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April 12, 2005
Hating Women -- are we are own biggest problem?
One of the nice side benefits of the recent road trip we took with Siobhan is actually being in a car and then a hotel room for 3 days. She brought her favorite CDs and Eric and I got a chance to sample much of the music she likes.
Friday night, Eric had already fallen asleep and Siobhan and I were watching Comedy Central and chatting. The show broke for commercials and the ad was for "Girls Gone Wild" .... part 12 or 30, I don't remember. But suddenly I'm sitting there with my teenaged daughter watching clips of girls not much older than her waving their [blurred out] boobs at the camera under the rather salacious narrative of a guy who sounds like he's a barker infront of a Nevada brothel. These girls aren't actresses or models or anything other than college students who somehow feel it necessary flop 'em out. And that's the most "innocent" of the clips that move on to girl-on-girl soft porn.
Siobhan and I looked at each other and she rolled her eyes and sighed, "Well, some of them were probably drunk, but most of them probably just hate themselves."
That came back to me Monday as I was listening to Dennis Prager's show and his conversation with Shmuley Boteach. Shmuley has a new book out, "Hating Women: America's Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex", and they were talking about the book in the context of feminism, and male and female sexual natures. Shmuley pointed out the "death" of feminism with the dearth of female self-respect that results in increasing numbers of women willing to accept what can be only described as misogynist behavior directed at them. Dennis made the point that it isn't the death of feminism, per se, but the logical result of the dominant branch of feminism that went beyond equal opportunity to stating that there are no differences between men and women. Thus, women, presented with the male as template and a philosophy that she should be exactly like him, have become men in some of their own basest sexual nature - exhibitionist, predatory, promiscuous.
And they are enjoying it less.
To pick up on another Shmuley example: for those of us who came of age during the height of the "Woman's Movement," one of the archetypes that women fought against was the distant husband/lover. He was the guy who went to work, patted her on the head then put most of his emotional investment in bonding with "the boys." Cards, bowling, guys' night out, football weekends, etc., the "boys" would get their emotional intimacy from each other..oogling magazines, complaining about women. And what do we find today? Women who have turned that stereotype on its head. Women who are married, who are sexually attracted to men, but whose intimate emotional fulfillment comes from their girlfriends.
The "Sexual Revolution" I lived through was about empowering women to make decisions about themselves and their relationships. It was about male/female relationships moving into one of a mutual partnership with emotional intimacy. It was not about becoming female lotharios or whores.
What have we, as women, gained in the 'hooking up' culture? Is it that much of a honor that we can prove ourselves the "equal" of men in anonymous sex, STD's, vulgarity, manipulation and treating lovers badly?
We are told to "Say no!" to any "religious freak" who might express misgivings about abortion as birthcontrol, but we can't say "no" to sexual encounters that are degrading?
Personally, I'd like to interview some of those girls on the video along with the girls who told the guy filming the boobfest "No."
I think the level of self-respect between the two groups would be quite evident.
Posted by Darleen at April 12, 2005 12:28 PM
Comments
I have never met a woman, and you know the company I keep, who was not completely disgusted with the idea of abortion as birth control. I have met plenty of women who think that restricting access to birth control, restricting speech about birth control, condemning condom use in Africa, (home of the AIDS pandemic), or withholding funds for family-planning to international aide organizations is outrageous, unjust, shameful, and misogynistic, because until woman can control their reproductive health- there is no freedom for women.
Posted by: Mieke at April 12, 2005 04:29 PM
Mieke:
YAWN. How very off topic.
Posted by: julie at April 12, 2005 06:27 PM
Mieke
You miss both the general point my whole post was making and what I tried specifically to say with regard to the messages we ARE getting about "our bodies."
Over 90% of abortions are first trimester. I DO NOT want to criminalize them. Period.
But I do NOT pretend that the majority of these abortions are anything but for convenience, for birth control. Why is that so flippin' hard for us women to admit?
We can and do control our reproductive health. But we've lost our way on taking responsibility for our own behavior.
We are NOT males and we only hurt ourselves by taking the perverse position that we are.
Posted by: Darleen at April 12, 2005 06:29 PM
I don't think it's about controling reproductive health but not taking responsibilty for our actions, to me, those things go hand in hand. You can bet those girls in the video are not taking control of their reproductive health if they are treating themselves with such disrespect. I blame it on shitty parenting.
