Reflection on Attitudes to Sexuality

Key Question: 

To what extent has there always been a sexual double standard, and how is that double standard encoded in texts?

In the excerpt from "The Scarlet Letter", what surprised me was how the females ("midwives') were so harsh in judging Hester Prynne almost as though they are sexist when viewing Hester Prynne's chastity. "This woman has brought shame upon us all. " in the text show how they think the act of one single woman contaminate the so called 'good image' of the women's circle. However, why is the idea of Hester being unchaste a bigger source of worry rather than the speculation of how she became so? Why is it that they do not worry about whether or not she had been violated or raped hence being seen as a victim instead of a mere symbol of disgraced dignity as the embroidery "A" on her bodice show?

This is then continued with the Op-Ed article which states how society is still "perversely censorious of woman's sex life" showing how people still view the chastity of a woman in such light, whereby their sexual status is almost a complete representation of their dignity in the public eye.

We see women getting humiliated and scorned, even being driven to death because they get taunted for their sexual behavior such as Amanda Knox?

How does this compare to the case of Ariel Castro, a male who later killed himself after bring found guilty of 937 counts of rape, kidnapping and aggravated murder who kept 3 females for almost a decade as sex slaves to satisfy his dissipated lust?

What I see is that men get away with higher degrees of promiscuity whereas women get shunned just because the are no longer ‘virgins’ but society has mixed the issue of sexual righteousness with aggression as well where on this end, we unfairly and often stereotype males as aggressors instead of women.

 In the “Gender and Speech Styles” booklet, it also mentions how language is not an innate skill, and as mentioned by Dale Spender, language is a socially constructed system rather than natural phenomenon hence language can be utilized by powerful groups to encode meanings.

For example, the creation of lexical asymmetry place "talking like a man"> "talking like a woman", as cultures-often practiced by large powerful groups such as a society, still maintain a traditional stereotype over gender status in language. This then leads to my next point that was also highlighted in the booklet that women and men are two different cultures, and that they have different aims in conversing e.g. men for power, women for solidarity, intimacy.

Society also stereotypes gender with sexual implication. Women are expected to be nice which is sexualized to mean as chaste but when reversed onto men, "nice boys" "nice boys”- is an unusual collocation( juxtaposition) which then shows then the norm for men is 'not nice' and when sexualized, will presumably be unchaste and foul-mouthed.

In a modern context, the contemporary view is that both genders can have different identities in different contexts. Rather than a single notion for femininity or masculinity, there are so many femininities and masculinities and can be seen as a pluralist framework instead hence these characteristics simply become a set of gender-free adjectives, that are can apply to both men and women on an individual level as awareness towards individualism rises but this is also limited to the constrain of their situation.