Sunday, August 30, 2009

female sexuality: a no-win situation

Operating within mainstream cultural frameworks, female sexuality (in this context meaning biologically female with a "feminine" gender performance) never wins. Consider the options:

1) As a female, your sexuality is repressed and/or heavily regulated (I won't even get into the whys and the hows)

AND/OR

2) As a female having and acting out on sexual desire, you are "shamed" through pejoratives and other degrading remarks.

AND/OR

3) As a female, an expression or discussion of sexuality is an attempt to gain (male heterosexual) attention.

AND/OR

4) As a female, whatever your sexual preferences are, they are undermined as your authentic desires and instead cast as having been shaped by an all-pervasive male sexuality and patriarchal order.

I am not denying that some or all of these factors may be applicable to varying degrees in varying circumstances, but I resent the fact that all of these factors are active within the hegemonic mind at all times.

Give a girl a break.

2 comments:

Sydney said...

Amen.

I also find that, in a relationship, if a girl cannot keep up with her male mate's sexual hunger, she can be cast as "frigid," while the scientific reality that women do not have as strong a sex drive as men, and they their sexual peak is reached at a different point in life than men, is totally disregarded.

Vanessa said...

I am skeptical about any "scientific study" that compares sex drives between men and women