Au contraire

Years ago, and well into my seventh month of pregnancy in New York City, it occurred to me one day that, as I would be unable to run from a fast predator, I was lucky not to run into an urban panther. These weekly blogs will consider women's lives from the perspective of one who is now older.

For many years of my life, starting when I was still a girl, I have wondered about the portrayal of women. Much has changed, for which I am grateful and, perhaps, as a moderate second-wave American feminist (the first wave being led by women such as Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony), slightly responsible. It’s been wonderful to witness that heroic and positive female characters have become quite normal in our children’s literature and films.

But, once there were available stories about only two kinds of women -- the virtuous and modest (who often needed to be rescued) and the strong and sexy (who often ruined good men). Or, to use the shortcut, good and evil. As Glinda would say, are you a good witch or a bad witch?

In far too many religions, sexuality is seen as wicked, bestial, and women’s sexuality is the worst; it is the cause of all sin, tempting and leading men to perdition. Women had to be cleansed, kept separate, kept out of sight, for men’s protection. Another reality reversal, no? 

Is control the issue again? Men are distracted by sex -- perhaps the result of making millions of sperm a day, 1,500 a second (no kidding). But that still doesn’t explain how women’s sexuality became synonymous with moral danger and wickedness. Despite that, the “bad” girls were so often more interesting.

Let’s see:  there’s Carmen, whose insistence on freedom marked her as wild, criminal, and got her stabbed to death. But was Carmen evil? It seems to me that she bored easily. That’s not a trait to celebrate, but it’s also not a capital offense.

What about Salome? What if she wasn’t wanton, dissipated, capricious? What if she had been taken as the spoils of war? Such things happened in that part of the world at that time. What if she danced to wreak punishment on some religious fanatic who was calling her mother filthy names and the ruler who dragged them from their home to that place? (Talk about effective; to this day there are Baptists who forbid dancing.)

We know that our sexuality is playful, that girls do, in fact, just want to have fun. And there’s nothing wrong with that.