Is sex and sexuality inherently oppressive to women?

Sex is always rape.

Well, things are changing, but for the longest time there was that idiotic double standard, you know. The message was “If you’re a woman and you’ve had sex you are immoral.” For the longest time “decent” women didn’t appear in public when they were pregnant and started showing. Even in the 80’s, when I was having kids, the only maternity clothes available invariably had a “innocent little girl, baby doll” theme. I just grabbed some X-large stuff from Goodwill to wear.

There isn’t anything “inherently” wrong with sex and woman, but society made up all this shite about it.

“Anyway, what is wrong with sex and sexuality?”

Nothing….what is wrong is for people to place judgment on people that choose to enjoy the many pleasures of the human body both visual and physical. The ones that exploit this natural sexuality are the ones that spoil the true beautiful nature of the human body for the rest of us and the debate begins once again.

Excellent question, @hominid I really hope you get a ton of answers.
This objectifying yourself for the gratification for men is wrong,the majority of this is it coming from women mostly?

Not at all.

Ugh…college feminists…of course they would try and argue that.

There does seem to be some attitude in societies around the world, however, that being penetrated (or sexually “passive” in general) is inherently degrading. Think about it. Even in the gay community, the “bottom” is more likely to be called a “slut” than the top. Penetrating is “prestigious”, being penetrated has lower value. In Ancient Rome, homosexual sex was okay as long as the person doing the penetration was of a higher status than the “receiver”; a slave topping for a nobleman; that would be quite disgraceful. The other way around was fine.

I don’t know how that relates, but it is certainly something I’ve observed.

You seem to be equating sex and sexuality with the selling of sex or the sex of selling. Most women today enjoy sex just as much as men do – if done right – why would you think it was oppressive? That has nothing to do with selling one’s body to eat and pay the bills. And no feminist would think it does.

Nothing is wrong with sex or sexuality. We are all sexual beings in one form or another.
Even small children have sexual feelings and are capable of feeling aroused, however, this does not mean it is okay to sexually stimulate children.
I was on the near ground floor of the feminist movement back in the early 70’s when I was a young teen.

Equal pay for equal work,equality in the boardroom and the bedroom, Roe vs. Wade/ my body, my choice, the freedom to choose a career or motherhood or both, the freedom to chose to have a child out of wedlock without stigma and ostracism, on & on.
Woman feeling empowered by their sexuality and not copping to the shame, stigma and double standards that existed at the time where a sexually active woman was a “slut” or “whore” or loose woman, but men were the all american, red blooded, male and just sewing their wild oats, a girl in every port, bullshit
All positive changes but to exploit your sexuality in exchange for money, status, or the entertainment of the male sector was considered to be degrading, and a blight on what progress was being attempted.
The feminist movement was about solidarity among sisters, rising above stereotype and oppressive gender roles.

For women to pander their sexuality was seen as a sell out of the sisterhood and a 2 steps forward, one step backward move. How could women ever be expected to be respected and treated as equals if we were going to continue to play coquettish sexual games and fall back on our tits and ass to impress or worse yet, sexually manipulate men.
Taking charge of your sexuality is a good thing, using it to manipulate and gain male favortism through the arousal factor is manipulative and unbecoming to women that wish to be taken seriously.

As the warrior poet Pat Benatar once said, “stop using sex as a weapon”

“Is there something about sex that is inherently anti-woman?”

No, and literally no one who matters thinks so. (“Sex,” after all, is a very broad word that includes private, same-sex relations between women. So even the most radical of sex theorists cannot think that sex is inherently anti-woman since none of them argue that same-sex relations are inherently anti-woman.)

“I see the word “objectification” thrown around here without any qualification.”

What sort of qualifications are you looking for? Most people use the word assuming that those reading it have the basic intelligence to understand—or else research for themselves—what objectification is and that it always occurs in a context (and therefore logically cannot be an issue of inherency).

“There seems to be a near consensus that getting paid for doing anything that is considered sexual (posing for photos, dressing provocatively, etc) is necessarily harmful to women because it says that “women are only about sex”.”

This strikes me as an incredibly uncharitable way of reading such comments. The actual argument that some people have put forward is that the current social context makes it such that paid sex work contributes to underlying (that is, preexisting) essentialist notions about women, the role of women, and “women’s work.”

