While We're on the Subject of Female Want...

Women's sexual desire is still taboo.

I recently wrote about the fact that women are not entitled to their wants in the form of their ambitions and goals. If women do have ambitions and goals, they must always be purely in selfless servitude to others, and devoid of any ego or pride.

But there is another want to which women are not entitled, one of the most basic wants – sex. Desire. Women are not entitled to their sexual desire, unless it is for the sole purpose of the male gaze. I have long said that if women don’t have basic equality between the sheets, it will be difficult for us to have equality anywhere else. I wrote about this topic here several years ago.

Recently my husband and I were watching the show “Harlots,” set in 18th century England about – you guessed it - harlots. In one episode, a young woman is caught taking a literal roll in the hay in a barn with her lover, and enjoying the hell out of herself. She is immediately jailed in Bedlam, London’s “hospital” for the mentally ill.

Now, this is a show about harlots – women who service men sexually and are paid for their services. In this world, male desire is recognized and appreciated by everyone and men are clearly entitled to their desire. But women are not. Unless it is for the sole purpose of pleasing a man, as is the case for a harlot, and then it is not just accepted but expected. The harlots are free to enjoy themselves sexually, but if they are not enjoying themselves, they are expected to pretend. Female pleasure is ok occasionally, as long as it is for the express, sole purpose of a man’s pleasure.

Yes, the show is fictional. But its ideology is not. Nor is it an ideology that is relegated to the distant past. Or even...the past.

I was curious, so I googled “women jailed for enjoying sex.” It takes a lot to surprise me in terms of how women have been treated historically, but boy howdy was I shocked to learn some of the new, awful tidbits I discovered.

Of course, many of us know women were hospitalized for “hysteria,” which encompassed everything from masturbation to cramps to depression to merely being outspoken, but wait, there's (so much) more! In addition to this, I learned that from the early 1900s through the 1970s, (THE NINETEEN SEVENTIES!) under the “American Plan,” thousands of women were jailed in the United States for even the SUSPICION of the possibility of having any sort of STI. In some instances, women were jailed simply for being in public without a male escort. They were forced to submit to humiliating examinations, and if they did have an STI, they could be injected with mercury or force-fed arsenic. They were often beaten, hosed down with cold water, and sterilized.

The reasoning? STIs were rampant in “our boys” in uniform, so filthy women must have been to blame, and hence punished. To review: two people engaged in the same act, there was a consequence to that act (in this case, STIs), but only one of the people who engaged in the act is held accountable and made to suffer punishment. Sound familiar? The more things don’t change…

It is wild to me that men and women can be having sex and passing STIs back and forth to each other, but only the women bear the blame. Men are entitled to their desire. Women must be punished for theirs. And not only that, women must be punished for any consequences men incur as a result of their own male desire.

Women in the public arena are especially scrutinized for anything remotely related to sex. If you are a woman and have the audacity to have want in the form of ambition, you HAD BETTER NOT have a SHRED of sexual desire. And if you do, you'd best keep it to yourself and never, ever act on it.

Women's sexual desire is still taboo.

Look at what happened in this last presidential election. In 2020 it was “Joe and the ho!” This time, in the 2024 election, all I heard was that Harris got where she got “on her knees,” and of course, it was again repeated that she is a general ho bag. Many times I saw these comments from women.

The disconnect with statements like these is frightening. I know the women making these comments aren’t virgins. In fact, I know a lot of them have had a decent amount of peen in them. But we are so steeped in the patriarchy, they are so removed from the meaning of their words, these women don’t realize the exact same thing could be said about them. If Harris is a “ho” for having sex, I’ve got news for you, so are you.

But these women can’t see that because, “That ho must be other. She’s not me. I’m a good girl, even though I’ve seen more Ds than a high school dropout.”

Somehow this thought protects them. Bad girls and "hoes" like Harris get what they deserve. They are insulted. They are harassed. They are raped. (This argument is always trotted out in rape cases. "Did the victim engage in sex anytime prior to the rape? Yes? Well then she's a "ho" and that's why she was raped! No one to blame but herself.")

By classifying themselves as "good girls," and othering the "hoes," (despite the fact that there isn't much that is "other" about those "hoes"), these women create a sense of false safety and security for themselves, along with aligning themselves with the system in power - the patriarchy.

On one thread a woman commented that Harris is a “cocksucker.” I commented back to her to ask, “Have you ever had a dick in your mouth? If you haven’t, I feel bad for any of your partners. If you have, congratulations! You’re a cocksucker too!”

What is the message behind these comments? That, if you’re a woman and you have lofty ambitions like running for public office, you had better remain a virgin until married and then only bang to reproduce? And definitely, never ever engage in oral sex? Seems reasonable…

Meanwhile he-who-shall-not-be-named has had multiple documented affairs, lusted after HIS DAUGHTER on a prominent radio show, banged a porn star while his wife was pregnant, has violated women and girls at a pageant by walking in on them while they were dressing, and has been accused and convicted of sexual assault. All fine. Probably somehow women’s fault anyway. Men are not only entitled to their wants and their desires, they are entitled to violating women and girls if that is where their wants and desires lead.

Can you even imagine anything as silly as a man being ridiculed for his sexual desire, ridiculed for having sex? It's laughable. Men are entitled to their desires. Women are not.

The root causes for these inequities are the same: misogyny and the patriarchy. Until these ideologies are dismantled, women aren't going to be any more entitled to what we want in bed (or against a wall, or in the shower, or on a boulder in the great outdoors…) than we are in the workplace, politics, and especially in the White House.