The Paper Associated with Sex Survey

[TragicPixie]

Sexual Behaviours and Gender Equality in the United States

Simone de Beauvoir explored the myth of the eternal feminine in her book The Second Sex published in 1949. The myth of the eternal feminine comes to define women as they are ideally thought of by society and convention rather than as they are. Feminine wiles and the myth that men cannot possibly come to understand women are parts of this myth. However, when a woman is seen to reveal herself to be without mystery it is she who is at fault, not the myth. Much of the feminist movement of the 20th century has worked to shake this myth of the eternal feminine – and has been more successful than we may have thought. Today, though the myth of the eternal feminine remains present in society we have done away with much that is associated with it. Historically speaking however, many of the so-called great strides of the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s were already once achieved in this country. The great strides made in gender equality by the women's movement of the early 20th century make the slow crawling pace of the later women's movement since the post-WWII reactionary period even more evident that we have not come a long way, baby.
The women's movement of the early twentieth century covered much ground in a short amount of time. The changes in women's behavior seems to epitomize of the 1920s era.As demonstrated by an interview with Flapper Jane in a 1925 issue of The New Republic women are “tired of this mysterious-feminine-charm stuffâ€? and began to make changes. An example of the rapid gains made by the early women's movement is the right to vote. Perhaps as a result, more women began to enter the work force and get an education instead of marrying and having children. According to Flapper Jane, many women “prefer to earn their own living and omit the home-and-baby act.â€? At the same time, fashions became more risqué from the staunch and covered fashions of the Victorians with the shift dresses and bobbed hair. Along with these rather obvious changes, sexual behaviour changed as well. An activity called “pettingâ€? entered into popular culture. Flapper Jane and perhaps many young women of her generation “think a bachelor girl can and should do everything a bachelor man does.â€? The flappers of the 1920s often set out to prove this point, and they may have managed it rather well.
The Second World War ushered in a reactionary era and a return to the myth of the eternal feminine and Victorian ideals of womanhood. Although many women entered the workforce during the war years, immediately following they were shoved back into their homes and kitchens. This was partially to provide jobs for the returning men as well as a reaction to women's liberation. Although in the 1920s many young women felt getting a career and an education were important, and marriage and children could wait, young women of the 1950s felt that getting married was more important. The idea that women should be angels in the home once again captured public opinion and Nancy Fleming (Miss America 1961) stated that she felt there were “too many women working in the world� and that “a woman's place is in the home with her husband and children� when asked about the question of women in the workforce in a 1961 beauty pageant. Because birth control was illegal, many young brides became young mothers and stayed at home to care for her children. Public opinion on birth control also changed. Besty Martin McKinney of Ladies Home Journal felt the use of contraceptives by a woman denied, “her own creativity, her own sexual role, her very femininity.� Clearly, having and caring for children had become once again the domain of women.
With the sexual revolution of the 1960s and later women's movements much has changed in our own opinions, as well as our own sexual behaviour. Recently the phenomena of “friends with benefits� has been discussed in our media. This practice is not so uncommon in teenagers and young adults all over the United States. A “friend with benefits� relationship is often a mutual understanding between two people who have sometimes regular sexual relations without attaching the title of “boyfriend� or “girlfriend� to each other or considering themselves in a relationship other than friendship. Also, oral sex has been stated by many sources to be more prevalent among young people than in the past. The interviews conducted with college students show that the majority of them did not feel that oral sex was a form of sexual intercourse, stating that sexual intercourse involved actual penetration. However, many adults felt that oral sex was sexual intercourse stating that the emotional bond it creates is not significantly different. In interviews with many college students as well as young adults, over half the women interviewed used oral contraceptives. Likewise, many men interviewed identified oral contraceptives as their preferred method of birth control. Clearly, these findings indicate a change in sexual attitudes and behaviour over time, but do they really indicate that much of a difference between the sexual behaviour of today and the sexual behaviour of the earlier part of the twentieth century?
We may have not come as long of a way as was once supposed in eradicating the myth of the eternal feminine in the twentieth century but that is not to say the gains made were not important. The era after the Second World War seem to have successfully quenched the flame of the liberated woman and sent her back into her home with her children, only to have those children rekindle it for the coming generations. Today the women's movement lives on making gains in the way of women's healthcare and reproductive health and awareness as well as focusing on workplace equality. Many women today are free to get educations, jobs, and when to have a family thanks to the gains made by the women's movement of the twentieth century.

