Evolution of female sexuality

take everything

Women fascinate me.
But the changes in female sexuality (psychosexuality if that's a word) especially in western women is something that I feel is both huge and not that well explored.

Men's sexuality is arguably simple and unchanging.
Women's is anything but.

This is a very sensitive issue so I'm conscious of choosing my words carefully.

Years ago, female sexuality was repressed (not a good thing). Nowadays with the advent of the internet/social networking especially it seems to have gone the other way.

A cursory look at this form of sexual expression, one could form the impression it is almost entirely fuelled by narcissism/attention/likes. And in the case of porn, money obviously. And of course, just getting off on it (maybe to a lesser extent?). But far more complex than male sexuality anyway.

Do women know what they want?
Is female sexuality far more varied than male sexuality?
Is the currency of female sexiness devalued with the plethora of sexual imagery? Just like any currency or power when you make it more commonplace. You see this with women duckfacing and baring more to beat the band in a kind of sexual arms race on social media etc.
Women who would have probably laughed at the idea of doing this years ago. The whole aping of porn culture (shaving etc) etc. Again something that people (both men and women) love to deny but which is glaringly obvious.

Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs talks about this. It wonders if women are just aping a man's version of what's sexy and just being co-opted into what men want. Instead of truly expressing their sexuality (personality and physical sexiness).

This post is a bit rambling because it's a potentially difficult and sensitive topic and I haven't expressed it well. But I just wanted to get opinions on this. And opinions on how/if male sexuality is changing in response.

Pat Mustard

take everything wrote: »

Men's sexuality is arguably simple and unchanging.

Interesting but I don't agree that men are unchanged by this.

Post sexual revolution, there is more availability of sex outside of traditional marriage. This affects men as well as women, obviously.

Thoie

Another way to look at it could be that the sexual repression experienced by both sexes in the last few hundred years was an anomaly that is now being corrected, and everyone is reverting back to openness. We don't really have many records of "daily life" before printing, but look at things like the Canterbury Tales (The Miller's Wife) written in the 1300s and "Alisoun" was certainly seemed to enjoy herself.

I suspect that women, and men, have always known what they want sexually, but it is only recently that people have started speaking about it again in public. Much like there's fashions in clothes, hair and makeup (for both sexes), it seemed for a long time that the fashion in sex was for women to be demure and inexperienced. That appears to be falling out of fashion, but it's slower than social media might make you think. You still find women hiding some of their past sexual experiences from partners so as not to appear "loose". I suspect it will take a while for everyone to grow out of that, as these attitudes are still being reinforced by parents/grandparents, and passing on to younger people that way.

Permabear

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silverharp

Permabear wrote: »

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given the high cost of sex before/outside of marriage in broader European society in the past was sexuality being supressed not the norm? there was clearly more decadent ages but was that more confined to smaller subsets of people?

Peregrinus

silverharp wrote: »

given the high cost of sex before/outside of marriage in broader European society in the past was sexuality being supressed not the norm? there was clearly more decadent ages but was that more confined to smaller subsets of people?

Depends, really.

For the great bulk of the population who had little or no property, the sexual instinct wasn't supressed out of fears for uncontrolled fertility would affect property. Life as a single parent was all but impossible so, if you had sex withs someone and a child resulted, you had little choice but to marry them. Particularly for women, this wasn't the result of social pressure but of economic necessity. They didn't have our romantic notions of marriage,; the object in marrying was to find someone who would make a good spouse which meant earning a reliable living in a husband; keeping a house and raising a family in a wife. But having sex with a good marriage prospect, getting pregnant and then getting married wasn't considered disgraceful; it was pretty normal. Having sex, pregnancy resulting but no marriage following was disreputable for a man, disastrous for a woman.

Matters were entirely different if you were from the privileged, property-owning minority. It mattered crucially to your family who you would marry, and therefore this was largely decided by your family. Sex outside marriage was a big no-no for women, except with a good prospect who was expected to marry her. Sex outside marriage was more acceptable for men, but not in the context of a romantic relationship, which was threatening to the prospects of a good marriage, or to the health of an existing marriage. So men could have sex with prostitutes, or a certain amount of casual sex.

In other words, the subset for whom the sexual life was relatively free of expectations and responsibility was not the top of society, but the bottom. For a man of no property and no trade, a woman with no expectations - nobody cared who they had sex with since they had, basically, nothing to lose.

