Why?
Because I CAN.
Here's something I just typed out. We're supposed to respond to a question posed by another student on the Discussion Board. This guy was writing about Cosmo quizzes. About a chapter in our textbook about a woman who took one of these questions and scored as an "out of control deviant." (Heh.)
The guy wrote out a good post and ended it with a question to which I responded...
"" Do you think that these quizzes have an effect on gender roles in society?"
Actually, I believe it is the other way around. I believe that it is societally prescribed gender roles that directly affect these kinds of quizzes. The quizzes serve to enforce the roles by giving the taker some fatuous measure of their adherence to standardized sexual behavior.
And this is why there is a market for this genre of quizzes. If we subscribe to a belief in the correctness of society's sexual rules, we are then obliged to constantly monitor the degree of our compliance in maintaining the norm. We wonder, " Am I having too much sex? Too little? With the right people? In the wrong circumstance? Am I normal? Is there something wrong with me?"
When we put our faith in societal mandates rather then within ourselves, we are unable to believe in our own essential nature. The inalterable fact as well, is that if we rely upon comparison, whether it be via magazine quiz or the opinion of family, or friends, or some so-called professional, we are marginalizing our own instinct and intuition. We are substituting someone else's standards instead of developing our own.
From my own experience, last year, for the first time in my life, I " came out" about how many sex partners I'd had. Prior to this I had always, always lied. Lied especially to men. (I think somehow I maintained my virginity six or seven times...)
I lied because I was socialized to believe that a girl, a woman, should not have multiple sex partners. I lied because I was afraid that people would call me terrible names, say horrible things about me, call me whore and slut, call me cheap, easy, dirty, all the words society throws at a woman. I lied because I told myself that I had to.
I lied until one day, like an epiphany, it occurred to me that I didn't want to care any longer about being judged by others, I didn't want my fear to be controlling me. I started thinking that real liberation, real freedom (of any sort), means not having to lie.
Apparently there is some kind of magic number. A magical number of sex partners that a woman of my age is expected to have. I know when I was still in the closet about my relentless, exuberant, overwhelmingly rampant promiscuity, and someone, usually a guy, would ask me how many people I'd slept with, when I'd pull out a very low number, they would say things like, " That's about right." And, " That's not too bad." And this confirmed to me that I was right to be lying, that obviously the true extent of my sexuality was not " about right," and was in fact bad.
I have no doubt that if a quiz exists (as it surely does),
grading and scoring a person on their number of sex partners, I would not rate
well. I would rate as definitely outside of the socially acceptable sexual
norm. I'm so happy to not care anymore.
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