Kate Taylor gets it

I find it fascinating that writers from other countries get this issue perfectly while Americans, not so much. Guess that's up to me, and while I do have a ton of projects on my plate, I've narrowed down the focus and come up with witty chapter titles and have been reading books like J.K. King's On The Down Low and looking at boobiesexuals and other examples of, well, I need to think of a word for it, but the opposite of sexual freedom.

But I'll just let the brilliant Kate Taylor take it away in her piece "Being loved for your body" in the Mail & Guardian Online:

...labouring to look like Pamela Anderson is not empowering. We’re not trying to be empowered. The twentysomething women I know don’t care about old-style feminism. Partly this is because they already see themselves as equal to men: they can work, they can vote, they can bonk on the first date. For younger women, raunch is not about feminism, it’s just about fashion.

Another reason for the rise of raunch is that women are rediscovering the joy of being loved for their bodies, not just their minds. Today, sexes mix a lot more than they used to, so boys grow up having girls as friends. They tend to listen to what women have to say, and when they marry they don’t consider sharing the housework to be castrating. Instead of desperately longing for the right to be seen as human beings, today’s girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects.

This is not terrible news. In fact, this is the ultimate feminist ideal, which Levy would realise if she stopped shouting at MTV for a moment and thought about it. She proclaims that boob jobs and crop tops “don’t bring us any closer to the fundamental feminist project of allowing every woman to be her own, specific self’’. But what if a woman’s “own, specific self’’ is a thong-wearing, Playboy-T-shirted specific self who thinks lap dancing is a laugh and likes getting wolf-whistled at by builders?

This also echoes but one tiny bit of a brilliant book coming out soon called I Love You, Nice To Meet You by Kevin Bleyer and Lori Gottlieb, in which each (both straight, both friends, both single) tackle various topics on relationships and sex. In the porn chapter, he defends guys' love for porn while she talks about posing for an amateur photo site:

For the next week, I kept thinking about the men who had clicked on my photo. Instead of feeling uncomfortable, I wondered if they missed me. I wanted them to miss me.

And that's what most women won't admit: Naked women have tremendous power-and we enjoy that power. But we're also keenly aware (and afraid) of other women's power. We don't mind being gawked at or objectified. It's the gawking at and objectification of other women that threatens us.

This book if funny and dead honest and the he said/she said format, written not antagonistically but realistically, is such a welcome reprieve from the divisiveness of the likes of Ariel Levy, Naomi Wolf, etc. when it comes to porn.