Wonder women sex,
power and the quest for perfection by Debora L Spar
Debora Spar, the
current president of Barnard College, depicts the life of women through-out the
history and the current state of women in her wonderfully written book, ‘Wonder
women: sex, power and the quest for perfection’
Prior to the Renaissance, the very notion of
courtship made little sense. In most parts of the world, across time, religion
and political regime, women were viewed essentially as property - commodities
for their fathers to barter away and their husbands to use. Spread of
Augustinian Christianity across Western Europe quietly redefined the role women
played and the freedoms they might enjoy. Because Christian societies
increasingly say women as wives and mothers rather than property, and because
they placed such importance on procreative sex, the areas of the former Roman
Empire slowly began to cede greater rights to women. Lust in all its forms was
forcefully condemned. And women’s lust, seen as it was as the vestige of Eve’s
original sin, was particularly suspected. As a result, women living during the
long centuries of the middle Ages were free to love, but only chastely,
following the dictates of their husbands, their Church and their God.
During the Victorian era, it was a time when
men’s foremost responsibility in the sexual realm was to control their own
passions and when women were expected only to suffer quietly and bear children.
History records these sentiments most famously in Queen Victoria’s wedding
night advice to her daughter. “Lie back” she is said to have counseled the
young princess “and think of England”... The bargain, then, for Victorian women
was straightforward and rather sweet: sex in exchange for a lifetime commitment
of love.
This
connection between love and lust - between sexual intimacy and long-term
attachment - because a hallmark of social relations in the twentieth century,
shaping most American's basic conception of what it meant to want and woo and
marry.
Smart, confident, attractive and bold - are
hitting their teenage years with more expectations piled upon them than any
magic wand could ever dispel. to excel at school, at sports, in theater, be
original, be a leader, but stay popular, start an NGO and a blog, Have sex but
don't get pregnant and never go beyond those size 4 jeans. You supposed to do
all these things and no go insane.
One quarter of American girls are depressed,
twice as many girls as boys attempt suicide. It is important to be hot than
smarter. By the time they hit puberty, their self confidence is starting to
plummet.
Free to be by Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote: "We want fantasy without illusion; stories of excitement without cruelty or violence... a literature of human diversity that celebrates choice and does not exclude any child from its pleasures because of race or sex.."
The question, however, is whether this
freedom has come at a cost. Clearly, women today can engage in acts that would
have made their mothers blush. They can enjoy their bodies without shame and
have sex largely without fear of pregnancy. They face none of the stigmas that
paralyzed women in the past and suffer, accordingly from far fewer inhibitions.
In exchanging simply sex for sex, women are truly playing the same game as men
and often; it appears, with the same relish and abandon. “Just like tasting ice
cream flavors” one website promises, “sampling sex with a new guy is what being
young and single is all about”.
Yet unless women actually enjoy casual
sex as much as men do, and unless they are equally content with no-name,
no-commitment relationships, they are equally content with no-name,
no-commitment relationships, they still, in retro respect, may have struck a
deal that works against their own best interests, Because, crude though, it may
sound, women arguably had more leverage over men whom they had the ability and
inclination to deny them sex. Presumably, women had greater resources when
dating still involved a little bit of financial foreplay. So, what then, have
young women gained in their pursuit of liberty? And was it worth the price?
There
is no single book or film can truly be said to capture the sexual revolution in
its essence. Still, two books emerged during this period that seems to have
both bracketed the revolution and fomented it - two books that told women what
was now theirs to claim.
The first, Helen Gurley Brown’s ‘Sex and the
single Girl’, was published in 1962, right at the revolutions outset and one
year before Betty Friedan’s far more serious ‘The Feminine Mystique’. Rather
than bemoaning the status of women, brown embraced her readers with a perky
self-confidence, offering makeup tips, wardrobe advice, and recipes. In between
she also urged them to have sex - frequently on their terms and way before they
were married. “I think marriage is insurance for the worst years of your life.
During your best years you don’t need a husband. You do need a man of course
every step of the way, and they are often cheaper emotionally and a lot more
fun by the dozen. Sex is a wonderful delicious and even, if necessary, employed
against men”, she said.. This was sex as women’s power for the very first time
in print; sex that was truly revolutionary in its impact.
The second monumental voice of the sexual revolution was ‘Fear of Flying’ a novel that would eventually sell more than 18 million copies and captures the voice, or at least the guilty dreams, of an entire generation. In ‘Fear’, he fictional Isadora Wing famously describes her fantasy of the zipless fuck, an encounter that is both explicitly sexual and wholly impersonal. This particular fuck, author Erica Jong wrote, “Was more than a fuck. It was a platonic ideal. Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover”. From the perspective of 40 years, it is interesting to note that Wing is actually describing something not all different from the yearnings voice by her Victorian ancestors. Because it’s kissing, after all, and romance, and garments blown round like flowers. No, what really defined the zipless fuck and made Isadora’s fantasy so radical was that the relationship was shot and the man essentially anonymous. The unnamed soldier makes love to the young widow in the speeding train and then parts silently from her. Sex isn’t just about sex to Isadora, it’s about freedom. About passion, About choice, And it has nothing to do necessarily with either romance or commitment.
In the 70s, girls
wanted assurance from their lover before indulging in sexual affairs and the
Meat Loaf’s song, Paradise by Dashboard light portraits those lives succulently:
Do you love me ? Will you love me
forever?
Do you need me? Will you never leave me?
Will you make me so happy For the rest
of my life?
Will you take me away? And will you make
me your wife?
- Meat Loaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard
Light,”, 1977
Today kids as young as 12 and 13 are regularly
reported to be attending “rainbow parties (at which girls wearing different
shades of lipstick take turns performing oral sex on boys) or engaging more
directly in sexual behaviors that include oral sex. The old base system - a kiss
for first breast for second, groping for third and intercourse for home- has
rendered utterly obsolete, replaced by a shifting game whose rules are not
quite clear.
