Sexssay

I have been reading a book by Catherine MacKinnon called Feminism Unmodified. It is the first feminist literature that has really made me think that perhaps my attitudes toward feminism are destructive, or at least passive in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It has convinced me solidarity, or a sisterhood of sorts, is important. I used to feel that how every woman constructs her sense of personhood, their sense of their own identity and her claim to dignity and respect from others is personal and private process. I am not sure if I feel this way anymore. I think that this is how it should be, but I am no longer sure if to just plunge ahead and live your life with no thought to how the world actually is, to how it has been, is the right thing to do.

I got to thinking about this because I was thinking about whether sex is a private or public thing, or both, and if it is both, how it works. On a personal level, I was wondering how it is that I can role play, and submit, and get to a place that is impossible for me to get to in a non sexual context because it would be harmful to my sense of self and downright degrading. I would never allow myself to be slapped or spanked or bitten or bound. I would have to be coerced. But if I put it away in a box labeled SEX in my brain, an entirely different set of feelings is provoked by those kinds of acts. Great feelings. So that exists. I exist and I do these things and feel the way I feel about them. I am one woman. There are others like me, and there are many more that are not like me. What we do in bed is really a private thing, and individual thing.

So, there’s that. But I also think that there are important connections between sex and dignity, sex and respect, sex and identity, sex and economics, sex and entertainment… and that these connections exist in a more direct way for women. I say this because there are far more women in sex work than men and because there are sluts and ho’s and the equivalent term for men either doesn’t exist or comes with a different set of baggage. I say this because the personal and individual act of sex speaks to a women’s sense of self respect, and respect from her partner, to her sense of dignity, to her identity in a pretty important way.

There are a mess of issues brought to mind by thinking about sex in this more public and general way. One, that if the connection between sex and all of those other things is more direct for women, they should have power over themselves as workers, over labels or what those labels mean, and over the relationship between sex and dignity and sex and respect. The problem is that they don’t. We don’t. Second, if we don’t have power and if sex is really connected to all of these things, than it is very difficult and very much not a given that women have control over or access to the process of self determination, or the construction of the self. This is not purely because of sex, maybe because of gender, but mostly it pokes holes in my thinking that sex can have its own little box and I can do what I want there and it doesn’t affect anything. Third, and this is a problem that I haven’t quite figured out how to communicate, has to do with the fact that the social world we all participate in changes us and affects how we perceive ourselves and so how we construct that self. Dignity and respect, for example, are not entirely individually determined things, and if sex is linked to them, then there is a public aspect to it as well.

So, as a woman, and an individual, is it problematic for me to think of my sexual activities the way that I do? It’s not as though what I put in one box ever really stays there and don’t inform other aspects of my life. Maybe that is what makes me nervous. I wonder what other people think. I'd like to know.

I have some other questions. Like, for instance, is it inconsistent of me to be grossed out by the Camp Bud advertising campaign but not by a strip club? This weekend, the Russian, his friend Pt from NYC, JL, and I went to a strip club and I was not uncomfortable in the least. I was actually thinking how much fun it would be to have a strip club, run in a non hierarchical way. Your game face would be a smile, because it would be fun to work there, not a pout or whatever it is that the strippers were doing while they were dancing (it was very poorly lit, so it was hard to even make out what they looked like). The Camp Bud advertisement, on the other hand, gives me the willies. The Russian says they both commodify women and women’s sexuality, which is true, but I feel as though there is something disingenuous about the Bud campaign. Obviously, it’s advertising, which is just that... It’s just that women in sex work are selling sex. They use their bodies to sell…their bodies. I guess that is what models do too, and yet, I feel as though a stripper knows what she is selling and the Camp Bud girl might not have gone into modeling thinking she was going to be rubbing herself against a sweating beer bottle. Or that she would be taking part in a subtle and pervasive system of using women’s bodies and sexuality to convince men that they can have access to those bodies if they drink enough Budweiser. Of the million and one problems that I see with that, one is that it removes the woman in question of any autonomy. It seems to say to the men that it is geared towards, this beer will give you permission, just in case you thought you might need it, to touch any titties you want, to access this woman in a red mini skirt or more frightening, any woman. That is what Bud can do for you. I am not saying that men don’t have access to women in strip clubs, or that it is the stripper who gets the majority of the money for that access and that that inequality is okay, but just that the transaction is straightforward, and I am much more comfortable with that.

Just for fun, and to mess up everything I've been talking about by posting a sexy photo:


And because Bby suggested I write a sex blog.