Everyone Else Likes Sex Too
17 November 2005
I agree that all these books about women and all the sex they are having is kind of wack. Without getting all meta-feminist about it, the idea of women’s empowerment seems kind of watered down lately.
If you, as a woman, make your own choices and define your own sexuality on your own terms, you’re all empowered. Of course, if you, as a woman, act in a self-destructive manner, make unwise choices, or adopt the entire buffet of male-dominant, frat-boy, corporate degradation as your modus operandi, you’re STILL empowered. Essentially, anything a woman does without being forced at gunpoint is “empowering”.
“I refuse to accept the roles society has set for me as a woman by making my own choices about my identity, my career choices, and my personal social relationships. I’m empowered!”
“I choose to be a stripper and reverse the course of the dominance and oppression of the male gaze by owning my own sexuality. I also subvert the role of capitalism in the commodification of sex by making lots of dough. I have a vibrator. I’m empowered!”
“I chose to work all day perpetuating wealth inequity at an investment bank, and then go out to bars wearing a t-shirt that questions the intelligence of other women, get drunk and act exactly how Maxim magazine has conditioned all these overpaid office workers to expect a woman to act, and then give one of them a blowjob in the restroom. I’m empowered!”
I’ll buy the first one, in the classic feminist sense, and I’ll even buy the second one, in a Second-Wave, “the sistahs are doing it for themselves” kind of way. But you see my point. There appears to be an unlimited supply of women, at least in midtown Manhattan, the cultural home of ‘Sex & the City’, for whom any act whatsoever, from marriage to buying a box of envelopes at the drug store, qualifies as a bold, kick-ass blow against the patriarchy. Girls rule! I’ll take three of these $4 cups of coffee, please. Take THAT, oppressors!
I guess this kind of griping is more of a critique of consumerism and its ability to absorb and cheapen any expression of the human condition (see also: feminism, songs about heroin, punk rock, war, etc.). Or maybe I am just crabby.
Posted by Bears Will Attack
Entry Filed under: apathy, it's not just me, zzz_posted by bwa. .
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1.
Anonymous | 18 November 2005 at 7:59 pm
i don’t know if owning a vibrator makes me feel empowered, but it DEFinitely makes me feel good.
sherm
ps. yours is my favorite post-feminist-feminist-male rant of the week. YaY, YaY, B-W-A!
2.
Anonymous-B | 1 December 2008 at 8:19 pm
It’s interesting to find that there is someone to write about literally any subject, whether they are an expert or a novice who simply wants an excuse to piss and moan about a situation that they have very little real power to change on their own.
If you want to change the perspective of people whom you find offensive, it’s usually a good idea to not be offensive, because that gets nothing done, at least nothing positive, at any rate.
No matter what the subject matter, a general rule of thumb which may indeed be hackneyed, but still seems to hold true is, you draw more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.
At the age of 50, I don’t find the pursuit of sex all that much glamorous anymore, and since I’ve relaxed because of that fact, I find it much easier to talk to women as people in a normal conversational context.
If sex happens at some point, fine.. if it doesn’t, fine. I’m not looking for it every time I set out to talk to someone of the opposite sex.
Maybe because my testosterone has ’settled down’, I’ve been able to ‘re-calibrate’ my priorities in life and have realized that some goals just aren’t worth all that useless anxiety.
I guess this is my way of letting you know that not all of us guys are selfish jerks. Some of us do think that there is more to life than what’s in our underwear..
Peace..