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
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—Samson Raphaelson (1896–1983)
“With two sons born eighteen months apart, I operated mainly on automatic pilot through the ceaseless activity of their early childhood. I remember opening the refrigerator late one night and finding a roll of aluminum foil next to a pair of small red tennies. Certain that I was responsible for the refrigerated shoes, I quickly closed the door and ran upstairs to make sure I had put the babies in their cribs instead of the linen closet.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“There is always safety in valor.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)