't realize that they own, and it has value.
Male success /wealth/ resource accumulation, is seen as a commodity in the same mating game...
Male sexuality , ie usefulness - is not time sensitive..
If you're looking at the data, everybody's reproductive usefulness is time sensitive. As males get older their sperm become more and more likely to present with genetic abnormalities that mean children conceived by older men are more likely to be unhealthy.
That being said, when I speak of sexuality as a commodity I am talking about using the bodies of women (although I recognize that men are not exempt from this) to sell things. Our bodies are used to sell everything from gum to burgers to firearms in a way that men's bodies are not used.
I will also add, reproduction and sexuality are not the same thing.
That's not remotely comparable, and I don't think you can support that with history of the last 5000 years to make that a valid point, sorry.
All cultures show precisely the same dynamic of older men with resources, mating with younger -highly fertile- females..
I totally agree.
Maybe the sexual value gives an inference to 'creation of life' and to associate it with the product, makes it priceless...( I just came up with that at I'm not saying its true!)
Men's actions , and not their aesthetics are used to sell. Success breeds success. Fastest, toughest, blah,blah,..
No, but sexual attractiveness to plays a part in human reproduction.
Sexuality would not exist without the reproduction 'engine'.
Sexuality only has one purpose, biologically speaking.
Dr. Sarah Hrdy from the University of California Davis notes in her research - which is built on the research of others working to refine Bateman's original premise that males of any species can mate successfully with many females over the course of their entire life - reported in an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences in 2000 that "older men. . . even if still potent, might deliver along with their sperm an added load of genetic mutations." Additionally (and this is me now) making claims regarding the social structure of mating does nothing to disprove that there is, in fact, an ideal time for men to sire children. All it does is serve to prove that women have, historically, been economically disadvantaged and have paired themselves with men who have resources.
Dr. Jonathan Marks, an anthropologist from the University of North Carolina, has stated "To confuse human (cultural) sexuality and (natural) reproduction is classically pseudo-scientific [emphasis added]. Of course sexuality is for reporduction - if you're a lemur. If you're a human, sexuality is far more than for reproduction; that is what evolution had done for human nature." (citation: https://popanth.com/article/nulture). To claim that sexuality only has one purpose is to completely disregard the fact that we are social animals. Sex and sexuality have a variety of biological and social purposes that are critically important to understand. When the odds of a male actually fathering a child are 3.1% (according to Wilcox, et al) with each coital act, do you really mean to tell me that 97% of all sex had is completely pointless?
You don't seem to understand the analogy.
A mugging does result in loss of dignity, self respect, and feeling of safety. The gender role of men is provider and protector. Look at any representation of admirable men in history, pop culture, literature, etc.
The admirable man is one who is strong, who can defend himself and those he cares about, and all the rest that goes along with it like status and sexual success.
So when a man is mugged all of that is proven to be false (unless he takes revenge like Caesar did on the pirates). So his self image, confidence, safety, etc are all negatively impacted.
So it is an analogous situation where a man's identity is threatened to where a woman's identity is threatened. In the vast majority of cases, a mugging is not as severe a damage as a rape but they both have a similar impact on the psyche of the victim.
In cases where a mugging also results in physical harm or near-death the psychological impacts can be just as severe.
It seems I did a poor job of explaining the analogy.
When scantily clad women are raped, people say that they are "asking for it" and deserve what they got. When a well-dressed person is mugged in a poor area of town, there is not a similar response. Rather, that person is the recipient of support and sympathy.
I'd actually disagree with both of those points in mainstream US culture.
Good for you.