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 as, women, responsible and/or safety:
“Can you conceive what it is to native-born American women citizens, accustomed to the advantages of our schools, our churches and the mingling of our social life, to ask over and over again for so simple a thing as that “we, the people,” should mean women as well as men; that our Constitution should mean exactly what it says?”
—Mary F. Eastman, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 ch. 5, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
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Talking of Michelangelo.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“After a certain number of years our faces become our biographies. We get to be responsible for our faces.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“The Declaration [of Independence] was not a protest against government, but against the excess of government. It prescribed the proper role of government, to secure the rights of individuals and to effect their safety and happiness. In modern society, no individual can do this alone. So government is not a necessary evil but a necessary good.”
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)