Western popular sexuality – sex in contemporary Western imagination

  1. Western views of sex

There is an important misunderstanding when there is a discussion about sexuality. Given the weight and power of western media western views of certain matters become dominant and understood as primary.  How does this affect people from other cultures? What happens is that people from other cultures try hard to make sense of western views of sexuality and re-interpret them and so begins a trail of misunderstanding.

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It does not assist that Western societies do not see themselves in a clear mirror.

This is a matter deserving much detailed research but here we can sketch one key point. Western culture has begun to fetishise sexuality and the young almost pubescent female body but the form of expression is important. Sex in western culture has certain dynamics that maybe unfamiliar to many in other cultures. For the elite sexuality was potentially subtle with concepts such as agape /chivalric love but these were not available to ordinary persons. Women were treated as objects, under ancient Greece they could not own property or sue in their own right and were the property of the men in their household. This inevitably affected the nature of sexuality.  An objectified person barely above an honoured serf/slave cannot freely offer her spirituality as central part of her sexuality. Her sexuality becomes her body. But the body is not the heart of sexuality so the emergent sexuality is debased. The woman becomes an aide to male masturbation, a warm and soft accessory to masturbation, while sexuality becomes masturbating with a human body.

Certain forms of female liberation become opportunities for women to treat men as aides to female masturbation, mutual debasement.

Once this is understood much of the dynamics of popular Western sexuality will be understood better and non-Westerners can cease trying to find something deeper in it. 

28 April 2022