The same is true for the rather notorious arguments that PIV sex is always rape. These arguments use an operationalized, academic definition of rape that does not mean what most people mean by the word, and has to do with the PIV sex in the context of a particular sort of society. I don’t think these arguments are any good, but it certainly makes no sense to cite or critique them out of context just because it riles people up.

“But what jobs do not only value their employees for what they bring to the task they have been hired to do?”

Two points here. One, something that “happens to everyone” can be worse when it happens to a particular group.” Both the rich and the poor are forbidden to sleep under bridges or beg in the streets, but it clearly affects the two in vastly different ways. Two, this is why intersectional feminism is also concerned with the way in which social class affects one’s position in society. In any case, “I’ve got problems, too” is just classic derailment. It’s like going to a breast cancer rally and asking why no one’s talking about heart disease.

“There were people in debates during college that argued that any consensual sex between a man and woman was an act of oppression.”

No, they didn’t. They were arguing that there can be no such thing as consensual sex between a man and a woman in the current social context. We might think this is false, but let’s not straw man the argument. (And again, the principle of charity requires us to understand the argument this way even if the actual interlocutors you are thinking about did not voice their argument very well.)

“But does that mean that our heterosexuality and homosexuality is a product of our culture?”

If you’re really interested in this question, you might look into the work of Michel Foucault. His is the classic argument that sexual orientation is a product of culture (based in part on how many past cultures exhibit the same behaviors without having any predilection for our modern labels). And of course, it follows from the idea that gender—not sex!—is socially constructed that sexual orientation must be as well since the latter is parasitic on the former. So if one believes that gender is a construction, one must also believe that sexual orientation is constructed.

This isn’t to say that there haven’t always been people we would refer to as “men” who were only attracted to other people whom we would also refer to as “men,” but only that the essentialist approach to this—that is, making it part of someone’s identity—is constructed. Again, the arguments here are tricky. And it is not clear to me, at least, whether they work. But Foucault is nevertheless a good starting point if you’re interested in the question.

“Anyway, what is wrong with sex and sexuality?”

There’s nothing wrong with sex and sexuality. There’s a lot wrong with how it is used and conceived of in our current social context.

@SavoirFaire: “What sort of qualifications are you looking for? Most people use the word assuming that those reading it have the basic intelligence to understand—or else research for themselves—what objectification is and that it always occurs in a context (and therefore logically cannot be an issue of inherency).”

Dig aside, it’s a reasonable question – and it’s one that I have an answer for. Any type of explanation would do. When you have discussions with people, it’s generally better to ask for them to elaborate before assuming what they mean. But when your attempts for clarification are met with just making the statement again, one can only assume what is meant…or ask a fluther question.

@SavoirFaire: “In any case, “I’ve got problems, too” is just classic derailment. It’s like going to a breast cancer rally and asking why no one’s talking about heart disease.”

Tell me a bit more about this principle of charity. While you’re doing that, let me try to explain what I meant in a different way….

Woman A is a software developer.
Woman B is a nude model.

What I’m asking is this: Please tell me is the important difference between the two. Some people will likely object to Woman B’s choice and make statements about sending messages about women being mostly about sex. Saying that one shows their body to men and one shows their code to men is not an explanation. I’m looking for an explanation of what the people here mean when they say what they say – not necessarily’ Foucalt’s, who I am familiar with, but primarily with his debate with Chomsky.

Going off what I feel the gist of the question is, not so much how it is worded or appears to float between two unrelated issues, the reason a woman using sexuality and or sex as an income is nebulous. Even if a woman wanted to display her body for free, just for the pure joy of showing it because she knows she is sexy, people will make notion that she was sexed up as a minor, that she lacks self-esteem, she is an attention grabber, she is wanton, or the likes. Times have changed some, she can be the neighborhood bicycle (everyone gets a ride), and just be liberated, but let her sleep with half the dudes for money then she is some slut, or debased woman. I don’t know how it is in other nations, but here in the US we are so obtuse about sex as a whole, it is no wonder ideas of it are all over the board.

@Hypocrisy_Central Agree to a degree, however, the only difference between the neighborhood “bicycle” and getting paid, is the pay aspect. The emotional and psychological factors remain the same.
It is a fact that the majority of female sex workers are products of sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcohol addiction and suffer low self esteem. Not all but the majority.

99.9% of sex based industry is a pain and shame based industry.
Just like factory farming is a cruelty based industry.
The nice little college girl working her way through school as an exotic dancer or escort or whatever, is a myth in most cases.
The harsh reality is most sex workers suffer from serious emotional problems stemming from abusive pasts, and addiction of some sort.

