![]() ![]() ![]() It is human nature to have our outrage to many kinds of abstract wrongs waked up by vivid imagery. Video of Rice’s violent attack on his wife changed everything, even though the fact of the assault itself was always the same. The views in this article are solely those of Naomi Wolf.The vehicle through which the Ray Rice drama unfolds is not a woman’s voice, nor an impartial justice system, nor the consistent, preemptive ruling of a major sports organization, but through a piece of technology that happened to be switched on. ![]() Emma Rees notes of the struggle over how one may speak about female sexuality: “For until we have a language and a platform for talking honestly about women’s bodies and sexual drives, we’re doomed into a cycle of objectification and silence.” Until that real freedom arrives, we can honor the pioneers such as Lisa Brown, Pussy Riot and the young women of Tahrir Square – and keep up the fight to be free to name our bodies and ourselves.Īs gender and representation expert Dr. And they are not yet fully free to claim the right to sexual pleasure and autonomy without enduring public shaming. They are not yet, as these struggles show, fully free to define the meanings of their bodies and their desire, to assert their sexual wishes without punishment – including punishment by the state. The sexual revolution came and went, and yet women are still not as truly sexually free as they deserve to be – here or around the world. In the struggle over sex, these choices are where the struggle lies: Who decides reproductive rights who decides when and how breasts might be exposed who decides who can say vagina and where who decides who is a slut and who must be punished with hard labor for asserting their right to define their own sexual and artistic identities. This turns a potentially liberating sexual revolution into yet another marketable consumer product that hypnotizes people and is creating new health and sexual problems around libido, rather than setting them free. Indeed, its addictive effects, in terms of new neuroscientific discoveries, actually turns out to be a kind of drug or sedative. Porn 24-7 doesn’t threaten social control. What is shocking and obscene is when a serious person – a legislator – dares to take back ownership of her own self, with the scandalous words “my vagina.” The issue is not the vagina, but who gets to say what becomes of it and who owns it. Legislating the most intimate aspects of women’s reproductive lives, all the way to imposing transvaginal probes on them – as states are doing across the country – isn’t shocking or obscene, because it is about taking away sexual control from women of their own bodies. Staging a strip performance is not disruptive to social order in Moscow, but three punk poets using their sexuality to make a satirical comment about Russian leader Vladimir Putin is destabilizing and must be punished. Rather, what is still scandalous to our culture is when women take ownership of their own bodies. Indeed, the female body has never been so commodified before, and female sexuality has never been so readily consumable in sanitized, corporatized formats such as pornography. In a hypersexualized culture, in which porn is available 24-7, it is not female nudity – or discussion about vaginas or breasts or “pussy riots” – that is scandalous. Vagina enters stage left – or is it right? We are at an important crossroads in which it is becoming clearer to women around the world that, as one feminist artist put it, “your body is a battleground.” Young women in Tahrir Square protesting in the Arab Spring were punished by imprisonment – and vaginal exams by armed strangers for “virginity tests.” This is not so surprising when you understand the delicate brain-vagina connection that my new book documents – female sexuality around the world is targeted because through traumatizing the vagina, you can intimidate women on multiple other levels. ![]()
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