With regard to the majority of abortions being for convenience, to control whether or not these women give birth you are right; which is why I bring up birth control, open dialogue, and easy access to conversation about aspects of sexuality, because most parents, really mothers, don't sit down with their daughters, the way that mine did, and discuss their feelings about love, love-making, birth control, abortion, etc... My mother had an abortion before they were legal, and she told me all of the details about what led up to it, the abortion itself, and the aftermath. It was a great lesson for me about what I didn't want to happen. She also told me that she didn't want me to have sex for a long time, but if I decided that I was going to, she would take me to her ob/gyn no questions asked. She held to her promise and when I came to her at the end of high school with a desire to go to the doctor, she took me without comment. None of my friends in high school had this conversation with their mothers (most were Catholic and had rigid views on the whole topic), as a result more than 2/3 did get pregnant and ultimately have abortions. Not me. I was fanatical about birth control and how I wanted/deserved to be to be treated. The lessons about self-worth came not only from my mother, but from my father. He told me the nitty gritty about what went through boys' minds and what they wanted and what they would say to get it. Both of my parents worked hard to reinforce my self-worth and guide me to establish boundries we could all feel good about.
This same conversation applied to alcohol use. They told me they did not want me to drink, told me the many consequences of drinking in a party situation, and made me a promise that if I was ever in a place where my judgment was impared or that I feared my driver's judgment was impared all I had to was call and they would come and get me, no questions asked. Once I got my license, I found the best excuse not to deal with peer pressure to drink was by ALWAYS volunteering to be the designated driver - there was valor in that.
The moral of my story is that children who have parents who talk to their children about the consequences all fo these choices and who also allow for the possibility that their children will defy their best wishes, will find they have children who have a strong moral compass and who have been empowered to make educated and wise choices. That's how it worked in my family and it's how I plan on raising my boys. There will be no topic off-limits in this family. Any and all questions will be anwered.
Posted by: Mieke at April 12, 2005 10:18 PM
Nah, they're just acting like adolescents. You know, less sense than God gave a kumquat.
"I'm young. I'm healthy. I'm a fun ****."
It's why we have parents, to keep those pre-adult twits from getting themselves killed. They make it to 25 they'll settle down.
Proposition: Sex is not about procreation. Procreation is only one possible result of sexual activity. Sex is about sex. People don't have sex expecting to have children, people have sex expecting to have sex.
To quote from Westside Story, "Smoke on your pipe and put that in."
Posted by: Alan Kellogg at April 12, 2005 11:13 PM
Mieke
2/3 of your friends got pregnant?????
Frankly, I'm having trouble with the math or the friends you hung with.
Back in the bad old days when I was growing that where supposedly no parent talked to their kids, I remember only 2...TWO girls in my high school class that got pregnant before the end of high school.
That's because not only did our parents talk to us but there was still a societal culture that frowned on kids being so irresponsible they'd take the chance on pregnancy.
Did kids still have sex? Some did, but it was totally different from today ... the kids having sex were the steady couples. Today kids have had MULTIPLE partners and that is so bad healthwise, for girls particularly, without even going into the issue of pregnancy.
I think this is why there is a "parent gap" vis a vis Bush/Kerry voters. Bush polled parents of minor children upwards of 20 points...because of cultural issues as I'm addressing here.
It's not always a matter of "shitty parenting" that has college girls acting like low-rent porn stars but a combo of being out of their own for the first time and a peer culture that has taken the basic male approach to sex as its default position ... mainly sex as separate and unconnected to love, affection, commitment, and/or caring for the other person.
Posted by: Darleen at April 13, 2005 06:10 AM
But Alan - that's what sex does: make babies.
The development of fairly reliable contraception has gulled the public into forgetting this fact, to the eventual dismay of a lot of people. Don't argue with biological reality would be my advice. Don't want a baby? Don't have sex.
Posted by: Sal at April 13, 2005 08:02 AM
YOu might only remember two girls getting pregnant but how many others did and had abortions so you never knew?
I am not making that number up - it may have been slightly, but just slightly less. In my little group in well-educated upper middle-class Westchester County, NY (where most of our parents also got divorced just as we were entering the sixth or seventh grade) the parents were just not around. They were very busy with their work and their newly single lives, which I think contributed greatly to the need to have sex and create a "psuedo-family" or a sense of belonging with someone. While I came from a broken-home, I had terrific parents when it came to communication about all the hard topics. The girls I can think of within my clique who didn't get pregnant either had very involved parents, took the time to educate themselves, or were virgins until graduation.
You are right about the diff between now and then. We were in steady relationships and not screwing multiple partners or jumping into bed casually.
Because we, kids, raised each other, and had a lot of freedom, by the time we got to college almost none of us were drinking and if we were it was not the binge drinking. I got out of the dorm as soon as I could for that very reason. I couldn't relate to this sheltered fools who drank until they puked in their beds and ran naked through the halls. It just wasn't my thing.
And Sal, I have two babies, I DON'T want any more but I do want to continue to have sex with my husband over the next thirty-years. There are plenty of methods of birth control that are 99.9% effective when used correctly. "Don't want a baby? Don't have sex." is just the kind of inane advise people don't need to hear. We need to be well-informed and given ample choices and access to birth control. Simplistic slogans never work. Look at the "just say no" campaign. It didn't work at all.
Posted by: Mieke at April 13, 2005 09:32 AM