AMBIVALENCE ABOUT SEX AT 'THE GUARDIAN' !!!

[Daanyeer]

Source: mensdaily
By Robert Franklin, Esq. | Aug 20, 2009


Here's an article that says a lot about the ambivalence many women feel about sex (The Guardian, 8/18/09). It seems that Tanya Gold decided, all in the interest of science mind you, to research strip clubs. More specifically, she decided to go to an exhibition of male strippers with a largely female audience, and another of female strippers with a male audience. She would then compare (a) the strippers and (b) the patrons.

Her "methodology" consisted of attending the clubs, watching the scenes and asking a few questions. As so often happens, she spoke only with women. Men, in her account, remain voiceless. She actually wants us to believe that her article has something to say about sex and sexual attraction, without a single word from a man.

About the male strippers and their female audience, Gold couldn't be more enthusiastic. "It feels joyous," she gushes. Why? "We are clapping (for) ourselves because we can be lecherous and bestial, and we can scream it."

Sounds like fun. But read closely. Soon the male strippers move off stage and into the audience and, according to Gold, a dramatic transformation to the women occurs - they become little girls. "When offered them (the strippers) at close range, we go shy... We want cuddles, not tongues." From "lecherous" dirty old women, to "shy" school girls, in half a paragraph is quite a feat. Gold adds, "There is not a single woman here who wants to have sex with [one of the strippers]."

How does she know? Interestingly, this time she fails to ask any of the women. In all other cases, she interacts with the women and reports what they say, but when it comes to finding out what they might want to do with one of those hunky guys, Gold lets her own feelings stand in for those of all the others.

It's not just that she cheerfully concludes that all the women there are alike and they're all like her. She apparently doesn't want to risk learning that they're not. And that willed ignorance is all about the possibility that some of the women do want to have sex with the strippers. Gold doesn't want to know that and she doesn't want us to know.

What's she afraid of? What would be so disastrous if some of the women looked at those cute, naked guys and felt unbridled lust? What if they weren't the shy little girls Gold insists on? Would the world end? Or would the knowledge be nothing more than a small blow against the view of women as Madonna, pure and fecund at the same time. It's a view that men and women both know to be false, so why is Gold so hell-bent on preserving it?

I think I know.

There's always been a strain of feminism that's wanted to liberate female sexuality, to allow women a wider range of sexual expression, to do away with the virgin/whore dichotomy, to dispense with shame as a restriction on female sexuality. I've always thought that was healthy. I think sex makes our culture far, far too crazy, and anything that tells us that sex is natural, intimate and fun, is for the better.

But that strain of feminism has a problem - men, or at least men as they're caricatured by feminists and pop culture. The argument to free the feminine libido, however healthy, runs the risk of women starting to act more like men. And interestingly enough, that's just what's happened over the past 40 years. Women, particularly younger women have become more sexually assertive than in the past. Madonna, for centuries, was the Virgin Mary. Today she's a singer with a racy past and a soft-porn book entitled Sex.

Traditionally men have been less abashed sexually than women. That's at least in part because our culture permits/expects it. We like looking at attractive women and don't mind admitting it. Our interest is partly aesthetic, but it's partly sexual too. Women, if they're to hold on to their (traditional) Madonna image, have had to pretend not to. That Gold's women can only let their true feelings out in a hidden, all-women setting like a strip club, is above all, sad.

Into the bargain, it's the perfect symbol of the type of female ambivalence I've been talking about. You can be sexual as long as it's closeted. Otherwise you might look like a man.

So when Gold gets to the London club with female strippers and male patrons, she flips her Manichean switch to 'on.' She wants nothing she says to suggest that women have the same desires men have. So her description of the club and its patrons is the polar opposite of the former club and its patrons. Gold's portrayal of the club as seedy and dirty, may, for all I know, be perfectly accurate. But it applies far more to her take on male sexuality than to the incidentals of a London strip joint.

In her telling, gone is the joy, gone is the enthusiasm, gone is the feeling of liberation. To come to that conclusion, of course, Gold is careful to make no effort to understand what's going on. There's no joy, no excitement among the male patrons of a strip club? No sense of liberation from the strictures of marriage or the threat of Calvinist hellfire? Please. If she didn't figure those things out, she just wasn't trying, which, come to think of it, she wasn't. That's why she again failed to pass a single word with a single man. But suffice it to say that among male patrons of strip clubs, there's plenty of enthusiasm and sense of liberation. And it is about sex.

Gold doesn't want the truth. She wants to parade her biases about men and women in the costume of social science.

At the end of the day, though, her biases teach us a lot. Like so much other popular culture, they want the appearance of embracing female sexuality, but only the safe kind. That's the kind that shouts lustfully at male strippers as long as they're out of reach, but turns "shy" as soon as they come near. Sex, actual sex, the kind that men enjoy, is too much for her to contemplate. It's just so, so...well, masculine! If we were ever to learn that women aren't the Virgin Mary, that they're fully capable of lust and acting on it, just the way men often do, where would we be?

A lot further down the road toward a sane society, that's where.

Thanks to Bernie for the heads-up.