Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ
#3 is not as true as many people want it to be. It fits nicely into Enlightenment biases, though. Women's pupils dialate to the same degree as men's do when they are presented with sexually attractive objects. Men and women process visual stimuli in different ways, but both have a strong visual response to sexual stimuli.
Ideas about visuality and masculinity are rooted in the assumption that males are more reasoned and rational, that they are, to use the enlightenment terms, more empirical and objective. This bias has been used to keep women from holding public power (the Victorians really took this to the extreme--Victorian women came down with the "vapors.") and to define activities associated with the feminine as frivolous, sensuous, and irrational. To the degree that this is true it is in large part because we have culturally made it so. We have naturalized ideology and treated it as objective fact.
Culturally speaking, this comes to a boil with a simple fact: the male gaze has a cultural acceptance that the female gaze does not. This derives from the fact that our culture is very much patriarchal and is the rationale behind such fascinating phenomena as both men's pornographic magazines and women's fashion magazines having hyper-sexualized women on their covers. Women's sexuality is being constructed on masculine terms. These covers tell men what to like and women to be what men like. The rise of "Men's Health" culture may reflect that women's gaze might be being rehabilitated. The jury is still out on this.
Another result of our patriarchal culture is that female sexuality is constructed with much greater specificity than is male sexuality. Sure, there are "hunky" guys, but women's expectations of male attractiveness have many exceptions and have greater variation. Female sexuality, on the other hand, is obsessively precise, is in some measure infantilizing (women are encouraged to shave legs and arm pits, to be pre-pubescently thin, are encouraged to look youthful, and should be "moist"--an obsession that has its roots in fertility and menstruation). So many women have come to construct their own femininity on masculine terms--welcome to hegemony. It should be no surprise, then, that both women and men have come to think of women as less visual. Our culture discourages women from exploring their visuality. It punishes them for doing so.
Study after study has demonstrated that human sexual behavior has great commonality with the sexual behavior of other primates. Female primates will stick out their chests and posteriors to attract mates. It is not a coincidence that this is the same posture that occurs when a woman wears high heels. Similarly, primate males will flex their arms and chests, and will display the food they have gathered to attract females. One need spend only about two minutes in a singles bar to see men doing this with their postures and wallets. These behaviors are in some sense inherited. Problems arise when the behaviors of one sex are used culturally to trivialize that sex, and when behaviors of attraction are compelled in otherwise neutral contexts. Men put on tuxedos for special occasions, but women put on their sexuality every day. If a man looks unkempt he will be given a pass in many situations--he may even be applauded. If a woman goes out without makeup and without her hair done and wearing sweat pants, many people will semi-consciously disapprove of her and some will wonder if she's having her period. Maleness is normative, femaleness is not. In a broader sense you have the "Cougars" and the "Lady Courgars."
So women's sexuality is used against them and visuality is no exception. Many women recognize this on some level and so are caught between resenting their own sexuality and embracing it at the risk of cultural disapproval. Symbolically, our culture still sends women to the edge of the village.
Historically speaking, the priveliging of sight over other senses that has arrived with the Enlightenment contributes to the porn problem. Sight is a distancing sense, a sense that always communicates our seperateness from others. In that sense (literally) porn is alienating. It is also a commodity and so is about the repetition of sameness. Sex, on the other hand, is about all of the senses and like natural reproduction, is about the repetition of difference. Check out my rated-R post (or I can board mail it to you), for more detail on this. I'm just summarizing here.
|