Women As Responsible For Sexual Safety
Since the emergence of sexual independence, health officials have launched campaigns to bring awareness to the dangers of unprotected sexual intercourse. While the dangers of unprotected sex include unintended pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases (HIV/AIDS being the deadliest), the use of contraceptive devices, the most reliable being condoms, remain inconsistent. These campaigns place the greatest responsibility for safe sex on women and there are several social constructions and assumptions that are to be taken into account to understand the reasoning why.
The social constructions of masculinity and femininity play a lead role in understanding why it is women who are responsible for controlling their sexual encounters. Society has attributed many traits to masculinity including a high sex drive. This high sex drive asserts that men are constantly interested in sex and once they are sexually aroused must be satisfied through orgasm. This drive is intertwined with the male identity and consequently creates a momentum that once started is difficult to stop. Society has also attributed many traits to femininity including altruism. This trait has caused women’s sexual desires to be largely ignored and because men are seen as unable to control their sexuality, women become responsible for enforcing condom use instead of the "uncontrollable" male. However, others speculate that the responsibility for condom use falling on women is not so much societally imposed but is instead resultant of the possible consequences of unprotected sex being generally more serious for women than men (pregnancy, greater likelihood of STD transmission, etc.).
Another commonly believed social idea of sexuality is the coital imperative. The coital imperative is the idea that for sex to be "real" there must be penis-vagina intercourse. For many women, this imposes limitations to the sexual possibilities and a condom is seen as a symbol of the end. It is easy to assess how these two ideas, male sex drive and coital imperative, paired with the social construction of femininity can easily lead to an imbalance of the power to make the decision to use a condom.
Read more about this topic: Human Female Sexuality
Famous quotes containing the words women, responsible and/or safety:
“The cliché that women, more consistently than men, turn inward for sustenance seems to mean, in practice, that women have richly defined the ways in which imagination creates possibility; possibility that society denies.”
—Patricia Meyer Spacks (b. 1929)
“Ambitious men spend their youth in rendering themselves worthy of patronage; it is their great mistake. While the foolish creatures are laying in stores of knowledge and energy, so that they shall not sink under the weight of responsible posts that recede from them, schemers come and go who are wealthy in words and destitute of ideas, astonish the ignorant, and creep into the confidence of those who have a little knowledge.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)