Sunday, March 8, 2009

Sex was never boring

Among the several theories that may seem easy but is complicated to understand is on the whole notion of sexuality and the politics of gender as for many years, there have been debates on the domination of the female gender or the male gender in various fields. Such was formed out of the female’s desire to gain equal treatment as compared to the male gender; hence the birth of Feminism.
However, the whole notion of Feminism is widely debated, with different beliefs and notion of what is the source of the problem that the phallic remains superior. Feminism is divided into four groups, that is liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism, and postmodern feminism. All four have clear points, but however, all four of them have loopholes, thus, making their beliefs problematic.
First, let us discuss liberal feminism. In this type of feminism, the main objective it wants is for women to be given rights and ultimately, to work like men. It is good in the sense that it addresses the problem of the legal system being too much in favor of men, but it is still considered to be problematic in the sense that it does not totally address the equality issue properly as their argument would end up with women being identified as men and not as women, which was addressed with the postmodern feminism.
As for socialist feminism, the problem with the economy is addressed through the payment of the wife, who would stay at home to take care of the child, for her duties in forming and rearing the child so that it grows up to be of good use in society. The problem here is that there is no basis on how the wife should be paid, and that it makes love and commitment a commodity, of which cannot happen. In the end, what social feminists are doing to women is that women are treated as a “necessity” for men and society, hence further stripping women of their rights, which liberal feminists were able to address.
Radical feminism takes steps a bit “beyond borders” as it sources the problem at the physical characteristics of the woman. As a resolution, radical feminism aims to create a woman dominating structure through going beyond the body of the woman and creating a reversion of the roles of the male and the female, which is problematic because first it creates a overly dominating woman sphere, and second, their beliefs are just as problematic as that of liberal feminism as the reversal of identity is the same as distorting the identity of the woman into that of a man, which for me is the primary reason why radical feminism is the most problematic of the four types of feminism discussed.
As for postmodern feminism, in my opinion this has to be the least problematic and easiest to understand form of feminism as it properly addresses the identity of women properly through the reformation of women’s way of writing as stories with broken narratives and illogical sequences rather than writing in a phallocentric manner like how men would write, having stories following a single climactic scene. It is similar with radical feminism but it addresses the identity of women in a more rational way.
In light of the issue of sexuality, Michel Foucault, in his book The History of Sexuality, further goes in depth about sexuality, giving the notion of understanding sex as the master explainer behind everything. In his book, he made a clear, elaborated point that even if the Victorian era made an emphasis that sex was considered a taboo and must not be talked about in public, while at the same time people are the more tempted to talk about sex in private, a result of the repressive hypothesis, Foucualt said that sex was never repressed in the first place. The repression issue was just an illusion for people to comply.
In addition, Foucault wants us to understand that such is being done in order to make sex of something useful and productive in society, just in the same light of the birth of the prison as a form of punishment in his other book, Discipline and Punish. Through the use of power, the state has found a way in making the use of sex as “productive” through various sources of power such as the Christian pastoral, the field of medicine, and the like. For the former, as pastors act as shepherds, their role is to be a consultant to the confessor at the confession box, resulting with the confession box as a box wherein the individual asks help in order to improve his/ her sex life, thus giving the pastor the power to “discipline” the sexual desires of the individual.
The rationale behind the “trimming” of sexual practices is in order for the state to first manage the population well and second, in order to prevent individuals from the state to practice unorthodox sex, such as necrophilia, pedophilia, bestiality, and the like. Hence, the objective of repressing sex is to trim the extreme aspects of sex, as there is a multiple center of production, of which Foucualt points out as the general problem of Feminism, as feminism tends to concentrate on one aspect wherein the role of gender involves multiple sources, hence the role and power of gender involving pluralistic sources of power.

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