Last night, I was hanging out with a group of my friends and one of them was writing a psychology paper about female power in the bedroom. She was frustrated because it had to be 5 pages long and she only had 3... Her dilemma was that she couldn't think of ways women express their sexuality. Of course I showed up right when she was erring her grievances, and another one of my friends chimed in with, "oh, you should ask her, she's really into this kind of thing," so when she asked me I posed the question to the entire room. Here were some of their responses in regards to female sexuality: "Dancing, clothes, lingerie, body language, music, porn". The thoughts trailed off after this, and so I asked how they thought they expressed their own sexuality. I mostly received the same responses as the previous ones, and some of my friends didn't answer at all.Then they turned the table back on me... I said, "I'm still trying to figure that out..." They all got a pretty good laugh about that because they assumed I was making a gay joke, but when I told them that it was because I've realized sexuality in most cases has been structured around the idea of women being subjected to men and what men desire, they stopped laughing.
It was actually a pretty amazing thing to witness, watching the wheels in their brains turning as they were trying to contemplate what I had just said. I don't think many of them had ever thought about it in that way. The conversation ended with my friend gesturing the computer toward me, and saying, "you want to write the rest?"
This got me thinking more about the ways women would express their sexuality though if pressure from society wasn't constantly influencing us to behave or act a certain way. Would more women be apt to grow their leg/armpit hairs out? Perhaps. Maybe bras wouldn't even exist! Maybe the biggest form of socialization wouldn't involve "the bar scene/the party/the dance floor". Maybe everywhere would be a place for self-expression, and it wouldn't be about how our bodies looked in relation to someone else or for someone else.
How do you all think we express our sexuality, or would express/should express it?
You're right - that is hard to imagine. Like you, the best I can come up with is that women would be free to, frankly, do whatever they damn well please. That is, if they wanted to grow their leg and under-arm hair out, they would! However, I would also hope that if women were free to express their sexuality, acts of rape and other forms of sexual abuse wouldn't be so pervasive in our society and in the media (a topic I will come back to in another post).
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