Sexual gratification

Subject: Sexual gratification.

Harvey Weinstein has rightly received the ire of society for his behaviour towards women, especially women who in trying to further their career in the film industry succumbed to his desire to be sexually intimate.
It's an industry which was known for the 'casting couch' in which very attractive young girls and women were seduced to believe that bestowing favours was a way of getting an acting part.

It has to said from the start that I have no sympathy for the man who prowls the clubs and bars looking to pick up women and when rejected he resorts to force. Rape is a terrible experience for a woman to go through and men caught forcing their attentions on a girl deserve all they get.

Listening to the many caller's, talk show hosts and newspaper columnists, the world is awash with bad men who commit unspeakable violence on women. The callers  especially have horrific stories of abuse and one begins to feel distinctly queasy being a man.

There are of course the cultural practices in Africa and Asia where women are chattels in the hands of husbands. The second class nature within these societies of women goes back thousands of years and it's unlikely that much will change.

In the West there has been a slow burn revolution which has sought to empathise the doctrine of equality between people, regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual proclivity and just about everything which claims to be part of humanity. Man from being the leader, the role setter has succumbed to being the onlooker as new and more extravagant claims are made for equal rights.

This is not a bad thing in itself but poses many difficult decisions, largely for men as their political and social hegemony is questioned. Under these conditions it seems a bit rich to decry men in the West who have come a long way in righting a wrong but a wrong which would be refuted by 4/5th of human beings across the world at large.

        Having recast the record in some sort of perspective ( a man's perspective), in certain societies it is no less true that from the time of Cleopatra to Bridget Bardot, women have used their beauty, their curvature, their sex appeal to help persuade men along a path of a woman's making.  

On the one hand sex is a commodity which can be used by a woman and turned to a woman's advantage, on the other, sex is used against women, (predominantly by men) as force majure, to effect their subordination.
It's a conundrum. 
It could be argued that part of a woman's emotional development, from childhood, is the belief in the need to accentuate their looks with products which highlight or hide their features. From lipstick and highlighter, to false eyelashes, Botox injections and at the extreme, 'the boob job'.  It could also be argued that this is a behavioural practice is to ensnare the male for purposes which they hope to benefit from in the future ?

Skimpy skirts, and ever more revealing blouses, young girls head out on the town, even on a freezing cold winters night. They stagger off preloaded with drink, their behaviour feeding the inbuilt voyeurism of the male, a process undeniably of overt sexuality.
Feminists scream that it is a woman's right to wear what ever they wish and that it is the man's responsibility to control his urge in believing that there is more on offer than there is.

The confusion comes when in fact everything is on offer and it's discerning 'when it isn't', that the problem arises.
How can men be expected to define a woman's intention ?
Do men assume that that the women he sees in the street and in the pub are only playacting, innocently  on 'Parade' as it were, even if they are scantily dressed, revealing  themselves as lewd and permissive, when in fact that is the last thing on their minds.

Perhaps it's all only a game played with the male subordinate to a woman's intention,  the archetypal  dumb idiot, awaiting a signal which only 'she' can give and which, at any time, can be cancelled. 
Her actions, often ambiguous and potentially dangerous, place the man in a minefield, one false move and he is finished.
It's all so far from a  Brontesque drama where the convolutions required to make your intentions known would take weeks of careful planning.
It has to be emphasised, we are not talking of rape. We are talking of being encouraged to believe that sex is part of the consensual process,  only to find that a change of mind has taken place. 
Of course it was traditional that the 'perfectly normal', sexual arousal within a man is controlled by the woman. In the old days, contraception other than saying no, was not available and when a mistaken pregnancy occurred it was the woman who picked up the tab. Today the unwanted pregnancy should be a thing of the past. The Pill, the morning after Pill and the back up of the abortion clinic, leads one to believe that a women, claiming an unwanted pregnancy, was deceiving herself to deceive others.
Perhaps we have moved into the phantasmagoric world of "maybe" !!  

Perhaps it was always so. Perhaps the intrigue between a man and a woman has this dynamic tension at the heart of everything, the 'forbidden fruit' syndrome.
We still live in a world where the old fashioned morality of the weaker sex, identified by Bronte, is still valued and finds proper representation in law. From a time when the sight of a woman's ankle was enough to send a man crazy, is still assumed and that women need protection.

It's as if society is programmed to be blind to a woman's role in the inter action, its as if they are merely perfunctory, rather than adversarial.  The woman's performance is a routine which is theirs to perform without any sense of ownership, without any responsibility for the outcome.
Different societies have different views. The Muslim and the Orthodox Jews go to great lengths to prevent this clash of desire and orthodoxy, whilst we, in the secular West have presumed to muddle through, attaching great stead on 'personal control' which is presumed enough. 
Without any overt demand on one or other party, this works, but when one side decides to flaunt the rules and demands that they see no need for rules or sensible modes of conduct on their part, then the unholy alliance of 'luck' and the passivity of the newly 'conditioned' male must see them through the night. Unfortunately it still leaves the chance of that sour  taste of misunderstanding, even the pangs of regret in the morning which could lead to accusation and for all hell to be let loose.
Of course the main question is, "what happened to femininity".  Not the feminist movement, but femininity.   In their competition to 'out lad the lads' women have destroyed the mystique they once held. The mysticism, the coyness which is so beguiling, that quality of shyness and modesty which sets us so naturally apart.  As the girls reveal their own basic grossness, sex for sexes sake, much like that which traditionally depicts the male, then the unique difference, male and female, as friends with a potential chemistry to be more than friends, is lost in the urgency for sexual gratification. 

The question that should be ask is, what is sex ?  How is the non liner attraction, the driving force of our life on this planet to be understood.  Not in the context of our convoluted rules of engagement but in our understanding of its importance as the supreme creative force which binds us