I was reading a friends blog recently and she posted about a character in a show that is being called a 'slut'. I'm not going to mention what show because some of what was talked about hasn't aired in Australia yet. But after reading her blog, the comments, and the article and then watching the show in question it made me wonder about women and their sexuality.
They had the character do three things that I can see caused the outcry.
1. She wore a police woman uniform and was a kiss-a-gram.
2. She didn't avert her eyes when a male got undressed.
3. She made very forward sexual advances towards that male character.
Really!! That's it and for this she is spread over the daily rag as being a slut?
Are we so afraid of women who are sexuality forward?
In movies and TV shows all over the place men do similar things often much more openly than she did.
Why is it ok for men to gawk at/proposition a woman but when she does the same things it causes a stir?
Then today I was flicking channels on TV and found a talk show that was focusing on X-rated movies and women. Not just the women who are in the movies but also the women who watch them.
Apparently (according to the talk show I watched) women are responsible for 30% of X-rated movie sales and 50% of X-rated toy sales. And women centred X-rated parafinalia and movies are the fastest growing section of the market. Female X-rated movie stars earn 3 times more on average than the males in the same industry. It also mentioned that 1 in 3 women look at porn on occasion. That's right 1 in 3!!
Most women I know enjoy sex and most of the men I know, like women who know what they want. But apparently this doesn't always mean they (men and women) want to see their leading ladies being sexuality aggressive.
It makes me wonder about the people who commented on my friend blog and those who wrote the article chastising this woman for being forward about what she wants. Have we gained nothing from feminism in this sense? Do we still want women who are pussy cats in public but tigresses behind closed doors? Have we learnt nothing from sex in the city?
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3 comments:
I actually didn't find Sex and the City terribly feminist, not least because the premise was that they would have sex "like men" (not a direct quotation, because I haven't seen the first episode in years). They could have tried having sex like women . . .
The interesting thing about that article was that it was ripped wholesale from The Daily Telegraph (both The Daily Telegraph and the free rag that published the article in question are News Limited holdings) without any attribution, but somehow managed to write an article that was even trashier, more sexist, and more offensive than the original.
There's a perverse kind of genius in that.
I wasn't clear. I don't think that sex in the city is a feminist statement. But I do think that it showed that we can cope with sexually aggressive women on TV. More than the article I was confronted by the comments on your blog. The media like to find little things and turn them into trashy stories. The fact that some 'so called' fans would actually agree I thought was more of an issue.
It was only one comment, though, and one that not only had a poorly supported argument but was also from someone who had never commented on the blog before.
Most of my commenters had a rational, sensible approach to the issue, I thought.
(I'm not questioning this piece of yours, which I thought was a great engagement with the topic and raised heaps of angles that I didn't cover. I'd just hate people to think that my lovely commenters are all sexist neo-conservative dickheads.)
(Can I say that word on your blog?)
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