Monday's rant on women's choices and male desire

Here comes the Monday rant on something other than Christians and history:

I've been realizing I'm a bit obsessed these days with deconstructing ideas about "choice". Almost without exception, the "popular posts" these past three months (listed to your right, scroll down a bit) have dealt with various aspects of "choice" and individual responsibility. Whether I've been blogging about food, abortion, cosmetic surgery, or porn, it always seems to come back to the "c-word".

My fellow Cliopatriarch Ralph Luker put it very nicely in a comment on my Porn and HIV post:

(It's all) well and good to say "choice" if choice is not hedged about with many other factors.

Folks don't make choices in a vacuum. Women don't make choices about their bodies and their sexual and reproductive behavior without being influenced by "many other factors". And for many young women in particular, one huge influencing factor in their lives is what I'd like to call the "omnipresence of male desire".

It is axiomatic in American popular culture that men are highly visual creatures who are obsessed with sex. This obsession, conventional wisdom assures us, is biological in origin. Whether we attribute the physiological roots of this obsession to the penis or the Ychromosone or testosterone, the end conclusion is the same -- male sexual desire is an indescribably powerful force. Social constructions aside, most contemporary American women are confronted with the reality of male sexuality by their teens, if not before. In both my women's studies courses and in my high school youth group, I often have the girls/women share stories about the first time they became aware of themselves as "objects of desire". It's a tough subject (especially with a male leader or teacher), but a crucial and often painful one. Even for those young women who have not been victims of overt sexual abuse, the stories of being leered at by friends' fathers at age 13 or whistled at on the street are nigh-on universal. We also talk about the strategies that women are taught for the control, mitigation, and manipulation of male sexual desire. We talk about the rules for avoiding eye contact, for parking in lighted areas, for carrying mace, for carefully crossing one's legs. Often, young women refer to these rules as "common sense", which is the perfect term indeed! It is our common cultural sense that male sexual desire is the great and omnipresent threat to women's physical and emotional safety; it is our commone cultural sense that it is women's responsibility to protect themselves from what at least some men will never be willing or able to control. (We can say over and over again that rape is a crime of violence not of desire, but that rarely resonates with our deepest intuitions and fears).

Of course, male sexual desire is not merely to be feared; it is also taught as a "tool" to be "used". Most young women are keenly aware of other young women who receive extraordinary privileges merely for their "desireability". By the time they hit college, many of my young women have heard (over and over again) that "looks shouldn't count" and "it's what's on the inside that matters." They also have already had plenty of experiences of male employers and teachers who offer subtle (and not so subtle) rewards and favors to those who are willing to "use" their desireability. At times, it seems as if making the conscious decision to attract and manipulate male sexual desire is the most empowering "choice" a young woman can make! Doing so can bring a variety of rewards; it can also bring condemnation. Both sexes in high school (and the community college) can be ruthless towards a young woman whose efforts to use her sexuality to gain advantage become too obvious!

Prostitution and pornography offer significant financial rewards to younger women. No 20 year-old woman can legitimately make as much money as she can through selling her body. I was told that my sympathy for Lara Roxx was misplaced; that she made her "choice" to appear in porn and now had to live with the consequences (namely HIV). But her choice was made in a world where satisfying male sexual desire was the most immediately lucrative professional decision that she could make. If men were not willing to pay for porn, Lara Roxx would not have HIV. That means that all those within our culture who produce or consume porn --and even those who merely condone it -- are complicit in her infection.

Most young women, thank heavens, will not become porn actresses. But many will choose subtler, less dramatic (and less lucrative) ways of complying with the demands of a culture of male desire. They will get breast implants. They will choose to wear miniskirts and halter tops to school, even if it means that they must endure sneers and leers. They will choose to diet obsessively. And yes (you knew I was going here) some will "choose" to have abortions because they live in a culture where men expect sexual satisfaction without the concomitant responsibility to raise a child. And though I have never been a woman, I'm pretty damn sure of one thing: none of those choices really feel very good.

I am not absolving my younger sisters of responsibility. But when we speak of "choices" we fail to acknowledge that women's bodies are, as Susan Bordo puts it, "politically inscribed entities, their physiology and morphology shaped by histories and practices of containment and control". Be it the corset or the miniskirt, the porn website or "The Swan", our culture has required and continues to require compliance with the imperious demands of male sexual desire. When women injure their bodies and their souls in "acts of compliance", it is ahistorical and cruel to dismiss them as victims of their own poor choices. And it is incumbent upon men in particular -- myself included -- to speak and act in ways that clearly and radically undercut this dominant cultural message about our sexuality and our spurious lack of self-control.

Whew. Rant over.

Comments

[Phyllis]

Rant on, my newfound friend. I can't tell you how much I respect you saying what you do. You get it, and it needs to be said. Thanks.

[maggi]

good stuff, hugo. Half of what we call 'choice' isn't choice at all - it's already 'chosen' for us by our context and our history. That's something for a Christian theology of guilt and forgiveness to get it's head around.

[Elizabeth]

wonderful, Hugo! Thanks for saying it. I agree with all, except for the short statement on abortion. But you already knew that.

