We all know about the sexual desire of adolescent boys. But scenes of young women’s sexual awakening in themselves do not exist except in a mock-up for the male voyeur. It is hard to imagine, in a cultural vacuum, what solitary female desire looks like. Women’s bodies are portrayed as attractive packaging around an empty box; our genitals are not eroticized for women. men’s bodies are not eroticized for women. Other women’s bodies are not eroticized for women. Female masturbation is not eroticized for women. Each woman has to learn for herself, from nowhere, how to feel sexual (thought she learns constantly how to look sexual). She is given no counterculture of female lust looking outward, no descriptions of the intricate, curious presence of her genital sensations of the way they continually enrich her body’s knowledge. Left to herself in the dark she has very little choice: She must absorb the dominant culture’s fantasies as her own.
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (via amythia)
