Sexual is similar to sexy and used
to describe the same things.
But sexual is used to mean something
involving sex and not just arousal.
Paris Hilton comment:
My boyfriends say I’m sexy but not sexual. Being
‘hot’ is a pose, an act, a tool, entirely divorced
from either physical pleasure or romantic love.
The message that women get from society is that they are supposed to be sexy, to be pleasing to the eye, but also that this is for the enjoyment and gratification of men.
Catcalling is a way of affirming that women exist in the world for the pleasure of the men around them.
A woman on the street is a public commodity, to be commented upon and scrutinized. Does she measure up to desirability standards that are gratifying to men?
Liberating Teenage Sexuality
We refuse to distinguish between the pressure
on young girls to perform an inauthentic sexiness
for others’ benefit and the liberating development
of their own sexual selves.
We shouldn’t treat girls’ sexuality as if they’re
doomed to be sluts, or something that must be kept
secret in order to be kept safe. We should acknowledge
the raw complexities of their own sexual desires.
But helping girls own their own pleasure will
take more than explicit encouragement to masturbate.
It means teaching men of all ages, in no uncertain
terms, that women’s sexuality belongs to women.
Boys must be told a girl’s interest in sex
isn’t an open invitation. Often when she
tells boys she has a vibrator, not only
do they ask to see it but assume that
because she likes to have orgasms
she’s automatically interested in sex.
Boys can’t seem to understand how wanting
to masturbate in private doesn’t translate
into a willingness to fuck.
For too many guys, women’s sexual desire
is something fungible, easily transferred
from vibrator to dude to dude.
This myth is at the heart of slut-shaming.
In guy culture, girls who don’t confine
their sexuality to one monogamous relationship
with a man have a kind of democratic moral
obligation to make their bodies available
to every interested male party.
Why I Dance from Why I Dance Film on Vimeo.
Young women have been raised in a culture promising
sexual freedom but what they ended up with looked a
lot more like obligation than opportunity.
It’s not hard to understand why the pressure
to be sexy so often trumps the freedom to
discover one’s authentic sexuality.
For the past decade, we’ve begun to sexualize girls
at ever earlier ages. The raunchiness of this sexual-
ization is relatively new. But when that sexualization
meets the far-older pressure on young women to be
people-pleasers, we have a recipe for misery.
Watch The Girls
Women are not supposed to actually be sexual beings. Their sexual selves are intended, by patriarchal standards, to be for consumption.
This is incredibly damaging to and undermining of a woman’s sense of self in ways that are difficult to gauge until you begin to dismantle that paradigm.
Even for someone like me who is pretty self-aware, outspoken, and pro-woman, I had no idea how detrimental this internalized message had been to my life until I got into an environment where the messaging was very different.