Apr 14 2008
Sex on the Interwebzorz
NOTE: The content of this entry may not be suitable for individuals under age sixteen or so, or people who get uncomfortable with sex and female reproduction.
There’s no arguing that the internet is primarily a man’s world. I say there’s no arguing with it because if you visit any online forum, you’re bound to be subjected to derogatory terminology for women’s reproductive system. I don’t think of myself as a buzz-kill, and if there were one or two offenses, I’d laugh about it and move on.
But it’s not one or two, it’s an entire system of communication built on disparaging women’s body parts. Pretty sweet body parts, if I can say so. Body parts that are partially responsible for creating life, and wholly responsible for carrying it and bringing it into the world. Ultimately, body parts no human on earth could exist without. Body parts full of nerve-endings and some of the most sophisticated work that god or evolution or whathaveyou has ever done, in my opinion.
Before any man gets his tight-whities in a twist, I feel the same way about their organs too. But they’re not disparaged online nearly as much.
I could dismiss the internet population as the unwashed masses who don’t know any better, but that’s not true. The fact is that people in forums are rewarded for the same stupid come-backs rather than original thought. Maybe the first person who said “blubbery vag” was being clever, but you certainly aren’t when you use it in every stupid thread. The same goes for “sandy vag,” “bloody vag,” “hairy coont” whatever. And “Tits or GTFO,” with every appearance of a woman in a forum followed by the insistence that she doesn’t belong in the male-dominated atmosphere of the internet until she has succumbed her body to their uses.
This isn’t something limited to uneducated people. The fact is, I have met very few men who wouldn’t say the same stupid things and laugh about it. I think there should be a system whereby for every derogatory word (or phrase) a man uses for women or female reproductive organs, they owe one female one orgasm. If they’re married, they owe it to their wife. If they’re dating, they owe it to their girlfriend. If they’re on the bar scene, they have to pick up one woman for the express purpose of giving that woman an orgasm.
I understand that in this society, we’re uncomfortable talking about our bits, about sex, about orgasm. I grew up with males who could talk about these things but if I tried, I got a weird look. It took me a long time to get anywhere near comfortable talking about women’s bits, and in doing so I often had to disturb social mores. I was the only person in a Shakespeare class in college to point out his obvious reference to the vagina in a sonnet, to the utter silence of every student in the room.
It reminded me of my first sex-ed class when I was ten, where we went over the words for sexual organs and we giggled or screamed so that we would be able to use them later without doing so. Penis got the biggest laughs, and it is kind of a funny word. I don’t think any of us had really heard the word vagina or vulva before, so it got almost no laughs.
My point is, our discomfort has a price, a price that is paid largely by women. A price that leads to sixty year old women who’ve never had an orgasm, men who denigrate women by debasing their bodies, a void of knowledge about sex which leads to STDs and pregnancy, and a roomful of college students who are stunned by the word vagina.