Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions

[Remember Me]

52. I'm not going to read this. But I do have something to say.

The paper could be a GOOD one or a BAD one, I don't know. What I find interesting, in an appalling sort of way, is how anyone thinks this is news. Did the bright young whippersnapper(s) who wrote this think they'd DISCOVERED something?

The OP subject line alone describes how life has been for women as a class for millennia.

I've read the thread so far and I see some of my feminist friends outraged about the paper, and I've seen DU men drooling and -- as one DUer put it -- needling and provoking.

The fact remains that the subject line is an apt description of life as we knew it prior to the Women's Movement and life as we know it STILL for far, far too many women -- certainly women in many other cultures, and too many women here in the U.S.

What bothers me, and perhaps this is because of the way the paper is written, is the underlying premise that these are CHOICES that women willingly make -- to trade sex for economic advantage. They may be choices women make, but they're hardly FREE women making those choices.

Rather, the women have grown up in a culture and been "trained" in all those subtle ways acculturation happens to behave in exactly that way. The shackles around our feet are a little looser these days, but they're still there. Women STILL make only $0.77 of what men in the same jobs make. Women are STILL discriminated against in upper echelons of business (that ole glass ceiling). Women STILL aren't present in their natural numbers in politics, government, judicial system. Women are STILL hunted (stalked) and killed, beaten and maimed, raped and sodomized, purely because they are women. And we are still taught -- from virtually the day we are born -- that our LOOKS and APPEARANCE damn near trumps all.

Women were trained to vie for the most eligible bachelors -- or indeed any bachelors -- by being pretty, cute, adorable, with decent enough domestic skills, etc., so they could escape the economic oppression that awaited them as single women in the days before 2nd Wave Feminism. We were also taught -- and it didn't take much given the economic reality -- that other women were our competitors, and so we regarded most of them as enemies, especially if we thought they were a threat to us in regards to the men we were interested in. The Patriarchy found this most amusing, but it served a very good purpose (for the Patriarchy): it kept us isolated in THEIR homes, distrustful of one another and distracted so we never quite put 2 and 2 together (until the 60s) to figure out The Men of Patriarchy were complicit in keeping us near totally detached from any sources of authentic power so we could merely live worthwhile lives WITHOUT a man, if we chose (or, more accurately, if we weren't CHOSEN).

And sure enough, now that women have a smidgeon more economic freedom, or a smidgeon less economic oppression, marriage isn't exactly the first thing all women run toward. Marriages are fewer now than ever. Women aren't forced to marry by economic necessity -- and so they don't. I think it was Bella Abzug who said, c. late 1960s -- "The greatest brain drain in the U.S. is down the kitchen sink." This was at a time when the "brain drain" emigration of scientists from the Soviet Union was in the news.

Fortunately, men in the Patriarchy found it useful enough when The Pill came into existence in the early 1960s that "virginity" stopped being the requirement it once was for nice girls to win economic stability via marriage.

So, I don't know what slant the paper adopted for this startling, stop-the-presses revelation, but as I said, the OP Subject line alone pretty much encapsulates the entire female experience under Patriarchy. It's disgusting, it's degrading, it robs women, men and society of the contributions women could make, and whatever's left of it at this late date in our so-called evolution MUST be changed. And quickly.