Okay that was long - and a rough draft, but because some of you took the survey just so you can sort of see a mini and rough version of what is to come out of it. When it's all said and done I'll post the polished version.

[sara]

is this for a class or just for the fun of writing? I'm glad that someone is talking girl stuff

I just typed a whole bunch of shit and was like, hmm, does she want to know all of this? And deleted it. I have a shelf of feminist lit; i don't read it very often -- but I guess I did read it along the way.

Smile, smile, smile has a lot of modern lit (in the traditional sense of modern lit) examples and it has original art, but I don't know if it's still being published

a side note, my mom went to Paris this summer and brought me back a propaganda tee, you know the one from WW 2 -- "We Can Do It" it's cool -- the factory girls

[TragicPixie]

it's for a class - without all the stuff.

the tree sounds awesome.

But I'm sad and write random rants anyway - it's more for the class though. Otherwise, I'd be more explicit. I'm trying to not get thrown out of this lovely Jesuit school.

[sara]

I don't know about Jesuit schools -- really, I don't know about Jesuits either. But i went to a southern baptist college for a while -- it can't, dear lord i'm praying, be worse than that. Maybe you should transfer, really. Anyway, you will get thrown out if you don't site those references

I'm sad sometimes too -- it's a sad time sometimes too.

[TragicPixie]

lol yeah they're sited on the paper - of course, the actual paper is much longer and more in depth.

Jesuits themselves are okay - acutally they're pretty cool for monks. However the people are just generally horrible. Lots of mini yuppies.

I'm going to transfer - but I don't know where to go.

[de rothschild]

as far as catholic orders go, and myself being a catholic, jesuits are the most profound and progressive. just give thanks you are not in a benedictine school.

on another note, in reference to your foray into gender issues, you should check out judith butler, especially her book, Gender Trouble. it questions, deconstructs, the issue of gender, espousing a post-structualist view on the differences of male and female. it's wild actually. i used it in a paper in a medieval lit class. she calls for a "repetition with difference" in order to subverset the whole concept of gender. very deridian.

[TragicPixie]

this is true - I like the Jesuits. Just not the student population.

The book sounds interesing - I'll check it out over Christmas break.

[Guest]

I was good at this sort of thing once. I got prizes. One thing that did stick in my craw was the "you've come a long way baby" quote. It was beaten into me that unless you are going to be earth shatteringly funny and enlightening at the same time then avoid the use of irony or flippant remarks in academic discussion. (Unless you are discussing the irony.) Approach the task like a doctor. It really isn't bad advice. It served me well in that it made me focus on academic rigor at the expense of stylistic tricks.

Now, is this the bit where I namecheck various highbrow theorists and related schools of thought?

[sara]

i guess, you could be tp's guest and go for it.

I really don't know -- I didn't really see Tragic heading in the direction of flippancy or irony -- so I'm guessing that's a rule of thumb kind of suggestion. Namechecking and showing how theories are related, yes, I think that's what most teachers call supporting your opinion and providing structure and coherence, it's good advice

if you mean that you know about a lot of feminists and feminist theories and you might like to talk about them, I for one would love to hear it -- I really don't have a cohesive idea about what I think about feminism today -- it's all sort of foggy, and of course related to myself as I am a woman and an individual and find the term feminism a bit annoying, but have already had one discussion about it on this website and would be more than happy to make it two or three or four -- why not, Martino said The Captain and the Enemy was mentioned thirteen times, so who's counting?

I also screwed up on the title of the book TP, sorry, it's Smile (times four) Smile, smile, smile, smile -- there's a poem that ends that way about a photograph, actually a strip of photographs -- you know, like still lives. It's a good poem.

[martino]

gosh sara, i said 13 as a conscious exaggeration, i was teasing but probably so heavy-handed at it as to seem nasty, i do hope no offence was taken.

pixie, i find the matter of flapper sexuality fascinating, can you recommend any definitive book about the subject?

