A girl called me a whore once in high school after I kissed a boy she also liked at a school assembly. She wasn’t happy about it, so she called me by the only name she thought would be the most poignant. Bitch. It might have been an insult a generation earlier, but it was 1993 and being a whore had gotten pretty chic for some of us.
Fourteen years and dozens of sexual conquests later, I am a strong advocate of Sex Positive Feminism or ‘Stiletto Feminism’, a movement that was born out of the turbulent social and sexual upheavals of the 1960s that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s. as a backlash. against the conservative movement that strives to put limits on what women can and cannot do sexually. Broken down into its core component, the message of sex positive feminism is that a woman’s sexuality can and should be used not only for her pleasure but also for her benefit if necessary.
The Media Mirrors Society
A 2000 article in Weather with the cast of Sex and the city drew positive attention to this phenomenon, as did an episode of The west wing. The August 2000 issue of George The magazine also featured it, calling it a “new kind of feminism.” She described the “stiletto feminist” as the woman who “embraces expressions of sexuality that enhance women’s freedom rather than undermine it.” Dr Susan Hopkins, a professor at the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland, wrote a cultural analysis of the contemporary archetype of the stiletto feminist in popular culture in her book Heroes girls. Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt tackled the issue head-on in their wildly popular book The Ethical Whore: A Guide to Infinite Sex Possibilities To be fair, the movement was criticized in a book titled Chauvinistic female pigs: women and the rise of libertine culture. They are all excellent readings that provide different perspectives on sex positive feminism.
And those of us who have embraced the principles of this, knowingly or unknowingly, have apparently been smart about it. At the same time, HBO’s Sex and the city was becoming a phenomenon, sexually provocative pop stars were burning up the radio airwaves, and virginity was becoming an afterthought, a funny thing happened: Unplanned teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates dropped by general. You can credit excellent parenting, good government policy, effective Trojan ad campaigns, or the fact that women were (finally) in charge of their own poonannies by the positive stats, but one thing was for sure: the women knew what they were. at stake with her freedoms and she wasn’t going to spoil it like a nervous, clumsy girl in love with her high school’s star quarterback.
A generation of young women (I dare say two generations because this movement started in the 1960s) have found the courage to do what men have been doing forever: have sex with wantonness. After all, Ernest Hemingway famously said: “What is moral is what you feel good afterwards and what is immoral is what you feel bad afterwards.” And I’m here to tell you that it feels good.
How society betrays us
But that still doesn’t soften the blows other women inflict on us if we are too sexual. Just as many of us have a new freedom and confidence, our sisters seek to bring us down, undermine our sexuality through guilt and shame. You know the game, right? If a woman walks into a room as if she owns the place, perhaps dressed provocatively, our first thought is ‘whore!’ We may even secretly envy her, but she is a tough competition for the attention of the men in the room. And we can’t outwardly admire it for that, so we’ve made ourselves feel better by putting a scarlet letter on it.
And that attitude is not exempt from evolutionary and generational causes. Women have been taught since the dawn of recorded history that our sexuality is a commodity that can be negotiated and exchanged for security within marriage. If some women throw those rules out the window, by reasoning, they cheapen the offer. Men will be less likely to provide security for women if they can get what they want for free elsewhere, or so we have been taught. So women, based on something ingrained in their minds by social norms, will naturally attempt to counter what they see as the devaluation of their ‘product’ by undermining sexually secure women.
Of course, it is not only women who condemn the sexuality of other women. In male-dominated societies, female sexuality has always been feared. One of the earliest myths of Judaism is that of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who was banished from the Garden of Eden for being at the top in a sexual encounter with Adam. Notice that the sin was not the sex itself, but rather that the woman was above the man instead of under him. Today theories persist that the forbidden fruit with which Eve tempted Adam was actually a metaphor for having sex for reasons other than procreation. One of the first laws in recorded history calls for the stoning to death of any woman who has had sex with more than one man.
Also consider some of the double standards our daughters are subjected to. Men who sleep with a variety of women, moving from one conquest to the next, are often admired, while women who have the same behavior are considered prostitutes. Rape victims are sometimes blamed for their own assaults because of the way they were dressed, which obviously means they were asking for it. Many insurance plans cover Viagra but not the contraceptive pill. Some pharmacies refuse to abide by the prescriptions of the contraceptive pill unless the woman can prove that she is married. And on the subject of the pill, a controversy brewing in England at the moment is whether adolescent girls should have access to it without a prescription while, at the same time, adolescent boys have been shopping for unhindered condoms for years.
A history of female sexual freedom
What are the roots of this new “piggy” movement? Well, how far do you want to go back? Historically, in many societies, when a woman’s economic situation improves, so does her sex life. It is logical, right? When women are not educated and dependent on men, they are less likely to experiment sexually for fear of being branded as whores. And indeed, for the many women who sought such pleasures of the flesh in times past and were discovered, the repercussions were devastating. No money, no education, no job skills, and no prospect of marriage. The psychologist Dr. David Ley, in his fascinating book Insatiable wives: lost women and men who love them posits that the traditional roles of men and women have always been dictated by economics and given a level playing field in that regard, women and men would not be so different in their pursuit of carnal affairs.
Ley explains that female sexual freedom throughout the history of the world is directly related to the economic independence enjoyed by women in a given society. Among the Inuit, where women have sexual freedoms comparable to those of the men in their society, women traditionally oversee the family economy. The government of ancient Sparta, where women were allowed to own land, wrote laws that protected the sexual freedom of women. Among Islamic culture in 19th century Morocco, wealthy women often engaged in blatant affairs, protected from the wrath of their husband by the fact that the family wealth was in the wife’s name, inherited from her family. . In 18th and 19th century Italy, women had a Cicisbeo gold Cavalier Servente, a mistress and servant who had “privileged” access to her.
In today’s Western world, as the economic status of women has increased, so have rates of female infidelity and, not coincidentally, the attention to female sexual satisfaction within heterosexual relationships. (translation: boys try so much harder to make us happy in the bedroom).
A book that addresses the practical application of positive feminism to sex is The Ethical Whore: A Guide to Infinite Sex Possibilities by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt. He is credited with raising awareness of the possibility of consensual non-monogamy as a lifestyle and providing practical guidance on how such long-term relationships work and are put into practice.
The authors define the term whore as “a person … who has the courage to lead life in accordance with the radical proposition that sex is enjoyable and pleasure is good for you.” The term is recovered from its usual use as an insult and is used to mean a person who accepts his enjoyment of sex and the pleasure of intimacy with others. The book looks at how to live an active life with multiple concurrent sexual relationships.
A box that cannot be closed
Of course, this whole super hot slut isn’t for everyone and yes, she does have her traps. Emotions can get involved, heartbreaks ensue and unwanted pregnancies and disease continue to occur in alarming numbers, especially in states that are conservative in their policies and where abortion, sex education, and family planning often cause the elections go madly to one side. And as mentioned above, if you ever drink the golden nectar of promiscuity, other women may be your worst enemy.
But as women achieve social and economic parity with men, the notion that we should only have sex when we indulge in romance, love, or lies fades into history. So, as they say, with great power comes great responsibility. The government must continue to promote quality sex education in our schools. Parents must make the safety of their sons and daughters a higher priority than morality. And other women shouldn’t fear the burgeoning carnal confidence of their sisters. Female sexuality doesn’t have to be a Pandora’s box.