@Coloma It is a fact that the majority of female sex workers are products of sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcohol addiction and suffer low self esteem.
Numbers, as we know, can always be manipulated. If I were to go to North Richmond and ask 50 Black men and women if the police were racist, I am sure I would have little problem finding willing participants to back up the claim that cops are racist. If I asked 50 Black students attending Baylor university, I suspect the number would be less to far less, and those who would say the cops were racist would be saying so not because of 1st hand observation but what was said to be. If all I am asking are women with drug problems, or who were abused that happen to be picked up by the cops, or in rehab, I could deduct that those type of women make up most in the sex trade. Even if ”nice college girls” were to be involved in such, do you think they would admit being in such an industry or activity that was frowned on? Those Girls Gone Wild videos were not filled with drugged out, abused, sexed up as minor women. Those were ”Good Girls” flashing their boobs, making out with other female friends ion the bathroom, and boinking on camera; be it by way of money enticement or too much booze.

When I worked in the salon I had some clients for a time that were young women almost just out of high school. They would go into Oakland to strip. They were not strung out, abused, had self-esteem problems, etc. they went because they could earn their rent, car payment, gas, insurance, college materials, etc. and still have a little fun money left over, in four night’s work, not working 2 weeks. When they got what they needed, they did not go in, they just went to class, got their nails done, recreated and enjoyed the money. When it got low, they went back to do a few more days on the runway with the pole. Eventually as they got further in their studies and as one said, disgusted with men their father’s age leering at them and trying to paw them when tucking the money in their G-string, they stopped going, even in spite of the easy money. The people who manage to come up with this, ”they are all strung out and abused” crap, if that is what you are looking for, that is what you will find more of.

@Hypocrisy_Central Whoa…chill. I said many, not ALL. Focus on the point.
Drunk college girls flashing their tits is nothing new, and you prove my point, the women that don’t mind having men their fathers age groping them quit that scene because it doesn’t feel good to them. I bet there is a huge segment of girls/women that gave it the good ol’ college try, pun intended but had enough self esteem to see that it wasn’t a savory lifestyle choice.

Jenny McCarthy, the idiot behind the anti vaccine movement… One blurb I read said, “Why would we believe anything this woman says? She posed for Playboy 20 years ago.”

The very people who created the demand for Playboy turn around and insult the woman who are in the magazine.

Yea it can seem that way, with the way sex was/used to be portrayed as something men enjoyed the most.

But women can be and are definitely predatory just like men in wanting sex, so now it’s like no one is being objectified because deep down we all want to stick it in something or ride something.

I guess society ruined the notion of sex, but obviously we’re just animals that were meant to plow each other.

Women can be really aggressive in bed to the point of “taking it” from the guy too.

@hominid “Any type of explanation would do.”

This doesn’t look like an answer to my question. First you said you wanted qualifications. Now you’re asking for explanations. These are not the same thing. Qualifications are ways of hedging our statements to make them less absolute. Explanations are ways of fleshing out our intentions to make our meaning plainer. Qualifications can serve an explanatory role sometimes, but I don’t think you intended to limit the sort of explanations one could give in that way.

Furthermore, the answer you linked to does not strike me as a request for an explanation. It’s just an expression of scorn and/or doubt. I see no reason why one would think the proper response to it was “here’s what I mean by that.” Nor is it accurate for you to say that what you received was a repetition of the statement. As far as I can tell, your post was ignored—and understandably so given that there is no real request for a response.

@hominid “Tell me a bit more about this principle of charity.”

{Sigh} As I have already explained via PM, the statement that you quoted was not directed at you or anything you wrote. Thus why I said “two points,” gave my two points in response to what you had said, and then offered the third statement as an aside aside aimed at those who would mistakenly continue that line of thought. But since you asked me to tell you a bit more about the principle of charity, here it is: if you had been following it, you would have noted this as a possible interpretation of my post.

@hominid “While you’re doing that, let me try to explain what I meant in a different way…”

Woman A is a software developer.
Woman B is a nude model.

What I’m asking is this: Please tell me is the important difference between the two.

And what I’ve answered is this: you are asking a bad question. It fails to understand that the argument does not say there is an important difference between the two. It says there is an important difference between the two in certain social contexts. Being a nude model in the US has implications that being a software developer does not. My own view is that we ought to treat the disease rather than the symptom, but I can understand why someone might encourage those considering certain forms of employment to think about what sorts of stereotypes and social institutions they are reinforcing by doing so.