[TragicPixie]

Well, part of the paper was actually debating the feminist slogan of the 70's "You've come a long way baby" - which incidently was also on camel cigarettes... but regardless, that was basically part of the assignment -

on a side note; how fucking progressive can we be if in the damn "feminist slogan" or whatnot "baby" is used to refer to women?! Maybe only I see the irony there... or maybe it's on purpose.

Martino - I can recommend some good books as well as websites; since I spend a great deal of time online. Most of the sources I've used to study it focus on fashion - but fashion is an apporiate way to study changing attitudes toward women - at least in the time peroid as fashion indicates social changes when it goes from radically covered up to ... well, what was considered radically uncovered (ohmigod you could see their knees if they danced!!) but one of my favourites is Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s by AngelaJ. J. Latham.
There are also some rather interesting biographies and such written on promient females of the time like Louise Brooks, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker.
And I have a habit of collecting as many primary sources of the time as I can - lucky for me both of great grandmothers saved many of their magazines and newspaper clippings and photographs in the form of scrapbooks. Cookbooks and etiquette books of the era area also very interesting. (They were arguably flappers.)
The Jazz Age (http://www.geocities.com/flapper_culture/) is a pretty well done site.

[TragicPixie]

agghh... and no study of a subculture or youth culture would be complete without a mention of the art of the time. Of course well know modern art (who wouldn't love Picasso?) but silent films and the first talkies are a great study of flapper culture as well. On the subject of films, it's really interesting to watch these old silent films and talkies and the films of the 1930s in respect to the women. Women in early films were brash, bold, and were actually portrayed in suprising ways in regardes to sexuality and etc.
As for good films - I tend to like anything with Clara Bow.

And literature is interesting as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald along with Zelda could be credited for creating the phenomena of the flapper... a little Scott; mostly Zelda.

[Tommy Martyn]

"Clearly, having and caring for children had once again become the domain of women."

You have a sentence a bit like that in there. You might want to tidy it up. As far as I am aware, having children never left the domain of women.

I thought it was Virginia Slims that used the, "you've come a long way baby," slogan.

Could you post the question that your piece replies to? I could follow the theme better then.

[sara]

Tragic, that is really cool about the original documents -- that's great in fact. I've been to yard sales that have old magazines; it's really interesting to me because I ran across one a few weekends ago but as luck would have it, the date had worn off, it looked to be from the fifties -- the ads do tell it all -- one was about how unattractive it was to be thin! Can you believe it! I wish I had bought it now, I could tell you exactly what it said.

Martino, offense, defense, no sense, nonsense -- it's not a big deal, and I'm sorry if I was being bitchy -- I was trying to be funny, but as tommy I think has explained if you have to explain it, you failed to be it, or something like that-- tone is totally lost on me sometimes -- I guess you could say, I'm tone deaf.

And to answer the question who wouldn't love Picasso -- um, guilty, or at least I was, but I guess it was more guilty of ignorance than of loathing, which I think nine times out of ten is the case -- I had no idea about all of his art and i probably still don't -- which is the greatest joy of getting older -- you find out just how little you know about a damn thing -- bring on thirty.


Tragic, catch me up on what's wrong with the Jesuit student population -- that sounds interesting -- maybe I should go to another thread for that or not

[TragicPixie]

The population at a Catholic Universtiy - well it tends to be Catholics. Or rather, yuppie types at this one. I don't have a problem with Catholics - generally they do have a slight problem with me but religion aside... The people who seem to flock to the school are shettlered little clones of mommy and daddy's opinions, ideas, and thoughts - and never seem to have any of their own. Generally; the instance of actual thinking humans is relatively low in the general student population. Those who do think and go here tend to be conservative Republican types (which I'm not sure what's worse; that the guy I almost slept with was a Republican or that I possibly did stuff with a guy in a friend's tent and am thinking he was slightly if not entirely offended by this - which makes me entirely embarrassed).

I'm a fan of Picasso's blue peroid... it's all sad and pretty.

And the article sounds interesting. I have a book published in 1949 called Beauty and Charm at a Glance (Bernard Jensen, D.C., PhD) with some craziness (but the illustrations are actually rather cute) about being thin. It's really crazy - complete with meal plans ranging from 900-1100 calories a day.