[Mumcat]

(whistle, whistle, stomp, stomp, applause, applause)

Well said...er...ranted. Thanks for saying what a lot of men wouldn't even think about.

[Ophelia Benson]

"It is our common cultural sense that male sexual desire is the great and omnipresent threat to women's physical and emotional safety; it is our commone cultural sense that it is women's responsibility to protect themselves from what at least some men will never be willing or able to control."

But there's another aspect to this too, even beyond what you say about manipulation. It's one I've been puzzling over and sometimes fuming over (and, yea verily, ranting about) for some years now. What to call it? It's another kind of social pressure, groupthink, conformist coercion: the one that considers it 'sex negative' to think of desire as in any way a threat. The one that considers it a necessary and intrinsic part of feminism to claim that women are just as desirous and lust-driven and sex-obsessed as men are and a good thing too; that it's only socialization and repression that has obscured that fact for so long, that women are not Victorian angels but wild sexy beasts, so hey, if men are leering, women can and should just leer right back, and everybody's happy.

Yeah right.

That's called, I believe, 'Sex-positive feminism', which among other things carries the interesting (and subtly coercive) implication that any feminism that thinks it's nonsense and harmful nonsense at that is 'Sex-negative' i.e. prudish and dreary and repressed and Victorian and frigid and boring and keen to say No to everything.

Yeah right.

So it's arguably more difficult for feminists to resist the hyper-sexualization of women than it was, say, twenty or thirty years ago, at the height of Second Wave feminism. This is unfortunate.

[Jennifer]

Yeah, women also have a choice when it comes to thrusting their breasts in a man's face so they can get a drink free at a bar. I know I'm going to sound like a totally radical anti-feminist, but I think half the crap that happens to women is brought on by stupid things they do.

[Tim]

Rant on Hugo! I think men have been structuring society for our benefit since the fall. It is too easy to blame women for their choices, when the reality is that we have set them up.

[Serena]

On the other hand, as far as clothing goes, is there not an element of it genuinely being choice? I mean, I know that I do sometimes dress to "use" desireability. But I also wouldn't say that if something dreadful happened to a girl wearing a miniskirt that she was "asking for it". Sometimes clothing - in all sorts of styles - can be meant unprovocatively, just as self-expression.

But I do agree with the broader scope of your argument, and I'm glad somebody said it because there's so much which is worryingly true.

[Jonathan Dresner]

OK, a public sphere without sexual threat, coercion or manipulation. Exposure or coverage without benefit or detriment. Absolute sexual neutrality in public; total freedom for informed mutual consent in private. This is what you're aiming for, isn't it? I'm with you all the way. Shall we give it a name? Sexual secularism?

[Hugo]

Oh Jonathan, you do know how to tweak me, don't you?

Thanks everyone. Ophelia, I take to heart what you wrote about the astonishing rise of "sex-positive feminism" (Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, and so forth). The "fight fire with fire" mentality has been allowed a high degree of credibility, perhaps largely because it only asks WOMEN to make substantive changes in their own lives, not men.

[Jonathan Dresner]

Tweaking aside (yes, it was, I admit it, but the parallelism in the arguments is too good to just ignore completely), one of the things I think has been missing from the discussion is a sense of the direction in which this movement is pushing: what is the endgame, and how will we know if we are winning?

For example, I have never heard a colleague (male or female) comment on a students' (male or female) attractiveness or lack thereof. Surely this represents progress, even if only within the oddities of academia. (on the other hand, I just heard of a colleague who recently married a student; I know, it may or may not be problematic, but it's still questionable.) But ratemyprof.com includes a checkbox for "hot" profs.

What are we trying to accomplish?

[Dave]

If this is all true and I believe it is why do so many young women prefer jerks to responsible men. Don't they cause many of their own problems by bad choices? We know, by observation, that they are powerfully attracted to thugs.

[mythago]

"We" do? Or is this another "I'm a nice guy and I don't get girls so clearly girls like jerks" thing?

Ophelia, that's an interesting way to mischaracterize 'sex-positive' feminism. Do you not see that you are doing exactly the kind of bad paraphrasing you accuse 'sex-positive feminists' of doing to you? Or is it only OK when you do it?

Every improvement in women's status is going to have a side effect that may not be wonderful. Insisting that women should have the right to earn their own living, for example, is going to mean that there are women who (before) would have had easier lives and less struggling by marrying wealthy men, but are now expected to work hard and pay their own way. So yes, there are going to be people who look at the feminist view that women (like men) are capable of lust, and leering, and being driven by their nether regions and take that to mean there is no such thing as a healthy "no" or sensible modesty.

The solution to that is not to snobbily pretend that'sex-positive feminists' prefer the world to look like an egalitarian Playboy Mansion, nor to take the old view of women as above all that beastly sex stuff. It's to directly challenge those who have always been sexist and used any removal of women's protected status as an excuse to attack them.

the astonishing rise of "sex-positive feminism" (Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, and so forth)

When did Camille Paglia become a feminist? Interesting how the real pioneers of "sex-positive feminism"--Susie Bright, Pat Califia, Candida Royale, Scarlet Harlot--get sort of pushed aside because they talk explicitly about the details of sex, and gosh knows we don't want that in the New York Times Book Review.