Feminism Friday Round-Up

As usual, not all of these posts have actually been tagged as Feminism Friday articles by their authors, but if a post appears to fit into the category I include it. Please add any other online articles you think fit the bill from the last few weeks in comments.

Amanda Marcotte is out of the gate early this week with this fabulous post: On pigs, basketball, frames, and music

I’d say the two major metaphorical frames about sex would be the conservative-sexist one and the liberal-feminist one. The conservative-sexist metaphorical framework of sex is Sex As Conquest. In this frame, women’s bodies are objects and sex is about the struggle to conquer the pussy. Sometimes the struggle over the pussy is between men (ex: jokes about fathers guarding their daughters’ bodies from young male interlopers) and sometimes women themselves are tasked with defending the pussy from sex. If sexual intercourse happens, by definition, the man who gets to fuck the woman has won and the defender (father or woman herself) has lost. Sex happens when women surrender, in this model.

The liberal-feminist view of sex is that it’s not a war or a game, but more of a mutual collaboration, less like a battle and more like playing music. In this model, to be a sexual person is to be a musician and sex is playing your instrument. Sometimes you play by yourself, sometimes you get with others and jam, and sometimes you actually have a band that you have a long-term relationship with. There aren’t winners and losers, but there can be good and bad sex, just like there can be good and bad music. The collaboration model of sex explains why acceptance of homosexuality and kinkiness are generally liberal views. It makes no more sense to call homosexuality immoral than it does to posit that rock is more moral than jazz; it’s all a matter of taste. Homosexuality creates a lot of grief to those who have a fairly strict conservative view of sex because you can’t even tell who’s supposed to be the offense and the defense. It’s simply outside of their model, and it creates cognitive dissonance, which often makes the person suffering it want to wipe out the source of the dissonance.

These separate models of what sex is explain why threads about rape turn into hellholes pretty quickly—sexists and feminists aren’t even speaking the same language, in a sense.

Thinking Girl has posted excerpts from a thesis by Shannon called the Domestic Goddess Series over the last few weeks:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

A recent addition to the ranks of Feminism Friday bloggers, elorie at Same As A Wildcat has been writing on-topic essays for the last few weeks – here’s her Feminism Friday archive.

Bluemilk takes on Sex and Breastfeeding.

Lauredhel looks at Feminist Ethics and Digital Communities.