That's patriarchy: how female sexual liberation led to male sexual entitlement

[flamingdem]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/thats-patriarchy-how-female-sexual-liberation-led-to-male-sexual-entitlement

-- snip

For feminists who survived those generations, it must seem extraordinary to have battled at such risk for liberation to hear younger women discuss sexual contracts, a desire for boundaries, a wish not to be sexualised by men in their lives. Given the emergence of their generation from socially-enforced cocoons of sexual repression, where actual laws existed to culturally erase women’s sexuality, it must look like regress to older women.

But what has happened in the intervening decades is that sexual freedom has become another realm of women’s experience for patriarchy to conquer. As soon as older feminists had won sexual liberation, patriarchy reframed it as sexual availability for men. Writer David Quinn was actually having a pop at #MeToo feminism in The Times when he stumbled onto an eloquent truth: “The only sexual rule today is ‘consent’, and men have been taught that women are potentially always sexually available because that is what ‘liberation’ means.”

Where once the patriarchal structures of cultural production were censorious of women’s sexuality in film, art, literature, now the depiction of it is hypersexualised and explicit – but the structures of production remain just as patriarchal.

The flipside to the destigmatisation of sex for women has been a sense of patriarchal entitlement to sex with women, which is why the painful conversation about consent in our new era of “freedom” must be confronted. One in 10 women, as opposed to one in 70 men, report they’ve been coerced into sex, the vast majority by an intimate partner.

Those doubting the assumptions informing the delicate and dangerous reality of the new sexual era need only read the studies quoted in Lili Loofbourow’s recent chilling analysis in The Week: the price of male pleasure is indeed the value of female pain.

And ubiquitous female sexualisation has manifested a reality in which young women find themselves in unwittingly sexualised situations all the time. Young women are right to feel that destigmatised sex has enhanced their traditional patriarchal status as sex objects, not liberated them from it.

[lapfog_1]

1. "patriarchy reframed it as sexual availability for men"

no... I think the casting couch vastly pre-dates female sexual liberation.

[mr_lebowski]

2. If 1 in 10 'report' it ... probably more like 1 in 2 have actually experienced it ... just sayin'

Depends largely how you define 'coercion' though. But 1/10 is even lower than the number who've reported being sexually assaulted in their lives, which should ABSOLUTELY be part of the % calculated as 'coerced', IMHO ... thus making it basically impossible for 1/10 to be an accurate number.

Also, a LOT more than 1 of 70 men have been coerced into sex as well, but we're neither biologically nor socially 'programmed' into experiencing a female (or obviously a male in some cases) insisting on sex at a time when WE don't feel like it ... as some sort of a 'negative' thing on her part.

We're pretty much taught that we're to be sexual machines always in a state of desire, and that if WE don't 'put out' on demand, that there's something wrong with US.

We must need some testosterone therapy, or viagra, or something. Or maybe we're 'secret homos' if we don't drop trow and perform at our partners request. Or ... we just don't love you anymore so it's time to move on.

Some women can actually be pretty amazingly hypocritical when the shoe gets onto the other foot, lemme tell ya.

[Voltaire2]

3. well that is pretty much nonsense.

For example, prior to "female sexual liberation", in many states a married woman could not be raped by her husband, The criminalization of marital rape started in the 1970s and was a direct result of the dreaded "women's lib".

Patriarchal entitlement us where we started from. Women were literally property.

[lostnfound]

4. Absurd. Did boorish behavior start in the 60s??? NO. Stigmatizing women is NOT HELPFUL.

The worst patriarchal institutions and abuses are FOUNDED on stigmatizing sex for women. Like the Magdalene laundries. Like honor killings. Like “what was she wearing?” excuses for rapists. Like women forced to go into hiding and give their babies up for adoption. Like burkas.

Sex is normal, natural, and positive.

It’s not “freedom”. It’s freedom — unabashed, don’t go back, don’t put it in quotes, don’t put our granddaughters back into boxes of shame and descriptors and paranoia about “being loose women” or feeling unworthy. Whole human beings.