Women and Their Struggle for Full Emancipation (Rant) By Edwin L. Young, PhD

Pondering men’s versus women’s interest in porn of the girl on girl or guy on guy type, or any type perhaps, I look to history. Just like the gradual woman’s liberation movements from suffrage on. Landmarks along the way have been their sexual liberation through the introduction of the pill, the dildo, empowerment in the work world, their role in the growing acceptance of GLBTs, same sex marriages, their participation in the hugely growing success of the porn industry generally, and especially women’s freedom to explore and accept their primitive sexuality since the sixties. All of these trends have been leading to more and more women, not just becoming interested in, but, actually lusting after the visual portrayal of all sorts of sex acts.

Remember “Fried Green Tomatoes” when Kathy Bates had her women’s liberation group use mirrors to examine their genitals? That was just as recent as 1991. Back in the sixties, Lyndon’s Surgeon General was fired, albeit surreptitiously, for writing a book that proclaimed masturbation was OK, but ostensibly just for boys. And that was even in the sixties’ with its Woodstock, the Flower Child, and the sexual revolution days! Today, we are finally catching up. When a Mixmaster of dough went awry and flung it all over the girls in the “Two Broke Girls” TV show, one remarked, “They say Santa comes but once a year, and, I think he just did!” it has been and up and down, bumpy road for women’s complete emancipation in our culture.

Women, like gay males, are now coming out of the closet and almost brandishing their primitive sexuality, proving that they now have the courage to fearlessly reveal what for millennia they have had to hide, not just from jealous, possessive men, but even from themselves. Still men, particularly the clergy and politicians, are trying to control women’s reproductive decisions and even what is decent for them to wear in public. Paradoxically, corporations and the media blatantly use their sexuality as bait to lure customers to buy just about everything.

On the other hand, think how far our culture has come from the late nineteenth century and industrial revolution to now. Gradually, history has seen the lifting of oppression and repression of women. Very gradually the bumpy roads are smoothing and the detours and barriers are being removed.

What was there but repressed for so long is now coming out into the open. Not too long ago, Joelly Fisher (actress of Ellen DeGeneres’ (the declared lesbian Ellen) show “Buy the Book”) stated publicly that she loved viewing male on male porn. And then there was Cindy Crawford who said, in the mid *90s, while still married to Richard Gere, “I like to watch!” Now, go back and remember the cigarette ad for Slims that said over fifty years ago, “You’ve come a long way baby!”

If you are a woman, you will remember the flood of books in the sixties that were telling women to get in touch with their primitive sensuality and sexuality. In the mid nineteenth century, George Sand, a famous female writer felt she had to hide behind a man’s name.’ And then, during that same era, there was the tragic tale of Camille Claudel, a genius sculptor in her own right and the great love of August Rodin (The Thinker), had to play second fiddle to him and has yet to receive proper recognition.

Now we even have women running for president. And that must be symbolically liberating. But, in their personal life, they can choose whether their partner is male or female. Women are declaring, right and left, that they like and even prefer sex with women to that of men. Their genitals are no longer clapped in chastity belts. They are leading political and sexual protests. Best sellers in books in every field are women.

It has been a long and grueling road toward women’s full psychological, legal, political, financial emancipation, and toward finally owning of their own powerful, primitive sexuality and sensuality.

Hester Prynne, you have finally been vindicated!

For the love of women as full, whole human beings, may they forever flourish!