Posted by Jay Livingston
Female sexuality is losing its taboo, and cultural conservatives are dreading the change. That was the gist of my post about the conservative reaction to the Amy Schumer movie “Trainwreck” (here). I quoted a National Review article that reacted to the movie with words like shamelessness, distortion, degradation, and smut.
Taboo combines great power and great danger as well as elements of impurity and uncleanliness (smut still retains overtones of its earlier meaning – dirt). People and things that are taboo must be suppressed or controlled, surrounded with ceremony and restrictions. To allow them as part of the ordinary world threatens the social, moral, and cognitive order.
Shortly after I wrote that post, I was reading Jonathan Haidt’s 2012 book The Righteous Mind and came upon this anecdote.
| I was recently eating lunch at a UVA dining hall. At a table next to me two young women were talking. One of them was very grateful for something the other had agreed to do for her. To express her gratitude, she exclaimed, “Oh my God! If you were a guy, I’d be so on your dick right now.” I felt a mixture of amusement and revulsion, but how could I criticize her from an ethic of autonomy? |
Sex here, both for men and women, is no longer confined to some secret, sacred realm. It’s just another everyday enjoyable experience,even a way of saying, “Thanks.” She might just as well have said, “I’d spend an hour in the kitchen making you my special brownies-avec-weed.”
In movies like “Trainwreck” and TV shows like “Girls,” women’s sexuality and women’s bodies are not so imbued with mystery. They are what they are. Along with this waning of sacredness goes a parallel decline in the association of sex with uncleanliness. I can remember when people talked, though usually jokingly, about “dirty books” or “feelthy pictures” or told someone to get his mind “out of the gutter” – all of these contrasted with “good, clean fun.” You probably won’t hear those metaphors today at UVA and similar campuses. In some places, people still see female sexuality through the mists of purity and danger. But I would predict that as with attitudes on gay sex, the untaboo view of women’s sexuality will diffuse to more and more regions of society.
ADDENDUM: Lisa Wade, who knows far more about campus sex than I do, reminds me that everything I said here about the demystification of sex describes women’s attitudes far more than men’s. “My female students are still VERY worried that men think that their vulvas/vaginas are gross, disgusting, smelly, unkempt, etc.” They are probably right to worry. Even at enlightened, elite schools, normal adult female sexuality may trigger in men disgust and ideas of taboo and uncleanliness. Men (some? many? most?) may react with horror/fear/aversion/avoidance to vulvas, menstruation, and even pubic hair.
Sexual taboos are cultural universals, they like the other forms of social control, evolve. Often taboos and mores can change with technological advancement. There might be a high correlation between sexual taboos and behavior and the advent of birth control pills. ( I think this is a big one ) The point here is that adherence to sexual taboos can related to generations. There often is a "cultural lag" generationally between what is perceived as acceptable behavior between groups. We have had times in society when it was completely inappropriate for a woman to expose her ankle or for a male to be bare chested on the beach. The new attitudes and behaviors about human sexuality like many other forms of social change can take time, and can often seem as disruptive or maladaptive.
ReplyDeleteMy theory about the labeling of many notions of sexuality as being "dirty" or "filthy" or "smutty" was that these were used as forms of social control.
Prior to effective contraception they functioned to prevent unwanted pregnancies, control STDs, and to keep the preserve notion of monogamy. As post modern societies evolve the definitions about sexuality and the mores associated with them change as well.