anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
nemophilies-deactivated20190428
If a woman’s sexual sense of self has centered on pain as far back as the record goes, who is she without it? If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer. It is hard, because of such conditioning, to envisage a female body free of pain and still desirable. Even aside from the biological pain of women’s gender, modern women are just recovering from our long experience of man-made punishment for pleasure. The Greek lawmaker Solon ruled that an unmarried woman caught in a sexual act could be sold into slavery; the emperor Constantine decreed that a virgin who had willingly fornicated must be burned (her penalty was lighter if she had been raped); death was the price a free woman paid for making love with a slave. The laws of Romulus gave a husband the right to kill his adulterous wife. Adulteresses in modern Saudi Arabia are stoned to death. Resistance to the abortifacient pill RU428 derives partly from its relative painlessness. Antiabortion activists often make exceptions for rape and incest, which suggests that it is her desire for sex for which a woman must pay with her pain.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth