Women and Their Struggle for Full Emancipation and Sexually Coming out of the Closet

By Edwin L. Young, PhD
December 9, 2011

             When pondering gender issues such as men’s versus women’s interest in porn of the girl on girl or guy on guy type, or any type perhaps, I look to history.  Just like the gradual woman’s liberation movements from suffrage on, landmarks along the way have been woman’s sexual liberation through the introduction of the pill, the dildo, empowerment in the work world, their role in the growing acceptance of GLBTs, same sex marriages, their participation in the hugely growing success of the porn industry generally, and especially women’s freedom to explore and accept their primitive sexuality since the sixties.  All of these trends have been leading to more and more women, not just becoming interested in, but, actually lusting after the visual portrayal of all sorts of sex acts. 

Remember “Fried Green Tomatoes” when Kathy Bates had her women’s liberation group use mirrors to examine their genitals?  This was considered revolutionary at the time.  That was just as recent as 1991.  Back in the sixties, Lyndon’s Surgeon General was fired, albeit surreptitiously, for writing a book that proclaimed masturbation was OK, but ostensibly just for boys.  And that was during the sixties’ with its Woodstock, the Flower Child, and the sexual revolution days!  Today, we are finally catching up.  When a Mixmaster of dough went awry and flung the dough all over the girls in the current “Two Broke Girls” TV show, one remarked, “They say Santa comes but once a year, and, I think he just did!”  It has been an up and down, bumpy road for women’s complete emancipation in our culture. 

Women, like gay males, are now coming out of the closet and almost publically brandishing their primitive sexuality, proving that they now have the courage to fearlessly reveal what for millennia they have had to hide, not just from jealous, possessive men, but even from themselves.  Still men, particularly the clergy and conservative politicians, are trying to control women’s reproductive decisions and even what is decent for them to wear in public.  Paradoxically, corporations and the media blatantly use their sexuality as bate to lure customers to buy just about everything. 

On the other hand, think how far our culture has come from the late nineteenth century and the industrial revolution to now.  Gradually over the last one hundred years, history has seen the lifting of oppression and repression of women in increasingly more sectors of our culture.  Very gradually the bumpy roads are smoothing and the detours and barriers are being removed. 

So much that was present in women but repressed for so long is now coming out into the open.  Not too long ago, Joelly Fisher (actress of Ellen DeGeneres’ (the declared lesbian Ellen) TV show “Buy the Book”) stated publicly that she loved viewing male on male porn.  And then there was Cindy Crawford who said, in the mid 90s, while still married to Richard Gere, “I like to watch!” referring to sex acts.  Now, go back again in time and recall the cigarette ad for Slims over fifty years ago that said, “You’ve come a long way baby!” 

If you are a woman around age sixty, you will remember the flood of books in the sixties that were telling women to become independent, own their own bodies, and get in touch with their primitive sensuality and sexuality.  Now, look again at women’s history.  The Theatre in the Round in sixteenth century England would not allow women to play women’s role in Shakespearean plays.  In the mid nineteenth century, George Sand, a famous female writer felt she had to hide behind a man’s name.  And then, during that same era, there was the tragic tale of Camille Claudel, a genius sculptor in her own right and the mistress and great love of August Rodin (The Thinker), had to play second fiddle to him and has yet to receive proper recognition.  Today, we even have women as CEOs of major corporations and running for president in the US and around the world.  And that, symbolically, must be very liberating.  Furthermore, in their personal life, they can choose whether their partner is male or female and single parenting longer prevents them from having a full life.  Even more audacious, women are declaring, right and left, that they like and even prefer sex with women to that of men.  Their genitals are no longer clapped in chastity belts by men.  They are leading protests for economic, political, and sexual freedom and equality.  Women are leading the way intellectually as well; with bestselling books in every field, even in math and physics despite Larry Summers denigration of women’s mental capacities in those typically male areas.

It has been a long and grueling road toward women’s full psychological, legal, political, and financial emancipation.  Now they are finally expressing ownership of their own powerful, primitive sexuality and sensuality.

Hester Prynne, you have finally been vindicated!  (Hawthorn’s “Scarlet Letter”)

For the love of women as full, whole human beings, may they forever flourish!

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