Blog with a Thousand Faces

Women are displayed sexually everywhere. We’re licking our lips on billboards for fast food restaurants, we’re naked in the trunk of a car to sell shoes, we’re posed and manipulated in a myriad of ways, very very sexually explicit. These representations of female sexuality and the female body are harmful because they’re all from a cis-male heterosexual viewpoint: poses, appearance, all filtered through the lens of male sexuality in society today. The women’s sexuality that is displayed is not their own. Their wants and desires are not the ones being shown, but rather they are selling the image of what’s socially acceptable for women to look and act like. It’s okay for a woman to be sexual, but only if it’s for male pleasure, and only if she looks a certain way. When we are manipulated to look a certain way and appeal to a certain aesthetic, we are not free to own and be in charge of our sexual images, behaviors, lives.