naomi wolf the beauty myth vintage feminism short edition

Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts.

The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?.Why not? What can I do about it? “Their sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist-then a real young man would probably approach the young woman's bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.” If girls never experienced sexual violence if a girl's only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, 'need' beauty pornography based on the bodies of men.

“Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things.

Naomi wolf the beauty myth vintage feminism short edition