Fertility and Female Sexuality: Revisiting the ‘Sexual Revolution’

Metascience ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-105
Author(s):  
Rebecca Gill
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Revolution

Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy F. Baumeister ◽  
Jean M. Twenge
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Limited Resource ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Sexual Deception ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Cultural Suppression ◽  
Female Genital

Four theories about cultural suppression of female sexuality are evaluated. Data are reviewed on cross-cultural differences in power and sex ratios, reactions to the sexual revolution, direct restraining influences on adolescent and adult female sexuality, double standard patterns of sexual morality, female genital surgery, legal and religious restrictions on sex, prostitution and pornography, and sexual deception. The view that men suppress female sexuality received hardly any support and is flatly contradicted by some findings. Instead, the evidence favors the view that women have worked to stifle each other's sexuality because sex is a limited resource that women use to negotiate with men, and scarcity gives women an advantage.

Sexual Economics: Sex as Female Resource for Social Exchange in Heterosexual Interactions

2004 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy F. Baumeister ◽  
Kathleen D. Vohs
Keyword(s):  
Social Exchange ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Attitudes ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Female Competition ◽  
Sexual Activities ◽  
Sexual Economics ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Cultural Suppression

A heterosexual community can be analyzed as a marketplace in which men seek to acquire sex from women by offering other resources in exchange. Societies will therefore define gender roles as if women are sellers and men buyers of sex. Societies will endow female sexuality, but not male sexuality, with value (as in virginity, fidelity, chastity). The sexual activities of different couples are loosely interrelated by a marketplace, instead of being fully separate or private, and each couple's decisions may be influenced by market conditions. Economic principles suggest that the price of sex will depend on supply and demand, competition among sellers, variations in product, collusion among sellers, and other factors. Research findings show gender asymmetries (reflecting the complementary economic roles) in prostitution, courtship, infidelity and divorce, female competition, the sexual revolution and changing norms, unequal status between partners, cultural suppression of female sexulity, abusive relationships, rape, and sexual attitudes.

Female Sexuality

1973 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Active Member ◽  
Women's Liberation Movement ◽  
Great Satisfaction ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Women’S Liberation Movement

When I was first invited to give this year's Marie Stopes Memorial Lecture I had to express my reservations, as my ignorance of Marie Stopes' work was, I'm afraid, profound. I was assured that the talk could simply be on any area relevant or only indirectly related to Marie Stopes' work. I assumed from this that the reason for my invitation was to associate Marie Stopes' achievements with the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. Since those days of pristine ignorance two things have happened to me. First, I have now read a certain amount on and by Marie Stopes, and second, I have read the lecture that Laurie Taylor gave here last year entitled ‘Marie Stopes—The Unfinished Sexual Revolution—but also extremely annoying. Here was a man extraordinarily sensitive to the facile male chauvinism of his predecessors: those biographers who had let a stuffy nervousness about Marie Stopes' stress on her own life-long sexual needs mar their tale, often turning an adventurous and unconventional woman into a disturbed and frustrated eccentric: someone who was not a ‘fuffilled’ woman. In his talk Laurie Taylor more than righted the balance for he not only corrected the priggish sexism of others, and was himself unusually free from it, but, moreover, he managed to place Stopes' work in a context of serious theories of sexual revolution. In other words, on reading last year's lecture I found my task already done. It is a rare and pleasant occasion when one can defer to the anti-male chauvinism of a male critic, and I do so with great satisfaction. In fact I wish to do more than to defer to it; I wish to take advantage of it. For I want today to use Marie Stopes merely as a jumping-off point, only vaguely relating her preoccupations to those of the contemporary Women's Liberation Movement. I am afraid I even want to be critical of aspects of her great achievement in spreading birth control and gynaecological health in a way for which, goodness knows, we are all most grateful today. For an active member of the Women's Liberation Movement to come and speak in honour of one of the women who in this century has done so much for women and ignore that honour or even turn it to criticism, is, I'm afraid, a dishonourable act. I feel I've been asked here in double trust and I am, in a way, going to abuse both.

