Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Black Female Celibacy...an Oxymoron?? Beg to Differ!

Reading this article from the 'New Black Magazine' brought to light and quantified in a concise format some thoughts I often have on the topic of why the stereotypical view of blacks maintains that we are sexually deviant, promiscuous and simply out-of-control in a kind of animalistic way. Also the sense of entitlement and claiming that seems to be made when it comes to women's bodies in general. If this were not the case why would sexual harassment in public be such a common place thing. I just wonder what gives a complete stranger the right to try and meddle with private parts of your body, in public for that matter so here comes a misogynistic aspect of this kind of behaviour - a need to humiliate a woman for no valid reason. It's a shame, a complete and utter shame yet when the complaints erupt, they are seldom taken seriously. In fact they are laughed upon, further perpetuation of the humiliation.

The treatment and portrayal of the female form in mainstream media seems to always boil down to this irrational notion that women do not have claim to their own bodies and what happens to them thereafter. That we see so many numerous cases of rape victims becoming the accused while their perpetrators are viewed with sympathy as the poor guy who got seduced by a women dressed raunchily who sought to use her sex to take a wealthy or powerful or publicly well-known figure down such as the case of Crystal Mangum. Now nobody seems to know what went down the night of the alleged incident but one cannot turn their eyes away from the fact that if she was raped, there is no way she would be able to have her attackers punished for their crimes. They bask in the glory of male privilege, the general public is completely favourable to sportsmen in most cases and as a figure that is commonly viewed in society as completely lascivious and sexually immoral, it is no wonder she is the one to take the blame for the assault.

Now perhaps one can understand why a complaint about the sexualization of the female form in mainstream media is not just a bunch of old tannies and oupas with overly traditionalist values and world-views frowning upon any kind of indecency or even perhaps overly religious members of the public who dismiss sexual immorality in fear of God's condemnation. Rather the problem lies in the fact that these images infiltrate the unconscious mind's of our young men and feed them with the notion that they are entitled to do as they will with women's bodies, that the female form exists to gratify the sexual hunger of the species and this in turn leads to an outward expression of these underlying beliefs: sexual harassments, rape and other sex-crimes.

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