Mini-skirts: expressing sexuality freely or sexual objectification?

Friends. I am very angry today about female sexuality and how little we understand that phrase. Last night at 1am I typed in the words "female sexuality" into google and hundreds of website popped up about women and sex. I was so disappointed. Female sexuality doesn't merely mean how a woman can have an orgasm, how she communicates with her partner about what she wants. In other words, female sexuality is not just sex related. To me female sexuality is what a woman experiences for herself, not in relation to another person.

It all started over dinner with some friends last night when I said I hate the poster for Mamet's play 'Race'. To me if it is a play about race (I understand the trigger for the play, the event that starts the play is that a white man rapes a young black woman) then why use a woman's thighs and a red sequined dress in the poster. What a cheap choice!! But I was told at the dinner table that 1-what's wrong if they use that...they want to bring the audience into the seats. To that I say okay so then why doesn't everyone just start using pornographic material for posters for everything and bring the audience? I know I am being dramatic. Why are we okay with the use of female sexuality to sell products? It perpetuates objectification of women that already exists. The 2nd thought I was offered was that perhaps that woman in the red short dress isn't being objectified..may be she enjoys her sexuality in a short dress. HHMMMM.....this is when things get really bad for me. So, we are suggesting that a woman's expression of her sexuality in a short red dress is nothing but her expression. The fact that THAT is also how women are objectified in the media....are we just not taking that into account? So....this discussion didn't really resolve. People defending the poster, kept on defending it. I stood by my conviction that the poster is insulting to women. When are women going to speak up?

Mini-skirts started in London in the early 60s. So, perhaps that at time it felt liberating for women to be able to wear these short dresses and skirts because they shouldn't have to hide their bodies or be ashamed of it. But at the same time, unfortunately, it became another way in which men could objectify and sexualize women. So, something that should have had a deeper liberating effect on women at that time, merely became a fashion thing. And men liked that cuz now they could see more skin and perhaps a little glimpse of the Va-jay-jay.

Now,...I am not sure if I am a conservative person or not. I would like to think that I am not a conservative person. If anything I want women to enjoy a kind of freedom that we are still striving for. But body....it is complex. My husband and I argued over this last night on our way home and I wondered if men are totally incapable of understanding what I am talking about? I would like to believe otherwise, so I thought perhaps I need to be clear in my argument and hence this blog. Hopefully, this will help me be concise in what my POV is.

So his question to me was "why do you think that a woman that wears a short skirt or revealing clothes is not expressing her sexuality? why do you think that is bad? May be that is how she expresses her sexual self." I had a tough time with this. So much female expression (of all kinds) is tied into the male gaze that I truly don't know what is pure sexual expression for a woman. I can't think of a woman in my life who expresses her sexuality in a way that isn't about getting attention. I grew up in India, and there we have our own issues with female sexuality. But I feel that in the West, female sexuality has been reduced to being able to wear less and less clothes. Or being able to have an orgasm. So, I fail to understand what female expression of sexuality feels and looks like when it is just for oneself. And I don't mean to masturbate or play with oneself. Sexuality is more than that, as I have said. It is an expression of oneself. Can sexuality exist without the other (whether that other is male or female)? Can it exist for just the person?

I know no woman - virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate - whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves - for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both knowledge and power.

- Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (1976)

How do we do this conversion?  To me wearing short skirts and high heels is certainly not the way to find power. I have heard people say, what is wrong in a woman using her body and her sexuality to manipulate men and getting what they want whether it be in the work-place or at home. Is that true empowerment? It is a survival technique - at best. I think. The fact that a woman cannot make her case on the basis of her intellect and knowledge and instead has to become objectified in order to by-pass the obstacle- to be honest is very sad. I wouldn't call that empowering at all. There are those that think it is.

Confession- I will confess that I do not understand my own sexuality. I don't mean as it pertains to what happens in bed. I am well aware of the dynamics that exist there and the power play that happens. I mean I don't understand my own sexuality as a woman. As it exists when I walk, when I think, when I sit.

Judith Daniluk has written a book titled, 'Women's Sexuality across the Life Span: Challenging Myths, Creating Meaning'. I am going to read it and hope that it will give me some deeper understanding for how to even find my sexuality as a human being, not just as a sexual being.