My Sexuality Is Not A Commodity
Even though talking about it earns me money
On a fairly regular basis, I get communications from random men who want to know if I’d like to start up some kind of a sexual relationship with them. I typically don’t know anything about them, not even what they look like, but because something that I wrote aroused them, they just assume that I’d like to get together, or have phone sex, or maybe just correspond for the future purpose of continuing to turn them on.
I’d like to say that I don’t understand this mentality, but unfortunately, I do. In our culture, female sexuality is a commodity. It sells everything from jeans to beer, and the subtext of these ads, which reinforce patriarchal narratives, is that women exist for the pleasure and entertainment of men. This is not some feminist theory that I learned in a Women’s Studies class because I’ve never actually taken one of those. It is my own lifelong experience and the experience of most of the women that I know. These inquiries are a case in point.
Until a couple of weeks ago, my readers didn’t even know what I looked like. They still don’t really know. A memoji isn’t exactly an accurate depiction, but for some, because I arouse them by talking frankly about my sexuality, I then transform somehow into a desirable woman of their imagining who really wants them too — even though I don’t know much if anything about them.
The men who express interest in me usually don’t have profile images at all. They typically don’t tell me anything about themselves, or if they do, it’s so general as to be worthless, such as “I live in this state.” There is no wooing of any kind. It’s just some version of “You turn me on and I want more on a more personal basis.” Not that long ago, a guy was so insistent about what I owed him because I had turned him on that I had to block him. I processed the experience through writing about it because it was so disconcerting.
This is the bane of every woman who writes about sex publicly. I’d change my profile descriptor to “I write about sex. No, I’m not interested,” but it wouldn’t make any difference. These guys don’t see me as a person. They see me as a commodity that they should have access to simply because they want it. Because I have pleased them in some way, it must be that I exist for their pleasure.
“No one’s openness with their sexuality, online or in real life, should be confused with an undiscerning invitation for sexual advances.” ~Queen Jayne Renault
The Madonna/Whore dichotomy says that good girls don’t talk about sex and only engage in it reluctantly in order to please their man. The fact that regular, every day women are actually sexual beings is a bit of a foreign concept in our culture. Be sexy but not sexual is the messaging that every young woman gets from a very early age, but if you are sexy, that’s seen as an invitation. If you are attractive in public, it must be because you are in some way offering yourself as a public commodity to the men you encounter. This is the unconscious basis of catcalling.
Research indicates that men tend to gauge female interest based not so much on the cues that the woman is sending, but on how attractive he finds her. If she’s got on clothing that enhances how her body appears and if she is particularly nice to look at, then the fact that he is aroused becomes translated into her acquiescence. I want that pretty plaything, and since that’s what she is there for, I will have it!
Men who have been trained to ignore signals, such as clothing and physical attractiveness, and focus on women’s emotional expression tend to more accurately perceive women’s sexual interest in laboratory experiments (Treat et al., 2015).
For most of human history, people lived in actively and affirmatively egalitarian tribes and villages, so it seems pretty clear that this impulse is a function of the social system of patriarchy, which began around 10K years ago. Prior to that time, women were not commodities and in fact, in many instances, they had a lot of sexual freedom, even within marriage.
“The temples of the Queen of Heaven often owned most of the arable land and kept the records for the community. In many ways, they were central to the life of their respective cultures. In most of the cultures that revered the Queen of Heaven, both married and single women lived for some period of time in the temples of the Goddess and they were honored and esteemed for doing so.”
The sacred sexual customs of the female religion offer us another of the apparent ties between the worship of the Divine Ancestress as it was known in Sumer, Babylon, Anatolia, Greece, Carthage, Sicily, Cypress, and even in Canaan. Women who made love in the temples were known in their own language as “sacred women,” “the undefiled.” Their Akkadian name of qadishtu is literally translated as “sanctified women” or “holy women.”
When God Was A Woman, Merlin Stone, page 154
It has only been within the past 3% of human history that men believed that women belonged to them and were on earth to serve and please them, but 10K years is still a chunk of history. It’s plenty of time for this idea about women and female sexuality to become pervasive and ubiquitous. Even some men who have conscious understanding and acceptance of the components of positive consent still unconsciously act out this deep-seated belief at times.
