Women Bloggers, And..
November 13th, 2005 | Published in general | 13 Comments
In our favourite trash tabloid today, the results of a poll by SMS have been published: “What’s your take? Will the sarong party girl disappear from Singapore?” I couldn’t tell if they were talking about the blogger, or sarong party girls, in general.
In a box highlighting next week’s topic: “What’s with women bloggers and their need to talk about their sex lives? Is it to tease, to gain overnight notoriety, or something deeper?” One is supposed to text your comments to a number provided.
Front page of The New Paper today: “Primary school teacher’s bold blog causes a stir. Offline TEACHER Online SEX TEASE“.
I kinda miss the days when there was just a handful of us, Mr Brown’s site still looked like this, and blogging was something you did if you could FTP and write basic HTML. When mainstream media wouldn’t bat an eyelid at what a couple of people with too much to say did in their free time.
So what’s with women bloggers and their need to talk about their sex lives? I don’t know. Do we? I don’t read any who do (I consider this to be the closest thing I have ever written, approximating a sex life). Could it be that the online medium provides an easy outlet of expression for people who find it difficult to articulate certain things in real life, politics for some, sex for others, women especially having an easier time talking about sex online? Or that in cyberspace as in real life, the mob just goes where there are nubile females displaying some kind of virility? Or that women just like sex (as I’m sure we do)?
The idea that female bloggers are writing about sex in order to pander to and to titillate a male audience, to spark controversy, to gain notoriety, is inherently heterosexist, and a construct conditioned and produced by a male society (including the women who come to believe so). Notoriety comes because this person has broken the unsaid laws of a predominantly male-run society, first talk nothing about sex or having it, if you are female, second have no sex if you are female and not married, third say nothing of it if you do. Just as how some people think certain women kiss each other in order to attract male attention at a bar, just as how all too often I have heard that pathetic male defence of male sexual crimes, “She was asking for it/ She was dressed up obviously to attract male attention”, “Sometimes men can’t help it, but you wouldn’t know how that feels like because you’re not a man” (believe me, I know enough, maybe even more, about that). Many other examples of misled heterosexist and male self-bias abound.
Not that I am a fan of those blogs guilty of the above charge, but that I am put off by the sentiment echoed by The New Paper, which I am sure is one which resonates across this society. Women are not to talk about sex. Cosmo had to be banned because depicting women with active sex lives outside of married life, was contrary to our Asian values. Sex and the City banned here not so much for the risque factor, but the idea that single urban women were willing and able to have obligation-free sexual activity with ‘marriage’ never being in the picture; while movies with gay themes like Formula 17 are banned specifically for being “too normal”, involving no suicide or sex change or depression or murder, therefore portraying too idealistic an image of homosexual culture. Ministers and ‘concerned’ citizens alike echo this idea: women are not to talk about sex. Women should have no sex life before (and maybe after?) marriage, never with anyone else other than their husbands, though what the husband does, doesn’t seem to get as much airtime.
Now, I don’t identify as militant feminist (surprise, surprise). But I do identify with anti-idiotarianism (removing of course, all elements of the American political right which popularised the term).
I was telling someone recently that I’m pissed off at how badly some women are writing about sex online, and that maybe I should try my hand at some literotica, in the tradition of Anais Nin. When that happens, you can go to the bloody New Paper and tell them I do this to tease, gain overnight notoriety, and… something.. deeper.
November 13th, 2005 at 1:49 pm (#)
It’s funny to read some of the forums and the commentaries on various blogs. To see the comments that are thrown around about various female bloggers. To contrast what those bloggers write about or do with what is regularly said on the boards exposes a stunning disparity in society.
I’m not so sure I’d term it heterosexist though. It’s really just your old-fashioned chauvinism that exists in any overtly patriarchal society. Many things throughout various aspects of society are heterosexist but the all enveloping chauvinism tends to over shadow those, for the time being.
Blogs are many things to many people; a large number come across as an outlet (shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone). So no one should be surprised when a group of people who don’t have an outlet through established channels talk about subjects that cause people to dig at their collars…
November 13th, 2005 at 4:28 pm (#)
I see women pashing women once in a while at my uni. It’s rather disturbing, not so much because they are a womyn-only coupling, rather, that even normal heterosexual pairs do not paw each other so openly. (those GLBT clubs are doing so well)
I don’t think there’s anything patriarchal or heterosexist about my reaction, it’s just that i’d prefer their passions be kept to the bedroom.
It’s the same thing online. The internet is a public sphere albeit virtual, and though p0rn is rampant online they are dehumanized. Blogs are personal and singular, a reflection of a real person that you might know or meet one of these days. I haven’t been back to Singapore in a while so the whole women blogger thing is out of my line of sight for the moment and i’m not sure what’s going on. But from what i’ve read here it seems that sex is going live, which is hard for me to stomach.
Call me conservative, but i really would prefer the body to be kept in the bedroom. We know that men and women enjoy sex and in the postmodern society everyone’s doing it to everyone whatever the coupling. Just keep it private!