There's a line in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall where Anne Boleyn's marriagability is called into question because of suggestions that, during a youthful infatuation, she exchanged vows with Harry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, unbeknownst to either of their families. If this is true, she is not free to marry the person her family intends for her (who, at this point in the history, is not Henry VIII but her Irish cousin, the Earl of Ormond). Percy's family also intend someone else for him. Cardinal Wolsey is called in to sort the matter out, which he does. Along the way he observes (of Harry Percy) something along the lines of "does he think he is a ploughboy, that he can choose his own wife?". And that about sums it up; a ploughboy could have sex with anybody who was willing and on any terms they might mutually agree; the heir to the Earl of Northumberland, not so much.

silverharp

Thats what I was getting at , that life was that hard for most people that the social norms had to reflect this because it wasnt far off a life or death issue. Young people being young people were going to break the rules but they would have to face the consequences, i wonder was there an older term for "shotgun wedding" ?

and indeed the upper class was more into capitalising on social status

Peregrinus

silverharp wrote: »

Thats what I was getting at , that life was that hard for most people that the social norms had to reflect this because it wasnt far off a life or death issue. Young people being young people were going to break the rules but they would have to face the consequences, i wonder was there an older term for "shotgun wedding" ?

The older term was "wedding", basically.

Until modern times, most people not in the small wealthy, propertied class married relatively informally. They got together, basically, with a suitable partner, they got pregnant, they moved in (in either order) and at some point they had a party.

silverharp wrote: »

and indeed the upper class was more into capitalising on social status

Everybody was into capitalising on social status, but relatively few people had any significant social status on which to capitalise. Generally speaking you were expected - and expected yourself - to marry someone of pretty much your own social status (and NB this is still largely true today), which mean serfs married serfs, peasants married peasants, etc. Marrying outside your social status was transgressive, and marrying within your social status, if it was a very high social status, was something to be very carefully negotiated.

Sex outside marriage - adultery - was condemned to the extent that it would threaten the marriage. But since a wealthy man couldn't possibly marry someone with the status of a prostitute or a maid, a married man committing adultery with a maid or a prostitute wasn't really opening up the possibility of an alternative marriage, so this wasn't so dreadful. A married woman, however, having sex with any man other than her husband risked foisting him with a false heir, to whom his property or some of it would eventually pass, and that was a big threat, so that was much worse.

But at the lower end of the social scale, the balance was different; a man married to (say) a barmaid having an affair with a different barmaid was potentially a big threat to his marriage, since he could plausibly leave one barmaid for the other. A woman married to a man of no property having an affair with another man of no property, still a threat to the marriage since she, too, could leave one man for the other, but there were no additional concerns about property, inheritance, etc.

silverharp

Peregrinus wrote: »

The older term was "wedding", basically.

Until modern times, most people not in the small wealthy, propertied class married relatively informally. They got together, basically, with a suitable partner, they got pregnant, they moved in (in either order) and at some point they had a party.


Everybody was into capitalising on social status, but relatively few people had any significant social status on which to capitalise. Generally speaking you were expected - and expected yourself - to marry someone of pretty much your own social status (and NB this is still largely true today), which mean serfs married serfs, peasants married peasants, etc. Marrying outside your social status was transgressive, and marrying within your social status, if it was a very high social status, was something to be very carefully negotiated.

Sex outside marriage - adultery - was condemned to the extent that it would threaten the marriage. But since a wealthy man couldn't possibly marry someone with the status of a prostitute or a maid, a married man committing adultery with a maid or a prostitute wasn't really opening up the possibility of an alternative marriage, so this wasn't so dreadful. A married woman, however, having sex with any man other than her husband risked foisting him with a false heir, to whom his property or some of it would eventually pass, and that was a big threat, so that was much worse.

But at the lower end of the social scale, the balance was different; a man married to (say) a barmaid having an affair with a different barmaid was potentially a big threat to his marriage, since he could plausibly leave one barmaid for the other. A woman married to a man of no property having an affair with another man of no property, still a threat to the marriage since she, too, could leave one man for the other, but there were no additional concerns about property, inheritance, etc.

you can look at it through biological drives and wants , men want parental certainty and don't want to use resources to raise kids that aren't theirs. Woman want as guaranteed an access to resources as possible to help support themselves and kids. There was probably a lot of internal policing, the women of an area would probably be suspicious of a particular woman if that woman was seen as a threat to "steal" their husbands for example? and then maybe prostitution was seen as a lesser "evil" as they weren't a particular threat to marriages.

Permabear

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Peregrinus

Permabear wrote: »

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Being more frank and open about the discussion of sexuality, though, is not the same as being more permissive in relation to sexual activity or expression. It's possible to speak very freely about sex and to celebrate sexuality, and at the same time to have very firm views about what forms of sexual expression are good/permissible and what are not. In fact, the Kama Sutra is largely devoted to this; it's only in the sex-obsessed, prurient modern western society that mainly thinks of the Kama Sutra as a manual of sex positions and sexual technique. Similarly, the society that produced Ars Amatoria also practiced severe repression and control of female sexuality.