“When Nicole Bedera, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan, interviewed male college students in 2015, each could articulate at least a rudimentary definition of the concept (of consent): the idea that both parties wanted to be doing what they were doing. Most also endorsed the current “yes means yes” standard, which requires active, conscious, continuous and freely given agreement by all parties engaging in sexual activity. Yet when asked to describe their own most recent encounters in both a hookup and in a relationship, even men who claimed to practice affirmative consent often had not.”
These young men weren’t monsters; they weren’t bad guys and certainly didn’t think of themselves as bad guys — and yet, they were self-reporting that they were sometimes engaged in behaviors that might well come under legal definitions of assault. Peggy Orenstein says, “In my own interviews with high school and college students conducted over the past two years, young men that I like enormously — friendly, thoughtful, bright, engaging young men — have “sort of” raped girls, have pushed women’s heads down to get oral sex, have taken a Snapchat video of a prom date performing oral sex and sent it to the baseball team. They all described themselves as “good guys.” But the fact is, a “really good guy” can do a really bad thing.”
These guys who said they valued affirmative consent probably didn’t have intentions to be harmful or abusive. None-the-less, their social programming around entitlement to female bodies undoubtedly contributed to them disregarding their own conscious beliefs about a woman’s full participation in deciding what kind of sexual experience they were going to have together.
Entitlement to female bodies and socialized misunderstanding of the women’s role in actual sexual consent means that for one in sixteen women, their first sexual experience is forced.
Some 50% of women surveyed said the perpetrator was larger or older. More than 46% of the women were held down. In 56% of the instances, men used verbal pressure. Men used physical threats more than 26% of the time and caused physical harm in more than 25% of the instances. Some 22% of the women were drugged.”(emphasis mine) CNN Health
Flirting only goes “awry” when men are looking at the woman’s interest and intentions through the lens of what they want. The men who force young women into doing things they don’t want to believe that women owe them sex and should these girls be reluctant or resist, they will simply coerce them or force them to comply. It’s another, more overtly entitled version of I want this pretty bauble, so I’m going to have it because after all, that’s what she’s there for. It may be entirely subconscious but these deeply entrenched beliefs still lead to the traumatization of women in huge numbers.
At its core, patriarchy is a dominance hierarchy, with power differentials between not just men and women, but also other types of stratifications as well. When this societal system first became pervasive it signaled the onset of classes and other types of social disparity for the first time. Those with more power in the hierarchy expect to get what they want, frequently at the expense of those with less power. It’s no wonder that “You’re pretty so I want you and your say in the matter is irrelevant” became a part of our cultural landscape. To declare that it’s time to dismantle that cultural belief would be a gross understatement.
As disturbing as I find these inquiries, I am generally civil to them, and simply make it clear that I’m not interested, before ceasing communication. It’s not my job to educate each one about how presumptuous and entitled their messages are. I don’t want to get into further discussions with them or potentially listen to their excuses or worse yet, endure their anger at me for not doing what they want and expect.
I talk about sex openly because I want to be free of these outdated societal restrictions on female sexuality. They are creepy and tiresome, but fortunately, not too frequent, and most of the feedback that I get from readers is genuinely kind and appreciative. It warms my heart when I’ve been able to contribute to someone else’s sexual freedom and healthy exploration. It’s a large part of why I write as I do.
But just because I like sex and talk about it openly doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to have sex with you. And just because I write freely about sex, and earn money for doing so, does not mean that it’s for your personal pleasure or consumption as an always-available-to-you commodity. The sex that I write about is always in the context of on-going relationships, not random hook-ups with strangers from the internet. How did you fail to appreciate that? Oh, right — lust blinders……
So, no, I do not want to watch you jerk off or listen to you come. I don’t know you from Adam, why would I? Telling me that you want to find me when I’ve just said I’m not interested is the exact reason that I write under a professional name and don’t give out any details about what part of the country that I live in. It’s not playful and flattering to say that to a woman. It’s creepy as fuck!
I am not your pretty plaything or porn star on demand. I do not exist for your pleasure and entertainment — and neither does any other person on this earth. Do whatever it is you need to do to deprogram from that kind of thinking and your interactions with women will go a whole lot better, I promise you.
I am a woman. I am a person, a human being, not a sex toy, and my sexuality is healthy and normal. And most of all, it’s mine. You get access to glimpses of it when and how I say that you do. My husband does not own my body or my sexuality. What makes you think that you do?
© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.
