Luce Irigaray, ’ article, “This Sex Which is Not one,” can be succinctly summarized by the following key points. First, the author mentions the way women are seen in the western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic theory. She also talks about the women’s sexuality in many ways. ”Female sexuality has always been concepualtized on the basis of masculine parameters.” Women are seen in qualitatively rather than quantitatively. “Must this multiplicity of female desire and female language be understood as shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality? A sexually denied?” Freud mentions that the clitoris is a small penis. The female parts are always seen as a commodity for men. Women don’t need men’s object to pleasure themselves
In my culture a male owns a girl until she is dead. First she has to obey everything her father says and then she has to obey her husband. The women are supposed to basically worship the men. If the men want sex she cannot say no to him. Women cannot express her sexuality openly like a man can. I also think that the clitoris is seen as inferior to the penis. Women are there so that men can gain sexual desire from them.
Contributions to the Course
The discourse of Luce Irigaray contributes to the core essentials of Femnist Theories in myriad respects. We can see that patriarchy plays an important role here. Men have always used women as objects when it comes to their sexual wants. A woman is supposed to be submissive while man is practicing the role of dominance over the woman. These are socially constructed ideas passed down through generations. Men have been told from the get go that they are the dominant one. Women are always told to act like a lady. A woman is also told to make her husband happy but a man is never told the same thing. Even in pornography, we can see that females are just trying to pleasure men. There are very few male strippers while there are dozens of female strippers. Men need touch and also objects to overcome their sexual desires while women don’t need those things. Women who are seen enjoying themselves are often called sluts by our
In Making Sex by Thomas Laqueur, the author analysis sexual differences throughout the 18th century reviewing physicians, scientist, biologist and how society understood the anatomy and physiology of the human body. Laqueur brig us two sex models; the one-sex model and the two-sex model. He explains who we transition from the one-sex model to the two-sex model. How this two models had impacted our society and created an impact in history had it to do with the fact that a lot of evidence was drawn from science. Laqueur also explains how society constructed sex. He takes this investigation in very detail as he explains and investigates sexual differences.
Sexuality means many different things to different people, especially sexuality of a homosexual nature. Everyone has their own personal ideologies about sexuality, many of which have been forced on us by mainstream society's portrayal of what of is right or wrong. Bersani's objective is to take these societal sexual idiosyncrasies and turn them upside down to reveal how he feels gay male sex should be. In Bersani's article, Is the Rectum a Grave?, he entertains ideas of the self, sexuality (especially homosexuality), and power. Bersani believes that abolishing the self opens many options sexually and psychologically. He rejects conventional ideologies pertaining to sexuality like gender, identity and inequality but proposes new ways of thinking about sex and ones sexual identity by showing the reader new and unusual ways of viewing homosexuality and sexuality in general.
Favorite selection Sundahl, Debi (1998) "Stripper." From Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Industry In "Stripper," Debi Sundahl explains her knowledge and experiences of a sex life while working as a sex object and as well as a feminist in addition to being a liberatist. Sundhal comes accorss the idea that female sex workers are responsible for the sexual repression of women, by asserting that in truth, to any freethinking spectator the very existence of a sex worker “provides a distinction and a choice as to when a woman should be treated like a sex object and when she should not be". In this article, Sundahl intends to invent a vice-like grip in the sex business for women, as a consequence to that; Sundhal initiated in 1984 the number one women-only strip demonstration at a lesbian inn in San Francisco. Sundhal argues that the reality that women are not vigorously drawn in the sex business, in the role of proprietors, bosses as well as clients is pinpointing of the gender-based outlook of the social order. Sundhal is of the opinion that the reality that women have had practically no erotic atmosphere that is solely their own creation and for women, this experience is “intrinsically tied to the sexist attitude that a woman's role in society is to be housewife/mother/sexual servant". Sundhal has been a very successful stripper as well as an entrepreneur and advocator of liberty of physical expression. Sundahl cross-examines the prevalent gender roles; as a consequence make obvious a system to undermine these roles as her article provides significant information about the feminist or else a social scholar who has tried to have as a feature a structural investigation into a development on strippers. This article thus provides the p...
Accordingly, I decided the purposes behind women 's resistance neither renamed sexual introduction parts nor overcame money related dependence. I recalled why their yearning for the trappings of progression could darken into a self-compelling consumerism. I evaluated how a conviction arrangement of feeling could end in sexual danger or a married woman 's troublesome twofold day. None of that, regardless, ought to cloud an era 's legacy. I comprehend prerequisites for a standard of female open work, another style of sexual expressiveness, the area of women into open space and political fights previously cornered by men all these pushed against ordinary restrictions even as they made new susceptibilities.
Irigaray, Luce. “That Sex Which is Not One.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Books, 1998. 1467-1471.
