In yesterday’s post, I pointed out that the photographs accompanying an article on women’s desire in The New York Times were all of women. They looked desirable, but had little to do with what women desire. For that, according to the piece itself, the photos should have been of men. Men’s faces thrown back in ecstasy, perhaps. Men’s stomachs and chests. Not women’s.
Freud said women’s desire was “a dark continent.” No, it is a continent obscured by the insistence of one point of view over another. Unfortunately, that point of view is not women’s.
Thank you, love goddess for waking us up once again(hey there, Sleeping Beauty, get up!) to the fact that so many depictions of women’s experiences are just that- depictions-and not what is actually happening to women.
Idealized, maybe? Contrived, surely. Canned, oh yes.
Such imaginings(go back to “Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover”) lead us to think and even consider pretending that these ecstatic and supposedly erotic responses are expected and not pressured responses and should be duplicated by us in the “act”.
Yes, robbed again of our own real responses (probably not quite as pretty as depicted by the male photographer) but if we are aware of the travesty of this on-going male eroticisized depiction, we might not be robbed of our truly felt and uniquely responses.
Again thank you for the wake-up call.
yes, I agree. We never see men in the throws of passion, it’s always a woman. Think about movies for a minute. Isn’t it always the woman you see lost in the moment?
I happen to feel that as women we know what it takes for a man to feel desired, too. Why is it always about them having the control?
As women who have evolved and learned so much more today, we, too can be in the driver’s seat.
There is no question that we know how…