Double Edged-Sword

           While all readings that we have done so far have more or less been able to sway me in one way or another, this weeks topic of consent has left me straddling the middle line. I also think that looking at consent as whether or not it can truly been given during heterosexual sex is important when researching the greater power dynamics behind sexual encounters, but I feel that arguing that consent cannot truly be given in an unequal society takes away women’s agency to enjoy sex and be sex positive.

            Where I think this argument get slippery is the example that Gavey uses in her article when she is interviewing the subject “Lee.” I think that comparing her experience with some of the other women in the article who “gave” sex begrudgingly is problematic because this is so clearly an example of coercion. Gavey describes this excerpt as an example of how the “construction of sex as ‘ordinary’ perhaps works to reconcile a felt need to do it in the absence of one’s own sexual desire” (Gavey, 1999). I think that it’s problematic to compare this experience as being “’nothing’ for some women on some occasions” (Gavey, 1999), because sexual intercourse on the basis of coercion is by definition, rape.

            However, where I do feel that Gavey makes a very important point is in the interview with Sarah, where she felt that she had to “take care” of her partner because he had a hard on. I think that looking at this from Garvey’s perspective is important because we live in a world where women are socialized into thinking that it is a “woman’s duty” to take care of men sexually, despite what our feeling may be in that particular moment.

            While I think that there are many problematic points to the article done by Traister, I really liked the point that she made about the double standards that “continue to redound negatively to women” (Traister, 2015). Women are dealt with a double-edged sword when it comes to their sexuality; they are either a prude or a slut, a tease or a whore. This point that Traister makes in her article made me think of an exercise that I did in the first Women Studies class I took, where we wrote down all the positive and negative words associated with sex for either men or women. After we had exhausted all the terms that we could think of (i.e. stud, whore, etc.), it was astonishing to me to see on paper the difference in how we view men and women when looking at their sexuality.

            I may be way off on this, but thinking back to this exercise and the connecting it with the Gavey article, I feel that this could be one reason why women may continue to say yes to sexual encounters that they do not necessarily want to consent to. I think that agreeing to these encounters may leave women with the hopes of not having their sexuality being negatively labeled.