@SavoirFaire

Woman A, Is “using” her education, mind and brains to make significant contributions in business & society.

Woman B. Is “using” her body parts to make insignificant contributions to the male erection.

Yeah, but Woman B is using her anatomy to develop software into hardware. ;-p

@Brian1946 LOL..you drive home a hard point. :-)

firmware

@hominid I see the word “objectification” thrown around here without any qualification.

Objectification is well understood. It means treating a person as a thing, and reducing women to sex objects. If you’re interested, I explained it with examples here. There’s a wikipedia entry on it here.

“There seems to be a near consensus that getting paid for doing anything that is considered sexual (posing for photos, dressing provocatively, etc) is necessarily harmful to women because it says that “women are only about sex”.

Posing for pictures isn’t a problem in itself. The problem is the way society views women. It’s like we are shown through a lens of over the top sexiness. We’re also judged for not being sexy- look at all the scrutiny over Hillary Clinton’s clothes when she was campaigning for president.

When people hire someone to pump out their septic tank, they are not particularly interested in what other qualities the person has to offer. Could someone explain what makes it different when sex/sexuality is involved?

Think about this. How many times have you seen a dead prostitute in the beginning of a crime drama? It happens so often that it’s basically background noise.

Modeling has its own problems, like coercive conditions and sexual harasment.

You may not care about the septic tank guy. But you would probably be surprised and concerned if he died in his line of work, or if his employer made an inappropriate pass at him. You wouldn’t expect either of those things to happen because of his gender or his job.

People expect sexual harassment and violence to happen to women in sex work. We’ve made violence and harassment against women normal. The septic tank guy still has his rights and his dignity.

There were people in debates during college that argued that any consensual sex between a man and woman was an act of oppression. I am trying to figure out if that’s where many people here are starting from.

That’s a pretty fringe viewpoint. I’ve heard some “all PIV is rape” arguments, and I don’t agree with their conclusion. But the underlying idea is that when it comes to sex, women have less power to follow their own wishes. There are a lot of unspoken rules in our society that shape how we interact with each other.

Women are socialized to be less assertive. We learn to cooperate and defer to others. Girls are also raised to take care of a family. A lot of our first toys are baby dolls or dollhouses, and girls are given more chores than boys.

The same thing happens with having a man in our life. In fairytales, kid’s movies, and YA novels, 99% of the time she ends up with a guy. In a lot of them, that’s what the story is about. Getting a guy is the happy ending. People in our everyday life innocently do it all the time, with questions about if we’re seeing anyone or if they can set us up with someone. It takes on epic proportions with the excitement over weddings, where women basically get to be a princess for a day. If you want to be single, nobody gives a shit, or they disapprove.

Women start out with less economic opportunities than men (we’ve only really been part of the workforce since the industrial revolution, a blink of an eye compared to human history.) We’re usually the ones who leave work to take care of children and elderly relatives. We often end up economically dependent on men.

Women also do most of the housework, even when they are working.

So if, say, an exhausted housewife loses her desire for sex, she’s at an impasse. On the one hand, everyone in her life is so happy that she’s married with kids. This was supposed to be her happy ending. She has always taken care of the people around her, including her husband. Even mainstream sex therapists say she should just have sex with him. On top of that, her husband is being pushy and insistent about it.

If they can’t figure it out, it may end in divorce. He’s been working, but she took a five year break to raise their kids. She might have to start over at a lower job title, if she can find a job at all. And if they get a divorce, she will almost certainly have custody.

In a situation like that, you basically have to unlearn an entire lifetime of training to stick up for yourself. Having sex you don’t want is a terrible feeling. The way modern relationships are set up, it’s almost inevitable for it to happen to some of us. Gendered socialization is a legit problem and it needs to be better understood.

@Coloma I’m not sure why you addressed this post to me. The Woman A/Woman B comparison question was raised by @hominid in this post. I don’t disagree that there are differences between the two situation. My point to @hominid was that the importance of those differences is in part relative to the social context. If we lived in a society that did not have a long history of objectification and an ongoing stereotype of women as sex objects, the existence of nude modeling would be of a lot less political interest than it is under the actual circumstances in which we find ourselves. Sure, it might remain personally significant insofar as we might think it was not the best use of someone’s talents. But it would not have the sort of group consequences that presently give it political significance.

