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Amaros -> RE: An Education on Fantasy. (10/3/2006 7:39:02 AM)
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I think that's pretty insightful treswank, male sexaul behavior tends to be more overt and it's encouraged by the culture of instant gratification, whereas a similar earthiness in women has been traditionally discouraged. Instead, a sort of "purified" abstraction of a feminine ideal is held up as an example, while women themselves, who naturally cannot live up to this ideal, either learn to live with being so imperfect, often at the cost of their self esteem, or become neurotic trying.
In fact I'm not sure how much of this is innate, and how much is cultural - in other cultures higher degrees of sexual aggressivness in women is tolerated without comment.
The "look but don't touch" element of American sexuality - Cheesecake, the big cock tease, sets up the perfect conditions for pornography to flourish - and a lot of other less desireable things. The obsession with pedophilia for example is much less prevelant in Europe, as far as I can tell, and seems uniquely American, another reaction formation against sexual repreassion, and it would be interesting to see how Rape and Domestic violence statistics compare as well.
Freuds theory of diverted cathexes held a lot of traction throughout most of the Twentieth century in America, with brief departures - the postwar periods following WWI the twenties and Thirties, and WWII notably - the latter however, turned into a bizzarre drug culture, and I'm not talking about the hippies, I'm talking about cocktail party culture, and heavily sedated housewives (Stepford syndrome) which the baby boomers turned on it's ear, restoring a bit of normalcy in the wake.
Pornography is a mediator in this, IMO, by providing a fantasy outlet for sexual aggression, and easing the frustration of the compulsion for the seemingly unattainable - in porn, women are typically enthusiastic, loving, and appreciative of male sexuality, and in the famous Playboy study done in the Eighties to counter the Reagan DOJ attempt to criminalize pronography, men who consumed porn were found to have more respect and less aggressive attitudes towards women.
I think it probobly represents a healthier balance of the actual natural degree of sexual attraction that exists between men and women.
At the same time, the repression also seems to encourage more aggressive types of porn itself, rape and forced sex fantasies, etc., which may have some slightly different effects on expectations, but still far short of the compulsion enabler (poor impulse control) that some try to make it out to be - I still believe repression itself the most focal role in that via reaction formation.
I don't think it's a coincidence that androcentripetal agrarian/pastoral civilizations where women are simulataneously worshipped in abstraction and degraded in practice also tend to be the martial and militant.
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