But uh-oh, guess what. It’s not your right to ‘choose’ to be a sexay layday. Making traditional, patriarchy-approved, feminine submissive ‘choices’ is like spitting in the eye of every woman who has ever been raped, humiliated, harassed, denied birth control, abandoned, passed over, or beaten.
And just a few days after tekanji tried to call a truce...
So, are we going to sit here complaining about women and each other, or are we going to look into ways of changing the sexual culture so that the sex work industry can’t degrade, dehumanize, and traffic in the women unfortunate enough to not have a choice in how they work? Are we going to address pornography, not in terms of ban/not-ban, but rather in terms of critiquing content and treatment of the actors? What about looking at how popular culture feeds into and is influenced by sexual culture, and how that culture has a different standard for women than for men?
But, darn that Twisty! she actually addresses this in her final paragraph:
I assert that we’re choosing the path of least resistance. It’s much easier to acquiesce to a set of established conventions—social, aesthetic, political, sexual, sartorial—for which the rewards (dudely approval, other women’s satisfying jealousy) dangle brightly ahead, than it is to blaze forth in a fury of white-hot anti-feminine iconoclasm and risk ridicule, ostracism, and male reproach. Life’s rich pageant is much more accessible when you go with the flow. Patriarchy, as the Spice Girls and Paris Hilton can attest, rewards conformity. Which is why the new feminism must be sex-ay, and why the only freedom it promises is the freedom to enjoy the degradation.
In other words: Duh! Of course our sexual culture has ridiculous double-standards. The way to get rid of them is not to go along with them for fear of being labelled a prude and a bitch.
Already forty comments in the thread; you might want to take a glance now, before the count hits 150 later today and it would take way too long just to get an idea of what people are saying.
1 comment:
Mm. Of course, there's no corresponding pressure to *not* be sex-ay for fear of being called a slut or a bimbo or a...sexbot.
but of course, pressure only come from one source: The Patriarchy (tm); and only flows in one direction (turn women who otherwise would never, ever think of such things into submissive make-up wearing sexbots, for the sake of pleasing men).
and men, too, certainly, never ever consider wanting to -be- "sluts" or wear makeup or...
which is why there aren't any transvestites and/or male bottoms.
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