No seriously, DISCUSS.

[bliumchik]

Okay, let's try this again with less crazy.

So I read a post about sexuality and stuff here which was written by someone who is not a nutjob, and I thought it was as good an opportunity as any to articulate what I've been thinking about since that last "discussion". Someone there mentioned a woman's sexuality as sacred (in the context of despising prostitution) and I got to wondering. Why women and not men? Nobody thinks male sexuality is sacred.

Now, the thing about the concept of the sacred is that nothing is objectively sacred. Holiness means nothing to anyone but humanity, it's in our heads, we give it meaning.

So, why have we developed the concept of the female sexuality as sacred? The "cult of the womb" so to speak?

The only explanation that's rung true with me is the one that goes back to prehistoric times: passing on DNA.It's ten thousand BC. If a woman is pregnant, she knows damn well it's hers regardless of who the father is also sleeping with. But the only way for a man to be certain his genes were surviving was to demand fidelity from at least one woman. That sort of underpins the virgin/whore dichotomy - you fuck the one who likes sex and you marry the one who doesn't really so you can be sure her kids are yours.

So it's actually in the male genetic interest to promote the cult of the womb, to consider female sexuality sacred and reserved - it doesn't benefit the woman except by keeping the male around to do the heavy lifting (hunting, protection) because he's defending his genetic future.

Now you obviously can't apply genetic determinism to individuals, but as a society... it's interesting to consider.

And I don't think sleeping around is a big feminist political statement either - it is what it is. But that whole anti-sex gimmick over at the radfem party is really not all that feminist at all.

Comments

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Gah, my reply got eaten by... not even the intertubes, by some bizarre quirk of my mouse-button setup. What the hell!

Anyway, I was saying that the mistreatment is just one half of the treatment of women throughout history. The thing is, in order to justify that whole cult of the womb thing, men pretty much had to think of women as property. And there are two ways you can treat property - you can think of it as something that's yours to do with as you please even if you break it, or you can treat it like your favourite necklace or whatever that you keep where nothing can harm it, etc. So the whole cherishing thing did happen just as often, but we hear less about it because it's less immediately irking. But it's also a part of the woman-as-property paradigm. That's pretty much why some feminists hate having doors held open for them.

[bethrealistic.livejournal.com]

Darn them mouse-button setups!

I actually never thought of it in the sense that we don't see the good (and I say good tentatively, for want of a better word), cherishing type of "property" treatment because it's less immediately irking - which I suppose is very true.

But as you say, both treatments come back to viewing women as property.
You can almost see how holding something sacred morphed in to a desire to protect it, then a devaluing of women in general due to characteristics that men pretty much attributed to women in the first place - their comparative weakness, or "need" for protection.
But that's highly simplified and probably somewhat incorrect, oh wells.