Sex, power and intimancy

It's weird how even things like sex and romance can have a major impact on the perceptions of gender.  Even impacting how we identify and define ourselves.  It starts with the sexual scripts that are taught to us since childhood that tell us “how we are supposed to feel and act as sexual persons” (Shaw and lee, 163).  These sexual scripts ultimately help establish and maintain gender roles and heteronormativity.  I understand that this is build into our minds, but it seems really hard to unlearn something like gender roles.  Only because the beginnings of these learnt roles start with whether you are brought home from the hospital in a pink or blue blanket.  Society needs to be taking baby steps to reverse this way of thinking.

On a different topic, the idea that virginity does not exist really challenges gender roles and heteronormativity. This is by not giving males a reason to “own” their spouse and it also gives women something that would lessen the discrimination against women who are not virgins.  Purity Balls are dances fathers take their young daughters too to make them swear the virginity to there fathers.  With this in mind, it seems society has an obsession with young, pure (white) girls.  But only girls that are pretty or even “sexy” (ew).  Vladimir Nabokov wrote about these kind of young girls in Lolita and calls them Nymphets which is referring to mythical Nymphs that are young female mystical beings that exploit and seduce sexually deprived, older men.  This is so extreme in our culture that there's a “daddy complex” with both men and women.  Girls with “daddy issues” are praised and are seen as hyper sexual because it gives men a reason to be sexually dominant and/or aggressive (which I'm not against and past no judgment).

In conclusion, everyone should be able to love whom they wish and not have society putting predispositions in your minds that restrict us in relationships.  I have come understand this through the essay Romance: Sweet Love where Peck states, “the desire to love is not itself love, love is as love does.  Love is an act of will- namely, both an intention and action.  Will also impose choice.  We do not have to love.  We choose to love.”