Women mistake sexual attention for liberation and power

In a review of “Female Chauvinist Pigs” for the New York Times, author Jennifer Egan wrote:

“Our popular culture has embraced a model of female sexuality that comes straight from pornography and strip clubs, in which the woman’s job is to excite and titillate — to perform for men.”

Girls have bought into the idea that our objectification is empowering; that looking sleazy is liberating. Sexualizing ourselves for attention and playing an active role in our objectification, will not lead to equality between the sexes. Increased objectification only furthers inequality.

Girls Gone Wild, sexting, stripper poles at parties and bars, glamorizing the lives of girls who pose naked, and treating them as celebrities, and other trends of this sort do not further the equality of women. Especially when it’s almost exclusively women who are portraying themselves this way.

Women should enjoy their sexuality in a responsible, self respecting way, because it’s pleasurable, not because it gets them attention.  It’s negative attention. Women we need to stop encouraging and engaging in our own objectification. The ability to get sexual attention is not what we should be striving for.  Strive for respect, influence, positive attention from quality people, longterm success and happiness. If you want to be noticed or want to look beautiful, be beautiful, but do it in a respectable way that gives you the attention of quality people.