An Exclusion of Pleasure

An Exclusion of Pleasure: Ending the Silent Vigil of Female Sexuality

         I’ve always been very aware of sexuality, ever since I was a young girl.  One of my favorite cartoon characters was Miss Vavoom, the seductive redhead featured on the Droopy show (and originally as the protagonist in Tex Avery’s “Red Hot Riding Hood,” a rather risqué animated short).  The image I carry of her from childhood is wearing a curve-hugging crimson dress, while her own fire-red hair is long and glamorous, draped mysteriously over one eye.  I had a strange sensuality for a little girl, always strutting about with my hips swaying provocatively, which my mother teases me about to this day.  However, apart from on television, I didn’t ever see a concrete example of female sensuality in the adults around me.  In fact, the aspects of womanhood I tried to emulate were generally frowned upon by my middle-school peers and surrounding authorities: the red lipstick, the platform shoes, the attempts at coquettishness.  When most people discuss inequalities of gender, their platform is the job market, or car purchases, or male/female typecasting ideology.  However, from even the childhood observations noted above, I see the roots of exclusion and inequality in how women are viewed—and how they view themselves—sexually.

         Sex education was a joke.  In the fifth grade, we were told that we would soon have our periods and that little boys were very different from little girls, all of which were observations made both by my mother and from having a little brother.  From then on, at the beginning of every year until the year I graduated, we were given slips of paper bearing the title “Family Living Permission Slip,” asking for my parents’ signatures to bear witness to the fact that I would be learning about the self-proclaimed “family living,” which was evidently the new term for “sexual education,” the predecessor evidently being too risqué for our young ears, even past the eight grade, by which time several students I knew had had sex, and into high school, where apparently everyone had sex.  I was given this permission slip, regardless of whether or not I was in a class that promised to educate me in sexual matters.  Truth be told, every time I received that slip of paper, I wondered if each year we would receive some new nugget of truth about sex, something more each year until our knowledge of our sexuality was complete and we were able to go out into the world as sensually savvy adults, ready for both honeymoons and one-night-stands. 
       
        But despite these yearly promises provided by way of family living, all I ever got out of Health class was a knowledge that a male’s penis stood up when excited (much like an audience during the “Hallelujah” chorus of Handel’s Messiah), and that my vagina was a literal “man-hole” that bore a sign that read “Insert Here, But Not Until Our Wedding Night, or We’ll Both Get Chlamydia.” And still there was the ever-present reality imposed upon me in high school: there were virgins and there were sluts, and that’s all there was to it.  The teachers didn’t talk about masturbation, or heavy petting, or contraceptive intervention, or what to do if you got pregnant.  In fact, the first time I heard someone talk about the myth that is female masturbation was during a visit from Life Action Ministries, a revival group that resided at my church and in various church members’ houses for around two weeks.  Our youth group split into male/female factions one night and for the girls, a very talented pianist in the praise band came and talked to us about chastity, modesty, and…masturbation?  It was the first time I had ever heard a female discuss masturbation at all.  Boys are widely known to masturbate, and it is seen with the utmost hilarity in sitcoms, movies, and scattered reality TV shows.  It as seen as something they cannot help, an instinctive force of sexuality that they cannot withstand.  But by popular belief, girls don’t masturbate.  So when this beautiful, strong Christian woman told us how it was wrong and something we should pray to God to help us with, I was inclined to believe her.  She had crossed so many lines by even speaking about it, and I was so grateful for the information and reaffirmation that I was glad to call it sin. 

        For women, sexuality is equally mixed with both prowess and violent shame.  These ideas are further bolstered by the pornographic industry, which is more than happy to offer a sexual “education” where the school leaves off, even if it’s not the most morally sound sort of education.  S&M, or sadistic and masochistic, pornography is an especial violation of women’s real sexuality.  The violence intermingled with sex poses a real danger to women, as it is seen as more and more acceptable to find sexual pleasure in causing damage to women’s bodies.  This sort of ideology contributes to the idea that women can derive pleasure from rape, or that they are “asking for it.”  And even today there are few alternatives, or even a women-oriented porn industry.  Type “porn for girls” into a search engine and you may find a few porn sites geared towards women, but you will find more sites that are lesbian-affiliated, but with men’s pleasure in mind.

          The truth of the matter is that female sexuality is not one thing or the other.  Women’s sexual experiences and identities are as varied in scope as the women themselves.  Ideas about female sexuality have been changing exponentially since the Victorian era, but we still are seen as sex objects, which is obviously not true.  Hopefully as female sexuality becomes more acceptable in society, sex education in schools will become more informative and social stigmas will shift to provide true gender equality in sexual motivation.