Women’s bodies are also sexual bodies,

Women’s bodies are also sexual bodies, and with sexuality comes both pleasure and danger. Probably no aspect of women’s bodies has been as contested as their

 sexuality, including the question of whether women had any sexual feelings to begin

 with. In the middle ages, a female orgasm was thought necessary to conception. Women’s sexual drives seemingly went missing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the dominant cultural ideal morphed into portraying women as passionless or asexual beings. Women’s sexual selves were miraculously rediscovered in the twentieth century. Today the very notion of sexuality is rapidly expanding — think of the LGBTQ rainbow. Sexuality is a prime example of a socially constructed category.

For most of history, women lacked any real knowledge of their bodies and the workings of their reproductive systems. This wasn’t just a question of medicine and science being slow to map the terrain; rather, it was that women weren’t encouraged to learn and use what knowledge there was. One result was what Gloria Steinem referred to as the “down there” generations — women who lacked even the simplest vocabulary to describe their own genitalia. Eve Ensler’s ingenious creation The Vagina Monologues addressed that silence, as did the women’s health movement in the 1970s and beyond.

Women’s understanding of themselves as sexual beings is affected by broader developments in culture and society. A woman would have to be living in a cave without access to television or the Internet not to be bombarded by the relentless sexual messages from popular culture. Men are affected by these images too, but the images have an especially pernicious impact on women’s already fraught relationship with their bodies. Magazines feature airbrushed images of women’s bodies and faces to sell a variety of products – cars, beer, underwear, life insurance. Pornographic images graphically depicting the sexual exploitation of women are rarely more than a few clicks away on the Internet, and video games are often particularly misogynist when it comes to butchering female characters. The film industry includes far more examples of nudity, generally female, than ever before, and television is beginning to follow suit. Even when clothed, female characters are often clad in form-fitting, revealing outfits that show off whatever female body parts — breasts, legs, butts — are currently in vogue.