Leave it to Jersey Shore to teach us an important lesson about feminine issues. This post was inspired by an 8-hour JS binge during a New Year's hangover and, later, a surprisingly poignant Law & Order: SVU episode.
The entire premise of MTV's greatest anthropological experiment is to put olive oil-y, spray-tanned grundle choads in one house, feed them lethal amounts of alcohol and set them loose on the club scene. Naturally, all castmates bang each other and every other moving peen/vag in the metropolitan area. Naturally, the double standard applies that boys are pimps and the girls are sluts. I moved beyond this thought, however, when tonight's SVU episode introduced as a star witness in a NYC rape case a Congolese refugee who had fled her country after watching her family, village and entire community get raped by neighboring warlords - sexual violence is one of man's best weapons of wars, after all.
Putting these two images together - the sluts at Jersey Shore and the rape victims and sex slaves outside our borders - made me think that maybe we First Worlders take our sexual freedom for granted. Sure, there is a wide gap to bridge in the U.S. in terms of gender equality, but for the most part, we own our vaginas. If we want to sleep around or if we want to be selective, that's really our choice. We can get huffy when men turn into hypocrites and apply these double standards, but the argument almost seems irrelevant compared to the experiences of women who don't have a say in their sexuality.
I've interviewed indigenous Mexican women in rural, impoverished communities who have literally lost their babies (or in the case of other women, their lives) because their husbands or mother-in-laws refused to let another man - i.e. the doctor - see their lady bits during this fragile process. The empowering part is that many of these women are saying "fuck that shit" and scraping up change to take themselves on the hours-long drive to the obstetrician, but in reality most of these women are secondary in making decisions about their own bodies. I won't even pretend like I'm well-versed enough to delve into Africa and Asia's shop of sexual horrors, but even the headlines will tell you that in most parts of the world, men (and other women) are taking the fate of the world's vaginas into their own hands, denying women the right to say how and when they'll use their Power (holla, Judy Blume).
I'm obviously not above watching the shallow cesspool that is the world's greatest reality show, but I believe it is incredibly effective in numbing the mind of its viewers in terms of the female experience. We watch these pickle-toting trolls have sexy times with roommates and strangers, and the conversation stops there. Are they slutty? Would you have slept with that guy too? Would you sleep with her? Is this normal behavior, and why is it so entertaining? They're questions that are fun to answer, but have absolutely no consequence to the fate of sexual suffering around the world. Tonight's Law & Order, however, posed a far more positive discussion (well, at least in my head, and with myself). According to the episode, which we'll consider 100% fair and accurate for the sake of my rambling, strategic rapes and mass sexual abuses have essentially no weight in international courtrooms - so, bombing people is punishable, but raping them is irrelevant.
Unfortunately I can't really conclude this post, as it's 2 a.m., my wine buzz has worn off, and I know tomorrow I'll get back to giggling with my ladies about my own sexual follies. I think the point that I wanted to make is that the majority of American pop culture encourages us to think shallow, inconsequential thoughts about women and sex. These shows reiterate our own experience in essentially owning our own bodies. Sure, we might make stupid decisions and sext them via iPhone, but that was our stupid decision to make. Rarely do we consider how insanely lucky we are to be able to make these stupid decisions. And it's not just that we're lucky compared to our grandmothers, who blossomed in a far more patriarchal society. It's that we are lucky compared to the majority of women around the world today.
That said, I have some gorillaz to smush.
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