Lesson Six
What's the first word to come into your head when you think about feminism? My guess is that it's not sexuality, ‘cause for some reason feminism has (for many) come to be seen as the most un-sexy thing around. The truth of the matter is that feminism is all about sex and aims to make it as spicy (or as sweet) as you want it.
In fact, feminism has always been about sex, beginning with the advent of the birth control pill , which paved the way for sexual revolution in the 1960-70s . Unfortunately, it didn't transform sex into an equal partnership the way some feminists expected, but it did make sure the ladies were seeing a lot more action. Leaders in the feminist movement realizing that ‘ free love ' didn't really revolutionize things for women at all. Girls and women were having more sex, but it was the juicy, empowering sex that women had envisioned for themselves. Everyone from psychoanalysts to medical doctors were still claiming that the only real orgasm was from vaginal intercourse and any woman whose earth didn't shake from the old in-and-out routine was just plain “frigid.”
Even today, people still try to avoid a discussion of a female orgasm by trotting out the ol' nature/biology argument that says sex is for reproduction and women don't need to orgasm to get preggers. I think that we can all agree that that argument is getting pretty weak in this age of myriad contraception, not to mention the growing trend of entirely artificial conception. So, especially today, sex for babies is sort of become a tangent—for the vast majority of women and men, sex is for something other than kiddies. But even knowing that babies are often not the end result of sex, there's still this really fuzzy logic in our society that jumps from sex to babies to what's considered “natural” to compulsive heterosexuality . And society definitely has some pretty strong ideas about what's natural: man + woman = great, any other equation, not so much. As feminists, it's interesting to figure out why heterosexuality is still not only the norm, but the mandate—it's everywhere, all the time, but why?
When we think about our true sex education (and I'm not talking about those cheesy movies we watched in gym class) I think we can agree that most of our knowledge comes from the silver screen and the boob tube. We learn that women are alluring yet passive, and men are assertive and strong, a message that should sound start to be sounding a bit too familiar. We also learn what happens to women who usurp the “men's role” and are sexually predatory in any way (think: Fatal Attraction or Basic Instinct), namely that she gets what's coming to her, and it ain't pretty. We learn important lessons about how to behave sexually as men and women, and the more that anyone is seen to deviate from these scripts, the more deviant you are seen to be. So sexuality is seen as something ‘natural,' as if society has no impact upon it, and this is then used as the underpinning of compulsive heterosexuality—heterosexualit
The s exual double standard that keeps men hard and women hard up and it's alive and well today. From adolescence, boys are comfortable talking, joking and cajoling about masturbation, not to mention getting right down to it without a lot of guilt or worry, while girls remain mum about the subject. Men who sleep around? Studs. Women who sleep around? Sluts. All of this is why so many third wave feminists are reclaiming sexuality as an issue: they are tossing out those scripts that want girls and women to read the lines of the damsel in distress and instead are insisting that they get just as much action as the next guy. They are insisting that how sexual we are has about as much to do with gender as it does with breakfast cereal. Instead of being taught that boys have only one thing on their mind, we all need to acknowledge that virility really has absolutely nothing to do with being a man. In fact, many men are just as stifled by the restrictive social expectations put on them as women are. Until we are able to turn a critical eye toward stereotypical expectation of masculinity and femininity, neither women nor men will be truly free to act on genuine desire— either in or out of the bedroom .