The "forces that contribute most to the suppression of sexuality" for most of history have been (a) the link between sexuality and fertility, and (b) the economic dependence of women on men. These predate both Islam and Christianity, and of course operated in societies untouched by either Islam or Christianity. In our own society both forces have diminished (they both still exist, but to a materially lesser degree) and this has led, in a couple of generations, to a rapid change in sexual mores. But since this happened in the society which, globally speaking, is the one most profoundly influenced by Christianity, it doesn't really bear out the theory that Christianity is uniquely or unusually repressive of sexuality.

silverharp

Ancient China as well too i believe was quite restrictive.

Peregrinus

Pretty well all societies were, though the restrictions varied according to the circumstances and needs of the particular society.

Aboriginal Australian societies didn't have property or inheritance issues and therefore there were no sexual mores intended to protect property. But they lived in small, closely-related communities and they had elaborate and extended taboos which functioned to discourage inbreeding. Plus, as hunter-gatherers they had a subsistence level of existence which crucially depended on assigned roles within the family - who would hunt and who would gather, whose responsibility it was to provide for who - and family breakdown could have catastrophic consequences for the survival of the group. So there were a further set of mores and conventions intended to minimise the risk of spouses embarking on relationships which would threaten the stability of the family unit.

Our own society is not without its restrictions. While we think of ourselves of living in a time of sexual liberation, as compared with 100 or 150 years ago our mores are in some respects more restrictive. The taboo on sex between adults and children/adolescents, for example, is much stronger, and much more strongly felt, than was the case a couple of generations back. Current preoccupations with consent in relationships between adults didn't exist in anything like the same way until relatively recently. It's only in our own time that anybody has thought that there might be a possibility of bringing legal action against someone who infects you with an STD. We live in a time where an adult who doesn't marry (or form a conjugal relationship) is regarded with suspicion, in a way that wasn't the case in the past. increasingly, if a couple are publicly living in a conjugal relationship we treat them for official and administrative purposes as we treat a married couple, regardless of whether they seek or welcome this treatment. And so forth.

That's not to deny that there has been genuine relaxing of previously-accepted restrictions, specifically with regard to sex between unmarried people. But I think what we have is different restraints, restrictions, conventions, etc regarding how sexuality is expressed, not fewer or no such things.

silverharp

Peregrinus wrote: »

Pretty well all societies were, though the restrictions varied according to the circumstances and needs of the particular society.

Aboriginal Australian societies didn't have property or inheritance issues and therefore there were no sexual mores intended to protect property. But they lived in small, closely-related communities and they had elaborate and extended taboos which functioned to discourage inbreeding. Plus, as hunter-gatherers they had a subsistence level of existence which crucially depended on assigned roles within the family - who would hunt and who would gather, whose responsibility it was to provide for who - and family breakdown could have catastrophic consequences for the survival of the group. So there were a further set of mores and conventions intended to minimise the risk of spouses embarking on relationships which would threaten the stability of the family unit.

Our own society is not without its restrictions. While we think of ourselves of living in a time of sexual liberation, as compared with 100 or 150 years ago our mores are in some respects more restrictive. The taboo on sex between adults and children/adolescents, for example, is much stronger, and much more strongly felt, than was the case a couple of generations back. Current preoccupations with consent in relationships between adults didn't exist in anything like the same way until relatively recently. It's only in our own time that anybody has thought that there might be a possibility of bringing legal action against someone who infects you with an STD. We live in a time where an adult who doesn't marry (or form a conjugal relationship) is regarded with suspicion, in a way that wasn't the case in the past. increasingly, if a couple are publicly living in a conjugal relationship we treat them for official and administrative purposes as we treat a married couple, regardless of whether they seek or welcome this treatment. And so forth.

That's not to deny that there has been genuine relaxing of previously-accepted restrictions, specifically with regard to sex between unmarried people. But I think what we have is different restraints, restrictions, conventions, etc regarding how sexuality is expressed, not fewer or no such things.

All societies had to have rules in this area, there was no welfare state or contraception. In the generality of history men were disposable and women protected because a society could lose half its men and continue but wouldn't if the women faced the same risks. So I'd imagine for example polygamy was a reasonable solution in the middle east back in the day if there was a high attrition of males and where basic resources were scares. and various societies had rules where widows would have to be looked after by inlaws.

In the current age there still needs to be "rules" or ethics, good parents will still teach their kids not to get pregnant young or by accident because it will ruin their lives relatively speaking. All the consent stuff doesn't have any socioeconomic reasoning behind it, its more ideological and partially because it seems if people have it good to begin with their tolerances drop to hair trigger levels of stress for some. Today it seems at the extreme that 2 people if immediately asked after sex was that "fun" they could say yes but in the fullness of time one of the parties might think they had been raped and certainly something that couldn't have been imagined a hundred years ago