Jill's excellent post, especially this part of it, makes me want to examine American culture's desire/tendency to punish women. Too frequently, Americans regard our culture as progressive, peaceful and egalitarian, while imagining the Middle East as belligerent, sexist, and regressive. I hope that by examining problematic American behavior and attitudes we can stop exoticizing the Middle East, influenced by Islam, and see universal problems as issues that are common, rather than indicators of difference.
Hypothesis: both American culture and Middle Eastern culture punish women for "inappropriate" displays of sexual agency. America has a culture based on capitalism, in which women are commodified. The Middle East, instead, has a family-based culture, in which women are objectified as property. Americans justify punishing women for their sexual agency for several reasons, all relating to the idea that a woman's sexual agency makes her less valuable as a commodity. Most men seem not to want to have sex with a woman many other men have had sex with, so a woman's value goes down if she has many sexual partners. This is why "slut" is a stinging insult with no male-oriented counterpart: men are not commodities, and so do not need to limit their exercise of sexual agency in order to remain desirable (overall). "Slut" can apply to a woman, even if she has no sexual experience whatsoever, based on the way she dresses or acts, as long as she seems to perpetuate the illusion of being widely sexually available. This use of the label "slut" shows that it is not reality that counts, but the perceived value of the woman as a commodity, not unlike a stock price.
The first thing I thought about when reading the quoted portion of Jill's post was the shaming and ignoring of birth mothers. Do women who become pregnant at inopportune times, especially without being married, experience public shame? Certainly teenagers who become pregnant out of wedlock are commonly considered shameful to their families (see: Bristol Palin, Jamie Lynn Spears). And, once pregnant, there's no win, since being pregnant is shameful and having an abortion means that a girl is not taking responsibility for her actions, apparently. So, if a girl is to take responsibility for her actions, she's supposed to carry the baby to term. I assume it is equally responsible behavior for a girl to give her baby up for adoption as it is for her to raise it.
Why, in a culture where so many people, male or female, have sex before they are married, is accidental pregnancy shameful? Women have sex. Sex makes babies. Birth control is fallible. The only reason I can think of is the devaluation of the woman as a commodity because of the visible results of her sexual agency. And, look how we punish women for the sin of believing themselves the arbiters of their own sexual behavior: we encourage them to bring their pregnancies to term, rather than "selfishly" terminating, and then either encourage them to give up the child and forget they ever had a baby so it can be raised by people who played by the rules (so far as we know), or else allow them to languish in poverty and blame them when their children become criminals. Yet the narrative remains that pregnant women deserve to be pregnant, since it is the natural consequence of having sex, which they shouldn't be having outside of marriage, even though most adults do.
In the Middle East, and in many Muslim-dominated countries, such as Indonesia, women's roles are defined within a family paradigm. A woman's sexuality is regulated not by her market value, but by her position as an agent of honor or shame to her family. Her sexuality is therefore only properly directed toward bearing children in wedlock, or to her husband more generally. How is shaming a woman who makes herself "public", either by actually engaging in adultery or premarital sex, or simply be going out in public alone without shame (thereby allowing people tho believe she has sexual agency and is willing to exercise it outside her family) different in this society than in America? Is it worse for a woman to be defined as property of her family than as a commodity of society? Are the equally threatening, or are most Americans justified in believing themselves to be more progressive in their view of women than Middle Easterners?
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While I think that the hypothesis itself is true—that women in both Middle Eastern and American culture are both punished for “inappropriate” displays of sexual agency—I think that there is a unique cultural difference that is necessary to point out. That difference is the inherent hypocrisy of sexualized American culture.
We’re dealing with some sort of sexualized neo-public/private dichotomy. Women are no longer “relegated to the private sphere,” but if they want to go public, there are strings attached… at least when it comes to sexuality. I think women’s role as property is at least in part accurately characterized by the intriguingly well-founded analogy of the securities market—although I think women’s promiscuity as devaluing her worth can also be characterized by private-property-concepts such as “fair market value.” The relevant distinction here is that the notion of women as property in American culture actively straddles the line between public property and, as in family-centric Muslim culture, private property. Although they are encouraged to embody both the domestic attributes of a “good (read: virginal) woman” and the sexualized representation of a “hottie,” these women have to choose (albeit this choice may be a false one) which type of property they will be—public or private; they cannot be both.
On one hand, women are certainly taught to be meek and domestic. We’re supposed to be “sugar and spice,” not a challenge to the existing social order or a sexual crusader. When girls learn about sexuality in a private context, we learn it in terms of male pleasure (by this point, you’d think Cosmo would’ve exhausted all the ways to let us know how to “please our man” … I’m still waiting for the day when they publish a “vibrator exclusive“). But these qualities are valued only insofar as women are viewed as private property—property to be held by one individual (a man), with a right to exclude (other men). This is true in American culture just as it’s true in Middle Eastern culture.
Yet on the other hand, women in America are simultaneously encouraged to take their sexuality with them to the public sphere. The female youth in U.S. culture is overwhelmingly indoctrinated with sexualized imagery; their willingness to become a sexualized object is consistently reinforced by American culture from a young age. Girls are given “Bratz” dolls which encourage them to dress provocatively; they are taught to understand empowerment through role models such as Britney Spears. And, in a vacuum, if sexualization truly was empowerment, then that would be one thing. But the standard is one that no woman qua woman can truly live up to.
The fundamental attributes, at least physiologically and superficially, that distinguish women from men—that of the ability to bear children—is not of value if women are public property. In fact, it is of negative value. And this negative value isn’t limited to unwed or single mothers. Rather, this view of women as public property is the very reason that Donald Trump attempted to boot host Nancy O’Dell off the Miss America Pageant, because he “[does]n’t like the way pregnant women look.” Further, if women are public property, put on display, then they are also subject to a greater deal of scrutiny for what they are displaying. Heaven forbid, Britney Spears display an abdomen that is slightly less toned than before it was the 9-month sublet for another human being on two separate occasions!
Thus, the reason that such public displays of women’s reproductive capacities is unpopular can’t purely be a function of its representation of undesired displays of sexual agency. Rather, I think it also has to do with the patriarchal “no-strings-attached” fantasy. It’s almost equitable with diversification: you don’t want to necessarily own the whole company, you just want a little piece of it. The women that are most highly valued, in the public sense, represent some sort of unrealistic sexual utopia. If women are public property, it is to serve men’s sexual fantasies; thus, women’s public sexualization itself is essential, but a reminder of the responsibilities sex might entail is a deal-breaker. You don’t want to own the whole woman, just the little part of her that’s going to give you the highest (sexual) expected return.
So, as an American woman, you’re stuck with a choice: empowerment through non-reproductive sexualization, or empowerment through domesticity and purity. You’re socialized to strive for both, but you can’t have it both ways.
I am not sure whether this lose-lose type of situation makes American culture better or worse than Muslim culture. At least the latter is consistent.
Wow. Awesome comment. I love the public/private dichotomy argument and I think you're right on.
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