…and no one noticed.
After the “Grab them by the ballot” nude photo shoot by “a diverse group of 10 Vermont women”, today, with only a few days to go before the most important mid-term election since the previous mid-term election, here’s another useful suggestion courtesy of Wednesday Martin, a “writer and cultural critic” editorialising at CNN:
It’s time for a revolution. At the polls, and in the bedroom. And in our understanding of who women are, sexually and otherwise. Given the tight interweaving of economic and political power with sexual entitlement, female sexual autonomy has never been more urgent, and women’s sexual pleasure has never been more political. Let’s consider what it might mean to go on a sex strike of sorts — to get what we want, rather than give what we think we owe others…
A women’s sex strike against service sex, a refusal to do it out of a sense of obligation, would force us to confront these basic inequalities. Our current administration has amped up the notion that women are mere extensions of male will and pleasure, there to serve at every turn. What is the rollback of reproductive rights but an assertion that not only female reproduction but female sexuality itself belong to what science writer Natalie Angier calls the “Greater Male Coalition”? What are the President’s insults to Stormy Daniels other than assertions that the woman who enjoys sex or profits from it in any way — emotionally, financially, or physically — is unnatural, immoral, and unattractive? In this world order, female sexual autonomy is not only dangerous and destabilizing; it is increasingly hard to imagine. And female pleasure is irrelevant, even pathological, if it exists at all.Some women under the current administration may be fine with this paradigm, but they are fundamentally yoked to male desires and agendas, never to exist outside or without them. This basic and deeply personal form of degradation, in which even women’s desires aren’t our own, both reinforces and reflects a hierarchy where men matter more.
