Comment on I had no idea y cunt was this powerful
andros_rex@lemmy.world 4 days agoRomans found it distasteful, and iirc it’s a thing for machismo-addled men in Italy to this day. (Berlusconi’s administration lead to spikes in DV/SA - when your president is gleefully fucking teenage girls, it tends to damage your society. One could look into how Trump has made outright expressions of misogyny acceptable again…)
A lot of these alt right weirdos subscribe to this weird Roman sexual ethics. It’s all about who’s in charge, who the sex is for. It’s okay to penetrate “lessers” - for Nick Fuentes to top his puppy femboys or for Alex Jones’s phone to be loaded with porn of trans women. The aspect of power and hate adds to the sex for them. (In a world where LGBT people don’t have employment protections, there’s a lot more “trade” too…)
They also see this as the way that everyone else understands sex too. Giving head to someone is submitting to them, and men don’t submit to women.
This definitely plays into something I’ve been thinking about lately - in a conservative worldview, all sex is rape, of a woman by a man. Whether it’s acceptable to them is all about ownership. Does that man have the right kind of ownership over that that woman? If so, they’re fine with it. If not, it’s bad.
This is also related to the idea that no woman ever actually wants sex, and no man ever doesn’t want it. It’s all about when it’s allowable for him to overpower her.
This is exactly what Andrea Dworkin was saying in Intercourse. Calling it out explicitly was such a threat to conservatives like Rush Limbaugh that they had to turn it into “this crazy lesbian feminist said all sex is rape!”
A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth - literature, science, philosophy, pornogra-phy-calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into (“violate” the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical pri-vacy. She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.
There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions.
Like - yes! A lot (not all) of heterosexual men see sex as domination, as something they have to “get” from partners who might not be eager or willing. The idea that women actually enjoy sex is not supposed to be a part of it. Think about how absolutely frothingly buttmad conservatives got over W.A.P.
Also all of the common Christian preaching about how wives need to ensure that all of their husbands “needs” are met. If she doesn’t put out, it’ll be her fault when his eyes go wandering (whether it lands on a man or a woman or a child). A young Christian girl is to remain pure until she is married and then immediately cater to all of her husbands sexual demands - at no point is she supposed to develop her own ideas about sexual pleasure. (The things Mark Driscoll was telling his congregation both in person and anonymously online are so fucked up.)
Sex is such a powerful instinct that people who want to control others are going to spend a lot of effort working on systems to control sex.
“this crazy lesbian feminist said all sex is rape!”
Not all sex, just all the sex in their world. So by saying it was “all sex” they were kind of telling on themselves by agreeing.
I should probably read that book, thanks for that.
CalipherJones@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Romans also shared a sponge on a stick to wipe their ass at the public restrooms. Doesn’t take much imagination to wonder why people didn’t go down on each other regularly.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 4 days ago
They did go down on each other regularly. Fellatio was common, not cunnilingus. There are lots of fun Latin words for face-fucking.
Roman sexuality just was very penis centric in general. They really struggled with understanding lesbians - they assumed that the more dominant woman would grow a penis or something.
Like in a way, they did think eating pussy was “gayer” then sucking off a guy who was higher in social status than you.