Meanwhile, the dating culture that persisted
from around the turn of the 20th century to its waning years seems almost to
have disappeared, replaced - for better or worse - by “hooking up”. Young men
in high school and college no longer ask young women out on dates. Couple doesn’t
go out or go steady”. Instead, boy meets girl at a party or frat house or bar
and takes her home (college apartment) for sex. Hook-up can be a kiss on the
lips o full-on sex. The most useful is the depiction presented in Andrea
Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler’s Hookup Handbook is the following:
Girl A sort of known Boy B (may be were in the
same Psych 101 class, have mutual friends)
Girl A goes to the bar with her friends, and boy
B goes out to the same bar with his friends.
Girl A stands in one corner on the bar, downs
cosmopolitans, screams the words to ‘like a Prayer’ at the top of her lungs and
pretends to ignore boy B.
Boy B stands in another corner of the bar and
chugs beer with his friends
When girl A finally gets enough courage (drunk
enough!), she approaches boy B and says, “Hey, what’s going on?”
When boy B finally realizes that girl A is the
best he’s going to do tonight, he answers, “Nothing’”
The two proceed to make out at the bar and then
go back to his place and ‘hook up’.
The hooking-up culture, by comparison, seems perfectly content to let boys be boys - esp. if they are well-muscled and tousle-haired and drive nice car. Men are hot’ rather than oppressive in hookup-land; desirable than despicable. In practice, though, it also means that women are no longer in a position to ask for anything but sex in exchange for sex - not marriage, not a date, not even a phone call the next morning. Women are as free as men to have sex simply for pleasure. No need to maintain a relationship in their busy academic life.
Rihanna’s famous
song, “Rude boy’ calls for casual sex:
Come here, rude boy, boy; can you get it up?
Come here rude boy, boy; is you big enough?
Take it, take it baby, baby
Take it, take it; love me, love me
Ultimately, the crux of the matter is whether
women truly enjoy the freedom that comes from uncommitted sex. And it is not
clear that they do. Instead, as Stepp reports in ‘Unhooked’, many of the women
who embrace he hookup culture for some period of time, later come to regret it.
Rather than feeling empowered by their conquests, they feel abandoned by the
men they thought might be their boyfriends. Rather than whisking blithely from
one affair to the next, they are waiting for call for last night's encounter to
call them back. Because, the hookup is so clearly not about commitment, though,
he rarely does. And the women are left, longing for something they swore they
did n’t want.
Girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl gets boy
back and lives happily ever after; the lines of this familiar plot gets twisted
into an infinity of permutations. Think of the past five happy movies that you
have seen or indeed of any of the great movies that end happily (e.g. When
Harry met Sally). Now think of five sad movies (e.g. love story, Titanic or
West side stories) They all involve broken marriages or widowed marriages or
tragic individuals who never marry at all. This correlation apparently runs
straight back to Shakespeare. Virtually all of his comedies end with marriage and
all of his tragedies end with the death of lovers who were foiled either in
romances or in marriage.
Marriage has never been easy. if it were, as
Katharine Hepburn once remarked, they wouldn’t make you sign a contract. It has
never been easy; presumably, to bind oneself to one person forever; to share
finances, meals, children, old stories and germs till death do you part. That’s
why we still sign contracts, why marriage remains a legal state as well as
personal one. Because, unlike wedding and sex, marriage is hard. It is hard to organize
a life with one person, day after day, for decades. Hard to be a good husband
or a good wife.
Today, women and men are grappling with an
evolving kaleidoscope of desires and expectation, many of which are wholly contradictory.
One place to start might be with the raft of self-help books devoted to these
issues. Heirs to the Good Wife’s guide, books such as Maintain a Keeper and becoming
the women of his dreams litter the shelves of American bookstores and features prominently
on bestseller list. In ‘The Proper Care and Feeding of husbands, for example,
Dr. laura Schlessinger perkily tells her readers to “forgive their husbands for
being men”. Women, Schlessinger scolds, are unhappy because they are
self-centered; because they are focusing on what ‘their men can do for them,
and not to what they can do for their men”. The simple remedy, therefore, is to
treat husbands better to “roll-over in bed, close your eyes, give him a big hug
and remember that without him, you are only a sorry excuse for a person”.
Similarly, in ‘The Surrendered Wife’, author
Laura Doyle advises her readers to relinquish any effort to control their
husbands and to focus instead on becoming vulnerable, trusting, respectful, and
grateful. Remember she writes, to” respect the man you married by listening to
him. Give up control to have more power,, Abandon the myth of equality. Say yes
to sex. let him solve your problems”
Schlessinger is explicit in her accusations,
claiming that women’s unhappiness is a ‘result of the women's movement, with
its condemnation of just about everything makes as evil, stupid and
oppressive”.
So what, then are we to do? Is there any way of
redressing the domestic contradictions that feminism has wrought?
One obvious possibility be to give up on men, at
least in the form husband's.
A second option would be to give up children.
This quietly is an option that many successful women have adopted.
the 3rd option is return to the home.
At first step, let me suggest that the quest for perfection simply must end. Clearly, as humans, we have a desire to be better. But women of the post feminist years have taken this quest to the brink, truly of madness.
Remember emotional
song of Britney Spears where the girl is looking back the real love after the
long tiring hook-up affairs:
I must confess that my loneliness
Is killing me now
Don't you know I still believe
That you will be here and give me a sign
Hit me, baby, one more time
Is killing me now
Don't you know I still believe
That you will be here and give me a sign
Hit me, baby, one more time