scholarly journals ENTRE RETICENCIA E INSISTENCIA: LA REVOLUCIÓN SEXUAL INACABADA DE DORIS LESSING EN THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 270
Author(s):  
Francisco José Cortés Vieco
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Sexual Revolution ◽  
Doris Lessing ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Sexualidad Femenina ◽  
Siglo Xx

ResumenEntre dolor y placer, demencia y recuperación mental, The Golden Notebook de Doris Lessing es un compendio enciclopédico y literario sobre la introspección psicológica, la autonomía asertiva con fines reivindicativos, la despenalización ideológica y la desmitificación artística de la sexualidad femenina en Inglaterra durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. No obstante, esta obra polifónica y poliédrica se debate entre su empuje pionero como panacea de la Revolución Sexual en este período y su reserva al proclamar el hito histórico de la equiparación de los derechos civiles, fisiológicos y emocionales de la mujer contemporánea con respecto a los del hombre.Palabras clave: sexualidad, mujer, hombre, amor, coito, liberación, dependencia, locura.English title: Between Reluctance and Insistence. The Incomplete Sexual Revolution inThe Golden Notebook by Doris LessingAbstract: Ranging from pain to pleasure, madness to mental recovery, British writer Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is an encyclopaedic, literary compendium regarding women’s psychological introspection, self-assertion, and search for validation, ideological decriminalization and aesthetic demythologizing of female sexuality in post-war England. Nevertheless, this polyphonic, polyhedral novel struggles between its decisive impetus towards the 1960s Sexual Revolution, and the author’s alleged reluctance to proclaim - by comparison with the powerful position of men - the historical landmark of women’s egalitarian rights in terms of social status, bodily enjoyment, emotional fulfilment and independence.Key words: sexuality, woman, man, love, coitus, emancipation, dependence, madness.

Cript Sexuality in Happy Days

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-222
Author(s):  
Elaine Wood
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Social Perceptions ◽  
Crip Theory

This article examines the figure of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, demonstrating how Beckett's staging of her queer/disabled existence might be read as subversively disruptive to social perceptions of able-bodiedness and ‘crippling’ stereotypes about disability and desirability. At the intersection of ‘crip theory’ – related to disability and queer studies, and scholarship on ‘cryptonymy’ – an encrypted language initiated by psychic processes, ‘Cript Sexuality in Happy Days’ argues that Winnie uses pain and immobility as her inspiration for song as Beckett's drama ultimately challenges pre-‘scripted’ roles for female sexuality by bringing occluded aspects of the sexualized disabled body into visibility.

Queer Seductions of the Maternal in Dorothy Macardle's Earth-bound

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-308
Author(s):  
Abigail L. Palko
Keyword(s):  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Maternal Attitudes ◽  
Female Autonomy ◽  
National Autonomy ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Sacrifice

During her lifetime, Dorothy Macardle was a prominent public intellectual in both her native Ireland and post-war Europe. Her passionate engagement in Irish nationalism found expression in her writing; in her only collection of short stories, Earth-bound: Nine Stories of Ireland, published early in her writing career, she protests Irish women's socially restricted status and offers literary models of female solidarity to her audience (her fellow prisoners in Kilmainham Gaol, where she was imprisoned during the Civil War). Complex and ambiguous messages regarding maternal attitudes and female sexuality are encoded within the collection, particularly in the two Maeve stories (as I have labelled them because of their shared narrator), ‘The Return of Niav’ and ‘The Portrait of Roisin Dhu’, in which she offers coded expressions of the realities of women's lives in early twentieth-century Ireland that the larger public would have preferred remain unspoken, particularly with regard to expressions of maternal inclinations and female sexuality. Earth-bound, driven by her reactions to the many ways that the Irish struggle for national autonomy was purchased by the sacrifice of female autonomy, becomes a vehicle through which she explores socially taboo issues, most notably mothering practices and both heterosexual and homosexual expressions of female sexuality.

Indian Sex Life

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Durba Mitra
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Social Progress ◽  
Indian Society ◽  
Global History ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
History Of

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.

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