That the current social context makes these inseparable is, of course, one of the important background facts to the feminist slogan “the personal is the political.”

@SavoirFaire Yes, I was aware you were addressing @hominid, but answered according to you being the current poster to question those questions.

@Haleth Brilliant answers!

My best friend, long ago, was a hair dresser. She told me that there was a hair dressing seminar being held at some large hotel on certain dates,and they needed models. So she signed my sister and me up.
So, my sister and I showed up. We were far and away the best looking women there (we always were) and we were instantly hit on by the producers. They tried to give us their room key and told us to go on up to their rooms and order some drinks and make ourselves at home. The attitude was like, “There is no question that you will have sex with us.”
My sister and I took one look and each other and turned around and walked out of the place.
I told my husband about it, and was really dismayed the next morning when he woke me up at 7:00, angry because the producers had been calling that morning because I was supposed to be there. I felt so betrayed and so unprotected by him. I was like, “Jesus. Do you not understand how we were treated? Are you going to be angry with me if I refuse to have sex with them?”

@Dutchess_III What is with these hair shows? My GF in college modeled in one of those here in Chicago and it was MC’d by Eddy Murphy. My GF was drop dead gorgeous think Cindy Crawford kind of looks and after the show Eddy and his entourage of goons walks up to us one goon stands in front of me and Eddy says to my GF “come on hon let’s go for a ride in my limo” Just like that. She says no and he grabbed her hand and started to walk away with her and she yells “I said NO” yanks her hand away. He then went stomping off in a huff. Total prick.

And that’s ^^ the kind of thing that is oppressive to women; a long, long way from consensual sex!

Exactly @janbb.

Only thing I can think of with the hair shows is that only woman who are beautiful (or think they are) show up for them, so the dicks think they’re going to get lucky. Everyone knows that beautiful woman are totally into sex with anything and anyone, any time, any where.

When I was in Jr. High, prematurely developed, one guy said to me “With tits like that you have GOT to be all up for sex so lets have a go!”

Oh yeah, I had so many goonish bosses in my younger years. Ass patting, tons of sexual innuendo, fetch my coffee, find my keys, let me stroke your hair types. Jeez…..about the onlt thing I wasn’t subject to was carrying their slippers to them in my teeth like a Cocker Spaniel. lol

You said “cock…” giggle!

It also depends on the species. Some mating rituals are violent and sometimes the female gets killed.

@Coloma Ah, I see. But I’m not questioning the question so much as suggesting that it is being asked in a misleading way (as if context didn’t matter). In fact, that’s one of the major problems with this question: it asks whether sex and sexuality are inherently oppressive when literally nobody was making that argument.

@Coloma I bet there is a huge segment of girls/women that gave it the good ol’ college try, pun intended but had enough self esteem to see that it wasn’t a savory lifestyle choice.
You said that to say that those nice college coeds lost their self-esteem and that is the reason they took to the pole or got on their back, and because of all the cash shoved in their G-string and guys pawing and hooting that them or being rode hard and put away wet, gave them their self-esteem back? That would almost be as if those guys did those girls a favor. ;-)

@Hypocrisy_Central What are you babbling on about?
I meant that there are probably a lot of women that quit the sex industry because they HAD selfesteem and didn’t like the way they felt doing what they were doing and being harassed by their customers.

@Coloma […and didn’t like the way they felt doing what they were doing and being harassed by their customers.
Just saying, self-esteem and getting upset being treated badly, is not perfect marriage. If a woman had self-esteem and went stripping, it would not be that because she had it, she would quit, to look at self-esteem as being the catalyst for her to leave the industry she much have had less self-esteem that led her into the industry. But…..you cannot fathom that so…..next…..

@Hypocrisy_Central What? Thinking you might be willing to give something a try and then realizing the realities of said enterprise….I fathom it perfectly.
It’s easy to THINK you might be able to do something but until you actually do it you don’t have a reference point.

Thanks everyone!

@Coloma Thinking you might be willing to give something a try and then realizing the realities of said enterprise….]
That could cover many areas in life. Leaving or entering the adult entertainment industry in some way of form could be due to the lack of self-esteem of a high dose of it. Leaving might have very little to do with self-esteem unless it was because she entered for reasons other than she needed some validation to feel desired and sexy to men and now she has more pride in herself as to believing she deserves more from life in all areas. If being ogled and pawed over by men gives her a spine and she quits the skin business, then it was a good thing she did it.