Forgive any typos or grammatical lapses here; I'm on my third day of fighting a fever.
None of us have to read this book to know where the story is going:
Rejection, villification and demonization of the pursuit of sexuality by women in the same vein as that pursued by men, the nature of male sexuality ostensibly being inherently oppressive, degrading and misogynistic.
Not like we haven't heard this before from all the familiar quarters.
It's this line of thinking that is a slap in the face to the concepts of intelligence, free will, and free enterprise among women. I won't dispute that some people aren't oppressed without their explicit knowledge, but that's a pretty friggin' broad spectrum. Is the office manager oppressed because he/she sits in traffic for an hour each way to work and then has to endure incompetent upper management?b) that, frequently, (and everyone is going to hate me for this one, but...) sometimes subjects are not truly aware of their own oppression (either in the personal or political/social sense). Women in Kenya (and please keep in mind that this analogy is only to clearly illustrate that people can be unaware of their own oppression, and not to analogize the actual oppression) frequently didn't see brutal female genital mutiliation as oppressive. But any reasonable person, with any personal distance can see that it is.
Exactly. They're capitalizing on the insecurity and bitterness of TOO's said demographic that are already predisposed to viewing in a completely negative light women that possess and demonstrate an expressive and expansive definition of sexuality, as if these women are a threat to their own existence. The fact these women (strippers, escorts, models, et al) are engaged in an act of overt commerce is practically irrelevant to the larger issue for the "aggrieved" audience.Books like this are written entirely on the basis of potential sales. I can hear the pitch meeting to the editor in my head. "Middle-aged women, angry and alienated from popular culture and unhappy with their daughters' rejection of their own beliefs will eat this book up. They account for almost all impulse buys in bookstores, and over 60% of the market itself." Sold.
If Levy and her counterparts allowed themselves to see the humanity in sex workers, they'd have to admit their own sexually repressed character traits that have made them so averse to the acceptance and embrace of expressive female sexuality in the first place.



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