This week offered some really interesting material to consider. As a gay man, I’m not the most familiar with the female anatomy and so i’d never considered how the oppression of women could hamper their sex life. I mean sure, I’ve seen popular culture float the rumor that the female orgasm can be elusive but this is something deeper. The female sexual experience has been shaped to accommodate the male ego and to benefit their male counterparts. Koedt states that “…Because of the lack of knowledge of their own anatomy, some women accept the idea that an orgasm felt during “normal” intercourse was vaginally caused.” I could only imagine what this must be like, especially for those who are married.
The American dream is starting to sound pretty awful at this point. I don’t have female family members, at least as far as I can recall, who aspired to live the life of a suburban housewife. But I did get to watch my stepmother try and listened to my mom complain about how she felt she was ‘losing herself’ when she tried to play the perfect housewife. This echoed the claims that Freidan made in The Feminine Mystique. “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.”
My classmate, Sadira Mohammed, posted a meme of a 1950’s housewife with a quote that reads “I don’t need rights-I have a Kitchen”. It reminded me of old war propaganda used to glorify the terrors of war. In all that we’ve learned, I feel pretty crappy as a man. Mainardt states that “It is a traumatizing experience for someone who has always thought of himself as being against any oppression or exploitation of one human being by another to
realize that in his daily life he has been accepting and implementing (and benefiting from) this exploitation..” But I also feel armed to go out and actually make informed decisions that go against the status quo.
I had some really great conversations with my female best friend after completing the reading for this week. I think I’d like to shop these same conversations around with my dad and uncle. I wonder what the experience is like for a heterosexual male to come to the same conclusions that I have; if there experience is different being fathers themselves. My father has been married twice and both women attempted to, unsuccessfully I might add, be a housewife. I would wager that a large part of that had to do with how much emphasis he places on men being the head of household.
