Female Sexuality

Both the secular and religious world often characterize female sexuality, wherever it manifests, as subservient to male sexuality, as if women only want, or should only want, to engage in sexual expression to please their significant others.  Female sexuality is regularly viewed as a servant of male sexuality.  Otherwise, it is often viewed as such a random, trivial force that it is not even regarded as comparable the sexuality of men.

In warring against the erroneous claims of complementarians about issues like leadership, marital submission, and ecclesial gifting, many Christian egalitarians outright ignore the enormous need for the correction of the cultural and evangelical idea that women are largely asexual or demisexual beings.  That many women are visual beings [1] with deep sexual impulses is scarcely discussed by them.  Even staunch egalitarians are not always consistent or bold enough to celebrate controversial aspects of female sexuality, or female sexuality in general, despite their willingness to fiercely challenge suppression of other aspects of female existence.  This inconsistency can damage women in egalitarian settings who are spared from other stereotypical ideas.

One needs only to consult reason to understand why the dominant ideas about female sexuality (and the companion ideas about male sexuality) are nothing but dehumanizing, false assumptions.  After all, the mere fact that it does not follow by logical necessity that someone born with a vagina will have any set of psychological characteristics alone refutes the notion that women (and men) have a gender-based set of personality traits or desires by default.  Women are visual, just like men are relational; wherever a person is on the spectrum of sexual triggers has nothing to do with gender.  Contrary claims dehumanize women by ignoring a powerful aspect of their sexuality, and they dehumanize men by treating them as helpless slaves to visual impulses.  Egalitarians are quick to affirm the latter.  Unfortunately, many of them do not seem eager to simultaneously affirm the former.

Cultural and religious variables often make it so that women feel ashamed to admit that they harbor sexual feelings towards the male body.  As a result, they can feel very isolated in their sexual feelings, as if there is something abnormal or perverse about themselves simply because they are sexually attracted to men--especially in a visual or physical sense.  Men feeling undesirable or unattractive is another natural consequence of this.  However, many women will openly admit their visual attractions to men and their potent sexual desires if one brings up the topic in a philosophically honest way.  I have never met someone who acts like they want to keep an entire dimension of their individuality undisclosed unless they fear some sort of denial or dismissal by listeners.

There is far more to correcting complementarian teachings about sexuality and modesty than emphasizing that men have varying degrees of visuality or sexual feelings (meaning that stereotypes to the contrary are entirely erroneous), that men alone are responsible for their motives and actions, that men are fully capable of controlling even powerful impulses, and that the human body is not sexual on its own.  There is also a great need for emphasizing that many women, like some men, are deeply visual creatures.  It needs to be widely known that many women sexually appreciate the male body.  There is a great need for encouraging women to accept, publicize, and enjoy their sexual natures.  Only when this task is completed will egalitarians have complete cultural victory (they already have intellectual victory) over complementarian notions of sexuality.

Women need to be explicitly taught that there is absolutely nothing unnatural about them experiencing sexual feelings and acting upon them in morally legitimate ways, from making sexual comments to engaging in masturbation to using nonsinful erotic media.  It needs to be affirmed that there is nothing sinful about women looking at men and savoring visual, physical attraction towards them.  The silence of egalitarians on these matters only contributes to the power of myths about gender that they otherwise ruthlessly oppose.


[1].  Ironically, both the Old Testament (Genesis 39, Ezekiel 23) and the Quran (Surah 12) strongly emphasize this at certain points, and yet evangelical Christians and Muslims alike often pretend like women do not possess this trait, or at least do not possess it in any significant way.