http://www.victoriasfriends.com/statistics
This would lump prostitutes in with porn actress and strippers. I didn’t evaluate the source data here, but this is the nature of the source data that feminists see - i.e. past abuse experienced while children (often sexual abuse) in the stripping community is the norm - and whether the stats are good or not, that is what feminists are working from when forming opinions on whether stripping is degrading and if women doing it are making truly free choices. It also jives with the experience many women who have talked to strippers have (I have a few acquaintances who stripped when they were younger - none came from healthy home lives as children.)
Women who are putting up with this sort of thing (78% say they’ve been bitten by their clientele) in the workplace USUALLY aren’t doing it because they really like to have their hair pulled at work.
The other thing that happens is once you are exposed to the statistics it becomes a little hard not to think “am I getting to enjoy this woman’s sexuality because her uncle started raping her when she was ten?” Kind of puts a downer on the whole experience.
I think they do. From what I understand, woman are primarily attracted to social status (or a man who acts as if he has high social status, aka confidence). I can guarantee you there are women who are are attracted to Prince William solely because of the status granted to him by birth, and not because they have some deep knowledge of his personality. Same principle goes for women who swarm around rock stars. They’ll have sex with men they barely know as long as the man has high social value. What is that if not objectification?
You reduced my argument to the point of absurdity, and made a strawman out of both our statements. You said:
I gave a biological and evolutionary theory as to why it is seen as degrading for a woman to have sex. I’ll post it again, and please take better care if you choose to respond to it.
"To what extent are these attitudes culturally relative, and not just an extension of our Biology? It has always been an evolutionary advantage for a female to be more selective of who she sleeps with than a man. It’s theorized that promiscuity has varied as a strategy relative to other women, but generally not in comparison to men. This is because women can only become pregnant once every 9 months, while a man is free to move on and continue spreading his genes. This benefits a woman to be selective for a mate who shows commitment to helping raise her offspring. It benefits a man’s genes to find a more chaste woman to mate with who he has a high probability of not raising someone else’s offspring with.
It’s not unreasonable to believe that the cultural attitudes you mention stem from a hardwired morality that isn’t entirely alterable."
It’s prevelant across all societies and all cultures, so you’ve got a bit of an uphill task.
It exists for good reason, of course; we have spent millennia surviving. Food, or rather the provision of food, was a complete occupation.
The less chance you have of being cuckolded the better for your genetic survival. For tens of thousands of years the best indication you’d have in that regard is virtue in the person sustaining your genetic inheritence.
Not that you claim it is - others do - but it has fuck all to do with some bullshit ‘patriarchy’.
Again, “more chaste” isn’t the same as “only submits to sex unwillingly”. Nor does it inevitably follow that infidelity being worse in a woman than in a man means that a woman with no sexual history is a better person than a woman with a history of chaste (i.e., sexually licit) behavior.
And in any case, 1) you haven’t demonstrated that such a biological imperative exists, only that it is posited and, even if such a biological pressure to look down on anyone that is penetrated exists 2) there are lots of biological imperatives that we restrict, moderate, socialize away.
Are you really arguing that on a biological level, men are incapable of respecting non-virgins as equals?
Lot’s of people don’t enjoy their job, including me. What does that have to do with anything?
And I’ve already told you I don’t think anything less of strippers.
I omitted this bit in my last post because I know how cliche it sounds: One of my oldest and dearest friends is a retired stripper. She took all that money she made stripping and invested it in real estate. She now gets by in her post fifty years as a landlord.
A pretty sweet deal if you ask me and I couldn’t think more of her for it.
ETA: Also, I know she worked her ass off to get where she is, which only makes me respect her more.
If that’s that case, then it seems appropriate to brow-beat boys into feeling shame and guilt for being sexually attracted to women, because you seem to be arguing that out of sheer biological imperative, sexual attraction inherently carries an element of degrading and lessening the person you are attracted to. If that can’t be mitigated, can’t be socialized out, then the only way to have an equal society to shame boys into not having those feelings, or to limit those feelings to, say, artificial constructs (fiction and illustration).
Virtue in females is a commodity. Being a good provider is a commodity in males. It’s who we are - beasts of the field dressed in fancy threads. Being less in one is no more degrading than being less in the other.
Play the game and be smart about your behaviour - women have outplayed men in that regard for just as long as time itself. It’s all part of the great game - unfortunately I can’t disguise my inability to provide the fancy stuff.
It doesn’t have to be this way. “It’s who we are” only applies to some – many people reject such a notion, or never had it to begin with. Human behavior and societies can be wildly different and still thrive.
You haven’t done more than assert that it’s nature. The existence of societies, both modern and historical, without such a concept attests that it may not be “nature”. Further, many things that are “nature” have been overcome by most societies and most individuals.
Actually ‘collections’ may be overly optimistic phrasing.
Well… nah. That’s a valid statement, but it does not inform the question.
Ever heard the term “golddigger”? That’s the complaint of men being objectified for their financial means. Men can feel just as repulsed by golddigging as women do by sexual objectification, the only difference being that the man’s reaction tends to be governed less by principle than by a brief but thorough financial self-assessment.
In modern times, enclaves of most major cities, much of Europe, parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, parts of SE Asia and Japan, and more.
Historically, specific times and regions/cities in Ancient Greece and Rome, much or most of pre-contact Polynesian societies, countless tribal societies in South America, Africa, Australasia, and elsewhere, and probably many more.
If by “enclaves” you mean a well documented middle-class keen to distinguish itself from the hoi-polloi, then I would agree.
Look beyond the veneer of polite middle-class journalism - propagandising its own civilisation, or middle-class historians assessing the world through their eyes.
It was never intended to mean the same; I am attempting to explain where the attitudes come from. Again, you’re simplifying things into absurdity. You should not assume women only submitted to sex unwillingly even in chivalrous times. I (and clearly you in your post) were talking about the general attitudes of sex being a degrading act to a woman.
Your right, but that’s a strawman of my argument. I never took that as a logical conclusion. Both of these were observations of a prevailing theory of sexual selection in humans.
"A number of evolutionary psychologists, such as David Buss, have conducted studies which tend to indicate that this pattern may still be present in the human species. Buss has shown, for instance, that women accord more importance to a man’s financial prospects and social status, preferring men who are rich and of high social standing, as well as men who are older than they are. Such men can make a greater parental investment and thus contribute to the success of their offspring.
Men, for their part, prefer women who are younger than they are (age being an indicator of fertility). Men also accord greater importance to physical beauty (an indicator of health) and to body shape (they prefer women with a waist-to-hip ratio of less than 70%, another fertility indicator).
Of course, the human cortex, that generator and assimilator of human culture, adds other criteria for choosing a partner. But these predispositions from our evolutionary heritage can often still be discerned in our behaviour." http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/capsules/outil_bleu11.html
I don’t disagree that we should strive for equality as much as possible, but do so with science in mind. It’s always important to remain realistic, and if some barriers to equality aren’t realistic then learn to cope with reality.
I’m suggesting men aren’t capable of respecting non-virgins, virgins, other men, or their own mother’s as equals. No one is equal because everyone is different. Equality is a useful idea in some ways, but it’s clearly showing it’s shortcomings in this discussion. I’m suggesting that there may be some biological underpinnings to different cultural sexual standards between men and women that won’t ever be able to be fully resolved. Regardless, knowing the science behind them (if true) would only help us in trying to resolve them.
What did pre-contact Polynesian societies need to distinguish their behavior from? Or various scattered groups in the Amazon rainforest (and elsewhere) with completely different societal rules, taboos, and expectations about sex?