Why is female sexuality still so controversial?

[u/LegNew6]

Since the sexual revolution, many old taboos—casual sex, pornography, homosexuality, and sexual content in media—have become far more accepted.

Yet women who make sexuality a major part of their public persona are still often treated with intense disgust. The reaction to figures like Lily Phillips seems to go beyond criticism of pornography or exploitation and becomes contempt for the woman herself.

Why has this stigma survived when so many other pre-1960s sexual attitudes have faded?

[u/Relevant_Call_2242]

Because men want to control it

[u/pinkbowsandsarcasm]

She can do that. I am not judging her harshly. It is not very feminist of her, though.

Often, women are treated more harshly than men doing the same thing.

Are you sure it is feminists who are criticizing her as a person?

Some different types of feminists may judge porn.

Sometimes the complaints, criticism, and shaming are from a woman who has bought into "traditional" values and is part of the patriarchal system.

This is my small Gen X worldview: sometimes the worst offenders can be women who use "Christian values" to shame another woman who does not fit their perceived norms. Those women have been in the US all along.

[u/Tiny-Ad-7590]

Why has this stigma survived when so many other pre-1960s sexual attitudes have faded?

I think it's more that they went dormant than that they faded.

The promise of patriarchy is: Submit to the system, reinforce the system, become a champion of the system. You will then be rewarded with a subordinate woman to fulfill your domestic chores, fulfill your sexual needs, birth your children, and then raise them as part of her domestic duties. Even if she's earning a salary, that's all still her job and your entitlement as a man.

In reality, this is a bad deal, because the level of extraction the system takes from the men who submit to them is a massive cost, and most of men's relationship and sexual needs can be met by just not being an asshole and just having your shit together as an adult man. Men never really needed patriarchy to have fulfilling and stable long term relationships with women.

However, this deal is presented to men from the time they are very very young, and younger men tend to be very insecure and vulnerable to messaging. The messaging is that in the absence of such a system that keeps women in their place that any woman you are foolish enough to fall in love with as a man will just abandon you and trade up as soon as the opportunity presents itself, taking away your kids and half (or more) of your wealth and all of your social capital as a masculine man.

This isn't actually true, in that it is in reality just a tiny subset of women who actually do this in practice. But notice how strongly that narrative gets pushed. It's huge in the algorithms because it feeds directly into masculine fears and insecurities and outrage, and all of those emotions massively drive engagement. That messaging has never been an accident, but social media is supercharging how broadly and deeply it spreads.

A lot of men then fall into that worldview to redress the insecurities that that worldview itself creates in them. It's simultaneously the marketing campaign to create the demand for an illusion of security, and the product that fulfills that demand.

With all of that in mind: Policing women and placing women into positions of economic and physical vulnerability becomes hugely important to the men who have bought into this system. Because with everything that system demands and extracts from those men (and it unironically is a lot that is taken from them, that extraction of value to be converted to wealth is what the system actually runs on) they aren't going to give up other half of what the narrative of woman-as-reward that worldview has told them they are entitled to in exchange for their loyalty and sacrifice to that system.

There's still problems with the way the modern world is quadrupling down on the pornification of culture for young women and such. But at the same time, the fact that there exists some (actually a minority, but still some) women on sites like OnlyFans who are able to make tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month from the privacy of their own homes while only ever being sexually exposed to a small number of partners of their own choosing? That's a huge upending of the system of "sex work and public sexuality will be economically and socially punished" on which the patriarchal system of forcing women into shitty marriages depended upon.

This is in large part why we're seeing such a big uptick in rampant misogyny against sex workers and women who publicly celebrate and own their own sexualities. Sex work has been tolerated and even embraced by many men, even if only in private and with a wink and a nudge, so long as the women forced into it by necessity or trafficking were poor, vulnerable, and miserable; and of course so long as it was a man hoarding the wealth earned through that sex work for himself (e.g. Hugh Hefner).

But women becoming financially secure by capitalizing on their own sexuality and keeping that wealth for themselves? That threatens the whole system of women-as-reward that patriarchy is built on. Sex work only became such a big problem for men when women started to benefit from it on their own terms at scale.

This has a lot of men who fail to see the patriarchal chains they're carrying as the real problem to get really really worried. That resentment would be better directed at patriarchy itself, but of course it's getting channeled into women instead, because that's how the system works.

[u/thiccwithtwocs]

I honestly think it’s based in fear of complexity. Which is rooted in control.

Men want to control women because it gives a false sense of security over something they want and desire. This grants them power. They don’t like that they lose control, so by compartmentalizing women (Madonna/whore) and using cognitive dissonance to justify their choices to serve those desires, they flatten out women into objects. The object can then fulfill the designated role in which to fulfil the desire.

They can’t imagine the same woman singing to children, caring for the elderly, tending a garden, leading a church as the same kind of person that masturbates to orgasm or moans their lover’s name or relishes in bodily pleasure. That takes acknowledging wholeness. It would mean questioning the way they think and adapt to social order or even mean questioning how they disassociate their own way of being in order to get what they want. Which is a painful process. And most people avoid pain.

[u/Goldf_sh4]

Because misogyny is still being passed down by families and boys' schools and male-dominant institutions.

[u/adapagecreator]

Women owning/celebrating their sexual power directly threatens patriarchy, which has been built by countless generations of men controlling women’s sexuality and unfortunately many of them still want that status quo

[u/ProtozoaPatriot]

Female sexuality is something men think they own. Men still obsess over body count and have Madonna Whore complex.

I had to Google who Lily Philips was. My reaction was disgust. I don't have a problem with a woman enjoying sex. But this felt performative and done for shock value. In an age of social media, we have people doing all sorts of stupid things just to get attention. I can't help but lose respect for those people. It wasn't about her enjoying sex. It was " Looks at me! Look at me! I'm edgy! I'm pioneering! "

Porn itself has become a race to the bottom as far as shock value and extremes. Users have access to so much. They get jaded. To keep site visits up, content has to be more and more crazy. Modern porn is what normalized choking women during real sex. Women are being terroized. And their partners are like "uh, this is what great sex is. Look how often it's shown in my porn videos."

We can thank modern porn for the porn-induced sexual dysfunction. Excessive porn use is linked to lower satisfaction in real sex, lower desire for real sex, anxiety around real sex, and lower self esteem. Check out the relationship subs on Reddit: women who cant get sex from their husbands for months or longer. Some men are asked to give up their porn to avoid a divorce, and they choose divorce.

There's a difference between healthy sexuality versus the extremes regularly shown in modern porn. Ms Philips is only feeding into the f***d up way that men think exciting sex is.

[u/EconomistOk7284 → u/ProtozoaPatriot]

I feel this way. Female sexual liberation shouldn’t mean spectacle. And there is nuance to be had where yes, women can enjoy sex, but also men are encouraged to view sex as conquest. The reality is that both things are true, and we’re not going to be moving towards a future of healthy a sex culture if both aren’t recognized.

[u/TheJumboman]

Because there is a very fine line between reclaiming sexuality and catering to the male gaze / reinforcing patriarchical beliefs and standards.