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Belle Waring Knocks it Out of the Park
By Jeff Fecke | March 7, 2007
This is an absolutely stop-everything-and-go-read post. A taste:
The second point, that women don’t like sex, is an undercurrent in every discussion of this type. Not even an undercurrent: a foundation stone for the whole creaky apparatus. Now, I think most people take it for granted that on average men want to have sex more than women, that their sex drives are stronger. Various not-totally-implausible sciency things support this, such as the effect of testosterone on male and female sex drives. On the whole, I lazily incline to assent to this view. But the truth is that there’s really no way to assess the truth of it.
What would a world look like in which women who had sex whenever and with whomever they want were never called sluts? Never judged by strangers and friends? What would it be like if girls were never told that they had to be gatekeepers for their bodies, defenders of castle walls that are always under assault by men wanting sex? Not to put too fine a point on it, what would the world be like if there wasn’t the pervasive threat of sexual violence? What if a woman could confidently go anywhere, dressed however she pleased, and not be afraid of rape?
[...]
This is all a long way of saying that we are currently so far from living in a society in which women’s sexual desires aren’t hemmed in and rechanelled in a thousand ways ranging from brutal violence to mild indoctrination—so far that I think we really can’t say whether men in general like to have sex more than women, or not. We look at that hypothetical society of true equality and freedom for women in this intimate realm across a vast gulf. We don’t know at all what that place is like.
What are you still doing here? I said to stop everything and go read!
Topics: Feminism | 1 Comment »
March 7th, 2007 at 4:33 pm
If you haven’t already read it, you’d enjoy Jill’s awesome post from yesterday. She makes the same point as Belle that women’s bodies aren’t Porches or $100 bills – good stuff, all around.