C.S. Lewis writes, in his essay titles We Have No "Right To Happiness," on pages 747 to 750, about an encounter he had with his neighbor named Clare and the thoughts he had afterward. Lewis describes a situation in which two people divorced their partners in order to marry each other, "Mr. A" and "Mrs. B." After entertaining different definitions of a human right and applying them to the event, Lewis concluded that the right his neighbor truly meant to describe was the right to, as he called it, "sexual happiness." Sexual happiness is treated exceptionally from the rest of the rights and moral codes people tend to hold, and he argued that this is undue. However, he stated that he could understand the reason for this: "It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion-as distinct from a transient fit of appetite-that it makes more towering promises than any other emotion. " This is to say that the pursuit of sexual happiness…
Max Dahl World Art 1 1/30/2017 Response Paper One In “Sex, Rhetoric, and the Public Monument: The Alluring Body of Naram-Sin of Agade,” Irene J. Winter displays an interesting argument that appealing aesthetics and overall sexuality of a political figure can be considered powerful and dominant characteristics for a leader to possess. Something interesting to note is that this can be closely tied with traits and views we see today in a more contemporary society which I touch on later in the paper. The author argues that the "eroticized body" of Naram really describes the link between a-uthority, sexuality, and power.…
In August of 1992, a speech was given by Mary Fisher called, a Whisper of AIDS. Fisher gave this speech in Houston, Texas and many people witnessed it. During this speech, Fisher elaborates on the topic of AIDS and speaks to her audience about the effects of society’s preconceptions. She uses the construction of parallel structure to show listeners that she wants their attention and focus, personification to amplify the differences between society’s actions and the effects and anaphora to once again reiterate the effects of society. Mary Fisher uses many rhetorical devices and Parallel structure is one.…
Paper # 2 Word Count: What I learned: I learned that America really is having a war on sex and even though I knew of some of the issues that were described in this war, I had not realized that how deep it went and all the things that were actually happening all around me. Throughout the text, he discusses the different people that this war effects, and it was pretty much everyone out there, and it had me wondering why more is not being done to fix this huge problem. I learned quite a bit about the different types of censorship that occur in the media and on the internet which I had no idea existed to such extent and it disturbed me how much control people have over our lives and what we do with them. When Klein uses the comparison on page…
Roxane Gay - Reading Response The three readings by Roxane Gay talks about rape culture and men. The idea that rape has more of a negative effect on men rather than women. The idea that the impact is more detrimental to the rapist rather that the victim is something that occurs in these readings a lot. In Careless Language of Sexual Violence, Gay talks about the case of James McKinley Jr., where the focus was more on the lives of the men, rather than the 11-year-old child who was raped by 18 men, ranging from the ages of middle school boys to 27 year olds.…
While her association with the CIA independent research service caused her to face criticism, Gloria Steinem is an influential leader and spokeswoman during the feminists movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s, because she talked with women who experienced abortions, took the lead in launching the pioneering feminists Ms magazine, and formed the national women's political caucus which worked on women issues.…
•Arguing for the absolute centrality of sexuality to understandings of modern culture, Sedgwick demonstrates that the homo-hetero distinction at the heart of modern sexual definition is fundamentally incoherent for two reasons. • On one hand, there is the persistent contradiction inherent in representing homosexuality as the property of a distinct minority population (Sedgwick refers to this as "a minoritizing view") or a sexual desire that potentially marks everyone, including ostensibly heterosexual subjects ("a universalizing view"). •On the other hand, there is the abiding contradiction in thinking about the gendering of homosexual desire in both transitive and separatist terms, where a transitive understanding locates that desire…
Yes, boys receive “mixed messages.” Though they are not identical to the ones girls receive, boys still get them. “Sociologist Michael Messner (2002) goes further and showed that sports are a primary vehicle in which boys and men learn, reinforce, and perform a form of masculinity that is based on compulsive, competitive, heterosexuality” (DeMello 143). In the locker rooms, boys are encouraged for multiple conquests (DeMello143). However, polygamy is not accepted in the eyes of the law or culturally.…
This article begins with a quick discussion of the book Intimate Matters in which the author, Cynthia M. Blair, expressed how the book majorly influenced the field of studying human sexuality in the United States. She explains how she used the book often when she first began studying sex work of black women in Chicago. She explains how the book allowed her to better visualize the connection between sexual labor and race politics. Most importantly she says it allowed her to better examine, “This historical criminalization of black sexuality and the role that the regulation of black bodies playing in define citizenship in early twentieth-century cities.” (Blair 4)…
Clarice Lispector’s “Pig Latin” is an interesting view into societal values of women and their sexuality. Often in society women are reduced to their relationship with sex and their bodies, forced into unwinnable situations where they’re either ridiculed and labeled ‘whores’ or they’re at risk of being raped. Society continues to forward this ultimatum with dire repercussions either side of the spectrum. When the decision is rape or forced into a stereotype, either way a women’s self-confidence is destroyed and she begins to believe she is nothing more than her sexuality.…
Ellen Willis, another feminist philosopher, believes that Longino’s definition of pornography could potentially hurt women psychologically (112). Society has had some history of repressing women’s sexuality. Defining what pornography is appropriate for women supports an idea that women cannot determine what is appropriate and beneficial for themselves. Women who watch pornography should not be shamed for exploring their sexuality (Willis, 113). Anti-pornography feminists, like Longino, claim that porn reduces female porn stars to sex objects, but this claim robs the performers of control over their bodies (Longino, 106).…
Rubin explains that Engles “sees sex oppression as the part of capitalism’s heritage from prior social forms” and “integrates sex and sexuality into his theory of society. ”(164) Rubin explains that all societies have their own different ways of dealing with “sex, gender, and babies” and that the desires of sexuality and procreation must be fulfilled. In addition, Rubin clarifies that the sex/gender system goes by several alternate names including “mode of reproduction” and “patriarchy.”…
How often do you get drawn to an advertisement because the first thing that you see is a pretty and hot women? Magazines have been around for several decades but even though only a few people reads them, they still influence old and modern day society. The article, “Sex, Lies, & Advertising” by Gloria Steinam tries to offer a better understanding into the magazine industry and how they operate. Steinam talks about how all magazine companies uses feminism to sale their product. She explains that within each advertisement, companies use women to draw in attention.…
Gender violence includes offenses such as domestic violence, sexual abuse, and sexual harassment, and anyone of any gender can become a victim. However, the stereotypical victim of gender violence is female because a large proportion of victims are women. Consequentially, as Jackson Katz discusses in his TED Talk “Violence against women – it’s a men’s issue”, many people believe that issues such as domestic violence and sexual harassment only affect women and, thus, are deemed “women’s issues”. One obvious consequence of this stereotype is that male victims are often overlooked or dismissed, but Katz sheds light upon other consequences of referring to gender violence as a “women’s issue” that contribute to its perpetuation.…
From a very young age we are taught the “sexual scripts” (pg. 313) that we are expected to follow and this largely dictates how we feel we should conduct our intimate relationships. Sexual scripts in many societies are largely “heteropatriarcical” meaning they are based on a system of heterosexual male dominance (pg. 354). Tight control over what is sexually acceptable can be harmful for the development of healthy intimate relationships especially for those who do not fall within the traditional heterosexual gender binary. A young American female receives mixed messages about her sexuality every day. In her article The Cult of Virginity author Jessica Valenti says that, “present-day American society- whether through pop culture, religion, or institutions –conflates sexuality and morality constantly” (pg. 336).…