The Female Control Theory: The Destruction Of Female Sexuality

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Women’s lesser sexuality arises because patriarchal culture represses female sexual desire. According to Sherfey, this behavior created social chaos. If a stable, civilized way of life was to develop, it was necessary to institute “the ruthless subjugation of female sexuality” (Sherfey, 1966, p. 119). On the contrary, men generally seem willing if not eager to meet women’s sexual demands. Men are more likely than women to say that giving pleasure to one’s sex partner is more important than pursuing one’s own pleasure (Janus & Janus, 1993), and the majority of men are quite receptive to female requests for sex even when the woman is a total stranger (Clark & Hatfield, 1989), whereas women are far less generous or receptive to such requests. The common theme in these lines …show more content…

To summarize the male control theory: The natural condition of the female is to desire a high amount of sex, including frequent copulations with multiple partners. Men band together to stifle this female sexuality. Men’s motives for doing so could encompass the jealous desire to prevent their mates from having sex with other men. Men are particularly concerned with stifling the sexuality of their wives and other mates.
The Female Control Theory
A second theory would hold that the women, rather than the men, cooperate to stifle female sexuality. As with the male control theory, the term control is used loosely to refer to cooperative, goal-directed activities of people in general that may contribute to a common benefit even if the people have not explicitly articulated that goal or made a conscious agreement to work for this purpose. If society as a whole has conspired to stifle female sexuality, and men dominate society, assigning an influential role to women must seem questionable on an a priori basis. Still, assigning an active role to women in history is in accordance with some revisionist approaches

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