“The way we experience, speak about and envision sex and sexuality can either kill us or help us to know and protect ourselves better.” In her essay, “Lusting for Freedom,” Rebecca Walker talks about the effects of today’s culture on young women’s sexuality.
She writes: “Sex in silence and filled with shame is sex where our agency is denied. This is sex where we, young women, are powerless and at the mercy of our own desires. For giving our bodies what they want and crave, for exploring ourselves and others, we are punished like Eve reaching for more knowledge. We are called sluts and whores. We are considered impure or psychotic. Information about birth control is kept from us. Laws denying our right to control our bodies are enacted. We learn much of what we know from television, which debases sex and humiliates women.”
The act of sex has longed been used as another one of the master’s tools. It is demonized and trivialized and a woman’s worth has become linked with her sexuality. Walker suggests that instead of allowing society to dictate how we value sex, we embrace the importance and the pleasure and the freedom that come with understanding sex and embracing it. “Sex can also be power because knowledge is power and because, yeah, as a girl, you can make it do different things: I can give it to you, and I can take it away.” For too long, society’s desire to protect its little girls from the world of sex has left women without knowledge and without self-respect. In “You’re Not the Type” by Laurel Gilbert, she writes that “I felt cheated by the culture of our fathers, the culture that promised to take care of us, keep us sage, somehow, from the other men who might “ruin” us. Instead, that culture ruined our sense of ourselves.”
This culture of our fathers, the patriarchy, has set up, in their attempts to protect women from the evils of sex, an impossible expectation for women. In our society, there is a fine line between what is acceptable in terms of female sexuality. Girls are expected to appear pure, innocent and childlike. At the same time, a girl is considered a prude or disinterested in men or labeled in scathing tones, a virgin, if she is uninformed or inexperienced. If she is too experienced, though, she is considered a slut or easy. In the desperate attempts at keeping this balance, enjoying one’s sexual encounters is usually the last thing on young women’s minds. Besides, enjoying sex is another indicator in our society that a girl is a slut.
Young women are concerned with finding the balance between this virgin/slut dichotomy and unable to escape the pressures of it. Experiencing sex on a personal level can be emotional and trying on its own, but in our society today, the importance of sex is everywhere. In the media especially, the importance of being sexually aware and active is the main theme for television shows, music videos, movies, and advertisements. Female sexuality is used to sell everything from beauty products to records. The media also sends mixed messages about sex and how comfortable women should be about it. Sex is trivialized because it is everywhere and everyone seems to be active.
Television shows like Gossip Girl use young high school students’ sexual encounters as a main theme in their shows. These encounters are often portrayed very casually and with little consequences, physical or emotional. Other sexual encounters in the show are used to denote a turning point in the relationships of the main characters, giving the viewer the impression that the relationship is not real until it’s been consummated.
Real life portrayals of girls in the media, like the younger Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson, also send mixed messages. While their videos, photo shoots and on stage appearances were often hyper-sexualized, in interviews they were often quoted saying that they abstinent or deliberately sounded naïve about sex. The way the media has portrayed these celebrities has no doubt had an effect on my generation’s attitude about sex. The real question is: how much?
-Taylor
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