Reading Gayle Rubin 's Thinking Sex : Notes For A Radical Theory Of The Politics Of Sexuality

Since the dawn of man, sex has played a crucial role in society. Before they learned to read or write humans were engaging in sex and without it none of us would be here. In today’s society, sex has grown to become much more complicated. If I were to ask a group of people on the street what they believed sex was? I bet they would have a hard time answering. The question puzzling society today is how do we define sex? Can we define sex? These are questions raised in Tracy Steele’s article “Doing it: The Social Construction of S-E-X”. This article is about the current questions and issues that have been raised about sex within today’s society. In this paper I will summarize the key points of the article, while sharing my own thoughts and

Unlike sex, the sexuality of a woman is not black or white; it is a complex multi-dimension abstract idea that is repressed from women by society. A female’s sexuality is viewed from our phallus-centered society as the male’s counterpart. Women are viewed as objects for men’s sexual behavior such that the female’s sexual preference is there for men to get off and our language on how we treat them solidifies this idea. Society has made a women’s sexuality so complex that it is unknown to women what they truly like. It has come to a point where if women do not have knowledge about the most sexual part of them, they won’t understand that sex is a type of knowledge in which society is blocking from them. Society is trying to impose a males sexuality,

The world now becomes a state of change or flux. Human beings act toward others and objects on the basis of the meanings that such things have for them but meanings are being continually constructed and modified through interaction. The fundamental approach is simple put: nothing is sexual but naming makes it so. Sexuality is a social construct learned in interaction with others. This is not to deny biological facts. It is simply to assert that things do not have sex meanings in their own right. They have to be bestowed upon them through sexual encounters. The mind has to define something as sexual before it is sexual in

Contemporary understandings of sexuality are not the same as back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Understandings and terminology in the past hold multiple differences and similarities than our current contemporary understandings.

Unlike sex, the history of sexuality is dependant upon society and limited by its language in order to be defined and understood.

In his article, “The Invention of Sexuality”, Weeks argued that sexuality is a product of society and is shaped by

Human sexuality is a common phrase for all, and anything, pertaining to the feelings and behaviors of sex for the human race. Sexuality has been a topic that has been discussed and studied for as far back as 1000 years B.C. and is still being studied today. As the discussion of sexuality has progressed through history, theories have been created based on research and experiments that scholars have implemented, based on their own perceptions of human behavior. Out of the many theories that pose to explain sexual behavior, Sexuality Now explained ten that are seemed to be the most overlapped, and built off of theories. Of these theories, two that were discussed in the text were the behavioral and sociological theory. These two theories cover some of the basic ideas of what could possibly influence a person’s sexuality.

Rubin discusses sexual hierarchy and how people are constituted within it based on types of sexual practises. She approaches these schemas as a basis of understanding how various institutional forces such as Medical communities and Religious communities define good sex versus bad sex and how their discourses define how people should see various types of sex. She emphasises that “marital, reproductive heterosexuals are a lone at the top of the erotic pyramid” (279). From this point, any type of sex falls under the heterosexual ideal is considered bad sex. Rubin further argues that “sexual liberation has been and continues to be a feminist goal” and states that both the LGBTQ+ community and Feminists often debate internally whether sexual liberation is good or not

​As the sexual revolution began in the 1950s, stag films became less and less popular. However, Irving Klaw filmed the popular pin up model, Bettie Page, in several specialty stag films from 1952 - 1957; and the film Smart Alec, starring Candy Barr, was released in 1951.

Additionally, Penny’s discussion on many feminist issues in the lens of neoliberalism is refreshing and thought-provoking. The way Penny explores what neoliberalism and market-driven society has done to sex, love, and intimacy is captivating. The way the market teaches young women to be sexual objects is not a new discussion, and Penny does address it alongside the Internet, but Penny has more nuanced thoughts; she writes, “the social cost of actually having sex, rather than merely appearing to want to have it, is what damages women; sexual control, not sex itself, is what harms all of us” (110). There is a defined line for women in society; women can want sex and appear sexually attractive, but once they take control and have sex, there is an issue because the control has been taken from the power-holder. The market is the instigator in sexual control. Further, Penny argues the cycle does not end there: “as all human affect collapses

In today’s society, the term and act of bargaining is defined as the negotiation of the terms and conditions of a transaction between two or more distinct parties. Chapter 13 takes the fundamental ideas and theories of bargaining and jumps into an in depth discussion focused on how each person in a particular bargaining situation is represented. Hirshman and Larson examine an individual’s life and classify the various sexual bargains that said individual might experience at some point in their life and classify them into five subsections. During this discussion, the title of the book itself, Hard Bargains, is used heavily to describe these

In today’s society things are being expressed and experienced at younger ages, than ever before in our time. Children and teenagers are discovering their sexuality at very early ages. Sexuality is the discovering of who you are and what makes you different from everybody else.

Throughout history, definitions of sexuality within a culture are created and then changed time after time. During these changes, we have seen the impact and power one individual or group can have over others. In the Late Nineteenth Century into the Early Twentieth Century, we see multiple groups of people and or authorities taking control over the idea of sex and how they believe society is being impacted by sex. At this point in time, society had groups of people who believed they had the power to control how society as whole viewed and acted upon sex. Those particular groups and ideas changed many lives and the overall definition of sexuality within that culture.

Sex has power. Sex has the capacity to change people’s self-experiences, transform relationships, and even challenge the societies in which we live. Sex sells. The history of advertising is rife with associating sex with the non-sexual, so people will purchase a product or way of life. As in the case of pornography and prostitution, sex sells itself. People will pay to have sex. People will pay to watch sex. People will pay to experience the fantasy of sex and then have sex by themselves. Sometimes, sex is treated like a secret that must be managed for the sake of propriety. In many parts of the world, woman can be physically punished for just the implication of sexuality. At other times, sex is treated as a self-evident, natural fact of human life. Magazines run articles discussing the top ten sexual techniques to make your lover have an orgasm. Sex happens when people like each other, and it even happens when they do not. Since sex can be many things to many people at many different times, any phenomenology of sex must begin by addressing the potential foundational elements of the experience. These elements must be common to a wide range of sexual experiences and encounters, be they heterosexual, homosexual, and everything in between and otherwise.

In contemporary society, power operates not only through the surveillance and categorization of sexualities, but also through a valorization of the act of sex as a key component to identity formation. Though Western culture often conceives of sex as “natural,” and thus divorced from the politics of power, Foucault argues that “sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power” (155). What