Blog Four. (Sex)

The most basic idea I got from the chapter on sex was that beauty pornography is put in place to suppress female sexuality. When we see women that fit the ideal body image in extremely sexual ways (sexual ads, photographs, and in actual pornography), it sends the message that we need to look like THAT in order to be sexual.

Beauty is socially constructed because, as we've discussed in class, the ideal image of beauty is created by the diet, cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery industries. The ideal is perpetuated by advertising and the media, and it is also perpetuated by those of us who subscribe to it. Believing in the false ideal influences our own body image. If women don't feel beautiful, they don't feel sexy, and thus sexuality is not what it should be.

Something that struck me in the reading on sex was the whole section on violence. Wolf says that in the 1980s, as more women were graduating with professional degrees, people started to get angry at women. Thus, images of women in the media in situations of violence started to increase.

Wolf says, "Sex just wasn't sex anymore without violence."

She says that violent sexual imagery has made rape more acceptable, even if it's on a subconscious basis. Men and women now have rape fantasies because those fantasies are projected. She says that "our culture is depicting sex as rape so that men and women will become interested in it." WOW.

Also, the idea that huge industries are "selling sexual discontent" is crazy and interesting. Wolf says that "product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies." To keep us spending money, society tries to keep us from getting laid.

In Wolf's words, "the myth wants to discourage women from seeing themselves unequivocally as sexually beautiful." Feeling beautiful is an important part of having good, fulfilling sex. If one doesn't feel beautiful, "one objectifies oneself or the other for self-protection." Women don't like their bodies because they are constantly confronted with naked or near-naked images of the ideal body. Then when they are naked for sex, it makes them insecure so they can't enjoy sex the same way. Thus, they are unfulfilled and still a slave to the beauty myth.