...am Victorian society, sexual liberalism transformed the ways in which people arranged their private lives. Shifting from a Victorian environment of production, separate sexual spheres, and the relegation of any illicit extramarital sex to an underworld of vice, the modern era found itself in a new landscape of consumerism, modernism and inverted sexual stereotypes. Sexuality was now being discussed, systemized, controlled, and made an object of scientific study and popular discourse. Late nineteenth-century views on "natural" gender and sexuality, with their attendant stereotypes about proper gender roles and proper desires, lingered long into the twentieth century and continue, somewhat fitfully, to inform the world in which we live. It is against this cultural and political horizon that an understanding of sexuality in the modern era needs to be contextualized.
The oppressed, repressed, and impressed subjectivity of feminism finds a new opportunity to assert its true self against the stultifying atmosphere of modernism and identity-oriented crisis of postmodern ambience by appealing to the unique characterization of Anna Livia Plurabelle which frequently oscillates phallocentrism and proves the me'connaissance of male selfism and female-otherness to establish a new doctrine based on the fact that the male subjectivity as a desceptionary ruling self is subverted through the intermittent alterity that the indispensable feminine Being-Anna Allmazifull-makes possible.
Rubin, Gail. "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality." American Feminist Thought at Century's End : A Reader. Ed. Linda S. Kauffman Cambridge, Ma : Blackwell, 1993. 3-64.
In the article “An Anthropological Look at Human Sexuality” the authors, Patrick Gray and Linda Wolfe speak about how societies look at human sexuality. The core concept of anthology is the idea of culture, the systems of attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors people acquire as a member of society. The authors give an in depth analysis on how human sexuality is looked at in all different situations.
While sex and sexuality are considered to be two of the most intensely private parts of a person’s existence, a woman's personal sexuality and experience of the sexual in the context of the greater society is not always her own. "[Women] are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman"(Wolf, 162). Our sexuality is being created for us before we even have the knowledge that we have something to fight for. Very often, we do not get to decide what our sexuality means, the world has already decided for us. And one aspect of female sexuality that has had been most intensely labeled is masturbation. So my questions are, what cues are women really picking up about their sexuality? How do women create their own sense of sexuality independent of these cultural norms and dictations? My goals in exploring female masturbation as a symbol of female sexuality and its relationship to women and to society are multi-layered. In this paper, I plan to outline the theoretical history of the taboo on female masturbation as it relates to female sexuality as a whole. I also plan to discuss the way that several women are experiencing and negotiating their sexuality now. In addressing each of these issues, I hope to present a better understanding of how the sexuality of women is affected and the way that women then manage the internalization of these cultural expectations and how they experience and conceive of their sexuality as a result.
Essay #1: Sexual Politics It has been said that “Society has always defined for us what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman, what a man should be like and what a woman should be like, and these traditional definitions of gender roles have limited and even harmed individuals”. The theme of sexual politics comes to mind in this quote. One can define sexual politics as the relationship of the sexes, male and female, regarding power. Society’s definition of this can limit an individual in their gender role and restrain a person from being themselves.
There has been a long and on going discourse on the battle of the sexes, and Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex reconfigures the social relation that defines man and women, and how far women has evolved from the second position given to them. In order for us to define what a woman is, we first need to clarify what a man is, for this is said to be the point of derivation (De Beauvoir). And this notion presents to us the concept of duality, which states that women will always be treated as the second sex, the dominated and lacking one. Woman as the sexed being that differs from men, in which they are simply placed in the others category. As men treat their bodies as a concrete connection to the world that they inhabit; women are simply treated as bodies to be objectified and used for pleasure, pleasure that arise from the beauty that the bodies behold. This draws us to form the statement that beauty is a powerful means of objectification that every woman aims to attain in order to consequently attain acceptance and approval from the patriarchal society. The society that set up the vague standard of beauty based on satisfaction of sexual drives. Here, women constantly seek to be the center of attention and inevitably the medium of erection.
De Beauvoir, Simone. "The Second Sex." Philosophy of Woman: An Anthology of Classic to Current Concepts. Ed. Mary Briody Mahowald. Indianapolis [etc.: Hackett, 1994. 201-21. Print.
The play, A Raisin in the Sun, has a very strong view of feminism in the 1960’s. The way that the females are portrayed and talked to in this play is not only an example of how the relationship between a man and a woman in society is unequal, but reflects a particular patriarchal ideology. Throughout this play, as the characters strive to achieve their dreams, the relationships that we see can be seen as feminist and as sexual stereotypes. Feminism is a perspective that views gender as one of the most important bases of the structure and organization of the social world. Feminists argue that in most known societies this structure has granted women lower status and value, more limited access to valuable resources, and less autonomy and opportunity to make choices over their lives than it has granted men.
One universal fact that cannot be denied is that men have dominated all the institutions- the State, economy, education, religion, family. It is the judgment of men and their established stereotypes by which women are measured in society. The stereotypes are guided by the portrayal of women as belonging to either the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ category thereby presenting them either chaste or pure virgin or as femme fatale whose sexuality tends to threaten the social order. This notion of segregation of the character of women as belonging to either category has been proposed and approved by social and religious doctrines. The available and advocated interpretation of the religious texts have either denounced the status of women terming them as inferior