November 13th, 2005 at 5:01 pm (#)
“I was telling someone recently that I’m pissed off at how badly some women are writing about sex online, and that maybe I should try my hand at some literotica, in the tradition of Anais Nin.”
YES PLEASE. :)
I’ll pay for it..
November 13th, 2005 at 6:00 pm (#)
I usually assess a statement like this by turning it on its head and asking myself, “which one would you rather believe”. In this case I’d also like to believe that guys love it when women talk about sex. Why shouldn’t we? Isn’t that the whole point? So I believe, instead of guys hating it when women flaunt their sexuality, if you asked me to be honest, we love it.
If people really believe that women shouldn’t be talking about sex, then where are all the hits coming from?
Why not take heart? If women bloggers are all over the papers, shouldn’t that mean that they’ve already won?
To say that women shouldn’t be talking about sex, maybe it is a guilty pleasure, that’s why. But personally the pleasure usually wins out over the guilt, and this is the key to happiness.
November 13th, 2005 at 6:11 pm (#)
Well, childhood is a social construct after all. The moral panic is a natural reaction to the concept of school and learning. Teachers are expected to be as desexualised as the children they teach, to maintain the ‘purity’ and ‘innocence’ of childhood. Teacher and sex tease are inimical to parental concern.
November 13th, 2005 at 7:09 pm (#)
It isn’t so much whether or not guys love or hate females talking about sex — I am sure they do love it more than they hate it. As our school days probably demonstrated, a couple of jocks could love how a girl is open about having an active sex life, since it is to their interests: but that doesn’t stop them from holding beliefs about this woman’s morals and value and worth. And the fact that they, the jocks, talk about it openly? Doesn’t count for anything at all. Extrapolated to the level of the collective, together with the sense of shame and hypocrisy we’re so good at displaying, you get a society that is apparently too conservative to stand the idea of women being sexually active, and a media which is too happy to perpetuate this idea.
Well jude, like you I would rather not look or read when ‘sex goes live’, especially if done badly, and i personally wouldn’t do so myself — just as how I don’t care for the trend of women bloggers here twirling their hair and taking snapshots of themselves at 1001 angles — though if they want to, that’s perfectly fine. For the new paper, and all its ilk, to decide to turn this into a topic of probable contempt, however, is an entirely different matter.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:27 am (#)
Yeah, but every time you (not you as in popagandhi but you as in generic woman) turn a guy down, tell him that he’s not welcome, it’s pretty much the same in the grand scheme of things: his sexuality is being rejected. The contempt is also there so in a way life is fair: equally f-ed up for all of us.
The main point of the New Paper article, though, is fair, I feel. It’s really inappropriate for primary school teachers to blog about their sex lives. I personally would not take up a teaching job because I am unable to keep tabs on my foul mouth. You can say what you want as a university lecturer cos they’re fucking like rabbits anyway but JC and below you just got to watch it. Anonymous blogs are fine but that’s also a fine line.
November 14th, 2005 at 4:51 am (#)
nono, the article abt the primary sch teacher was completely different from the poll.. that was in a separate section by itself.
well, i suppose teaching as a career has already been impossible for me for a long time.. =) not that i ever contemplated it. cross fingers
November 14th, 2005 at 5:41 am (#)
Well dunno if you’d figure out where I studied as a result of this: one of the teachers, who when she was teaching was female, was an old boy of the school.
If they can tolerate a trannie they can tolerate a lesbie, just not one who’s promiscuous or uses foul language. I think…
November 14th, 2005 at 7:05 am (#)
the singapore government treats its citizens like children lah. the people up there are our strict disciplinarians so if you transmute the bureaucratese down to our level, everything remotely sexualised or politicised (apparently my two favourite terms recently) is a no-go.
too bad for us!
November 14th, 2005 at 9:09 am (#)
Adri, I couldn’t agree more. I especially hate the idea that all men are interested in sex only on a crass mechanical level, so that “any hole’s a goal”, and it has nothing to do with any sort of personal connection for any man. (And conversely, that it can only ever be about personal connection when it comes to a woman.)
As Iain Banks said – “Seen one, seen ‘em all, I reminded myself. But then that, of course, was such shit. Sexists said that the way racists claimed, They all look the same to me. Both were confessions of personal inadequacy, of the inability to really see.” Purely visceral lust – the urge to simply ‘get off’ – is only one part of sexual attraction, which is only one part of how one person can relate to another. It is insulting to both men and women to suggest that straight men are incapable of distinguishing between their objects of desire as nothing more than different pieces of tail, and that women of all kinds can never experience any desire that is limited to the basest mechanics of the body.
If there are any such limits, we’re the ones who built them, and we’re the ones who can still shake free. But people are addicted to their jails they’ve built, and live in them as surrogates for their more responsive selves. It sucks donkey balls.
November 14th, 2005 at 11:34 am (#)
Jude, probably a bit late to be picking up on this (but 3am this morning didn’t seem like a great time either), what do/did you mean by ‘childhood is a social construct’?
November 16th, 2005 at 9:03 pm (#)
Maybe I should write some erotica to increase traffic. Never mind that I’ve never gotten any action.