Lost Highway Times...Paths in Oblivion

What a world we live in. At one extreme you have Christian fundamentalists who don't want adolescents to know solid information about sex, don't want contraception available to them, want to have banned things like Plan B. On the other....what? If you ask a conservative Christian what's on the other side of this equation he or she would probably say that it's Hollywood, with its promotion of sex, its cheapening of sexuality, plus some sort of appeal to homosexuality as being decadent. But to me, from where I stand, I'm not so sure if the two are polar opposites.

The homosexuality aside, which I don't believe either the media is pushing on people or is something decadent, there's something that both of these groups have in common: neither has a positive view towards sex in the sense of positive equaling healthy.

One group wants to promote total denial of sexuality the other wants to promote a version of sexuality that's exploitative and demeaning; neither approximates an ideal stance towards sexuality.

Sure, one could say that if the conservative view makes you mad then why not go to the other extreme, but what people think of as the other extreme, which markets itself as total freedom, is actually not healthy either because in the scope of sexual relations there are other issues than pure freedom vs. unfreedom that make the relation either just or not just. There's gender power and inequity, for one, which is the prime thing that is overlooked in the media's marketed version of sexual freedom.

When you say sexual liberation you almost have to say "sexual liberation for whom?", for men in general as society stands right now, men in society, or for both men and women in a sense which doesn't buy into the mores of society as it is now. To get to that goal I'd suggest that sexual liberation really needs to put women and women's sexual self determination first, because they're currently at the brunt of the social system.

If you just liberate sexuality without taking into account gender relations than you reinforce the gender relations that already exist. In this case that means reinforcing male dominance over women. Liberation for some turns into objectification for others as the tendencies in male culture to treat women as sex objects only gets a stronger push from this.

Traditional female gender roles are reinforced by this too, which is why some women may turn against sexual liberation as a whole; sure, the right to be sexy is more than the right to be nothing but a stay at home Christian mom, but it must be cold comfort to know that this sexiness feeds right into men's heightened sexual expectations of women.

Because of this, I would say that just pure liberation might leave women more oppressed than non-liberation, albeit in a way that is different enough so as to be apples and oranges. Oppressed in one way that wasn't open before but empowered also in ways that the conservative ideal of women will not allow.

But the way out isn't to turn back the clock. The way out is to correct the overly male centric view of sexual liberation with one that privileges the female and also takes a critical look at gender power in society.