In Praise Of Female Sexuality
I’m very impressed by the quoted portion of this article:
It’s time someone praised and defended reckless teenage girls and young women who behave badly, dress provocatively, engage in risky sex, and get pregnant. They are the normal ones. The rest of us are the deviants. They are behaving in the most natural way. The rest of us are mutants.
There is nothing wrong with pelvic display, push-up bras, Gosford miniskirts, spray-on jeans, low-cut tops, bare legs, bare arms, bare ankles, G-strings or even buttock cleavage, providing the displayer is young enough to get away with it. A woman’s body is at its fertility peak between the ages of 17 and 23. So when young women advertise or flaunt their sexuality they are being driven by a force far stronger than the Judeo-Christian ethic. They are driven by the power of peak fertility and a million years of evolutionary biology. Nature has programmed them for pregnancy, genetic diversity and keeping the species going. A big job.
Sexually active teenage girls, and sexually promiscuous women of any age, carry the greatest social burden of judgements, punishments, restrictions and risks because we haven’t got the child-care equation right. These women are just doing their job. They are real, while the rest of the equation is artificial. Society is the collective weight of traditions, conventions, laws, habits, fears, tribes, taboos and technologies, permeated by a Judeo-Christian ethic dominated by men and designed to curb female sexual power. Our norms are also dominated by the ideology of materialism that is moving women further and further towards unnatural behaviour, pressuring them to have babies later rather than sooner.
This is society’s real problem. Teenage pregnancy is trivial by comparison to suppressed pregnancy.
In other words, it’s not those damned horny kids who have the problem, it’s us grownups, who’ve built a society where you have to study and train and work your way up for far too many years, before you finally gain the economic power necessary to have children responsibly without depending on anybody else.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1094
Probably what you should blame is the industrialisation of society, that broke up the extended families that supported young parents, and instead insists that each couple – or single parent – tries to survive solo.
Or blame Microsoft. I usually do that.
The bit about ‘suppressed pregnancies” creeps me the fuck out. This planet needs less people, not more.
i don’t want my daughter to be sexually repressed, but i also don’t want her youthful lust for life wilted by the ball and chain of pregnancy and motherhood. it might be nature’s way, but i’m with sinboy and mr lee — all in favor of birth control. so… how about an article applauding and encouraging the incredible sex drive of the woman over 40? maybe i need to write that one…
The real issue in all of this is not behaviors but rather responsibility, respect and values.
A parents primary job in child-rearing is to teach their young that all actions have re-actions. When a person understands their actions create situations which they then must live with, they gain full license to do anything that does not usurp the rights of another or compromise what they believe is “right” for them.
I have a daughter and a son. They were brought up to understand they and they alone are responsible for their actions. They have done things I would not do and which I did not condone. But, they have never been “in trouble” or brought grief to another. They think for themselves and have the freedom to do what is right for them, not what they were told to do by a parent, a society or a culture.
Broken mothers, abandoned children and babies condemned to a life of sorrow –and disease–comes from irresponsible action and disrespect, not from sex.
I have a problem with this article. Girls may be at their peak of fertility, but their sexual wildness isn’t because of a sexual peak. Most, in fact, never have an orgasm until much much later in thier lives. Most of them don’t understand what they want.
Its far more likely the wildness is a social thing. A reaction to rules and restrictions, a sudden desire to be accepted and understood, since it comes out of a period where girls are absolutely paranoid about privacy. They’re trying to figure out how they fit into the world of adults, and getting some very strong opinions from the media and whatnot. Hence all the teenage boobjobs.
“Society is the collective weight of traditions, conventions, laws, habits, fears, tribes, taboos and technologies, permeated by a Judeo-Christian ethic dominated by men and designed to curb female sexual power.”
Yeah, right; it’s us males that are demanding they show less flesh, put out less often, curb their natural horny inclinations. Sure, that’s it.
I’d like to say “Amen!” but I can’t.
Most teenage girls that get pregnant are poor. And more likely I bet to breed Baptists.
Now a overpainted lass who goes out and has a good time and makes sure she doesn’t get pregnant has my full support.
Talk about primal forces has been in fashion on and off for a couple of hundred years. But that ignores the very powerful power of the primal energies that drives religious conservatives. As to which is stronger – well who has the most power in this society?
I also have a problem with this excerpt, if only because it seems to inextricably bind female sexuality with female fertility. The author essentially asserts that young women “behave badly” (who says it’s bad?) because they should be making babies while still in college, not because, as I personally feel, they should be discovering and exploring their sexuality while still in college. It’s a regressive pro-sex argument, and I think it just sign posts the slippery slope back to “sex for procreation, not recreation” as a cultural norm.
Brains *and* panties. Brett is a lucky man.
I agree with Alysha, most eloquent and exactly what i felt.
I agree with the atricle, but i do believe that young women, unless they willingly want a baby, should be on some effective form of birth control.
Trust me, i see yung women in all sorts of clothing all day, and in all honesty, i have seen so many of them it is starting to lose it’s charm on me.
i work at a wal*mart by a beach, pushing carts BTW.
The excerpt argues that behaviors which occur in nature, evolutionary trends, or what have you, are in themselves “good” or “right.” The author is assigning moral value to natural phenomena. This is just as much a man-made moral construct as Judeo-Christian values. That’s one major flaw of the author’s argument.
To tell the truth, this guy is a wack. Sure, fertility is a good thing. But we don’t NEED that young of mothers, who can and probably will produce more children. We don’t live in a society where half your children will die under the age of five. Besides, there is no pro-business way to do that. It would retard business growth, cause overpopulation, strain our resources, and cause a host of unwanted things. It sucks that women have to be the ones that make that decision, but it has been true since the beginning of time: the more successful people do things the less successful don’t. If we made everyone that enjoyed sports millionaires, there would be no money left for people that would earn it. So it is with people that are able to restrain themselves and get ahead. Same arguement could be made about college, schooling, etc.- free our kids up! Let them take 5 years off! Then they get stuck in the workforce, and never get educated. It sucks, but to change it raises a whole host of problems no one could anticipate.
I’d have to generally agree with the article posted above. It would be nice if society allowed for a slower pace where teenage motherhood could occur with all of the economic advantages of this current society’s later years, but I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen anytime soon. I do however believe that teens should employ birth control and disease prophylaxis and enjoy their bodies while they work at optimum performance levels. I think it’s cruel to demand abstinence until they can “afford” to bring up children. Many of these “horny teens” will NEVER achieve any real level of economic power that the parents of children should have.