Lately, I’ve been worrying about how sexist I am, and about whether others who share these tendencies are just better at covering them up or sublimating them.
I wonder what this says about how I respect women. This is what concerns me, and what confounds me as well. I wonder about the prospect of seeing another sex, or another general group as the object of sexual affection/interest and what this says to relations of power between such groups. Is it possible for equality and sexual relationships to coexist?
A professor once suggested otherwise, or they did insofar as they related stories about the figure of the female in Greece. They argued that, in a world in which sexuality implied or expressed ownership, the homosociality of men living among men prohibited any kind of sexual relations because this would subvert or undermine the power equally shared and exhibited among them and over women and others in society. This is why pederasty had to be hidden and concealed but simultaneously why it was permissible that women were the objects of sexual interest, as they didn’t hold the same status in Grecian society. But this only has to be the case when sex is ownership; but how and when was this changed, and was it? Can mere practice and ideological reformation change these relationships?
I wonder if I’m experiencing this same feeling, and I wonder to what degree the figure of sexual objectification and ownership has been lost from myself or from the communities from which I come. I wonder and worry about whether I have respect for someone I sleep with, or, put another way, is if such a relationship inhibits a sense of equality in ability or capacity.
There is no doubt that my own opinions, sensibilities and predispositions to those around were fashioned and formed in some part in and during my childhood, to take a Freudian stance. Although I consider myself progressive and even revolutionarily so, in the sense that I entertain the thoughts of new and different kinds of relationship configurations, every now and again, I notice my own conservatism, and it sometimes temporarily paralyzes me with questions of implications.
I think this is the small town boy in me, coming to terms with the radically different conditions of an urban world. These generalizations would surely not stand up to too much or too thorough of testing, but in general, I’m skeptical of many practices, even though I feel myself more at home here, in this atmosphere. But I feel, still, that I’m constantly fighting myself, that Freud was right, that we are, for the most part, broken, uncertain beings that are constantly coping with competing urges and finding ways to fit those to the strictures of our environments. If only we took him more seriously…
Bearer of Pity 