Attack on Sexual Liberalism??

BY Janae Clark
Sex sells is what they say. We see this all over the media, ads that are consumed with sexual images and body parts. Sometimes you get so distracted by the sexual images that you’re not even paying attention to what’s actually trying to be sold. While sex may indeed sell it seems to be that only one particular sex sells and that seems to be the female body. 96% of ads that use sexual images are of women and only 4% are made up of sexual images from men. The statistics while maybe not surprising should be at least slightly alarming to you. The ads never focus on the woman as a whole, they only focus on certain body parts of women making them into parts and not an entire person.(1) Some may say “oh well women do the ads so it must be okay“, well if this is what our culture says its okay for women to be than that’s very well all we will become. I believe that this is something our society needs to work on changing. We need to start seeing women as a whole and not as simply whatever body parts males find attractive at the time. A man gets viewed as a whole person and I believe that women should have that right too. I do however foresee problems with accomplishing this goal. Our sex culture is so tied into what we see on the media that I wonder how our society would view it if we try to remove women and men from being used as sexual objects on ads. Sex is everywhere we go so that makes it easy to believe that our sexual liberalism is tied into the women that we see being objectified on the TV ads. If most of society see these ads and the objectification of women as our sexual liberalism than a lobby to try to change this could easily be seen as an attack on our sexual liberalism and could be part of the conservative backlash that comes with said sexual liberalism. I don’t want to see us back in that 50s’ state of mind because we tried to promote women as a whole and it got mistaken for conservatism. Conservatism is always going to be there it is around during every sexually liberal era and I don’t want to give the conservative nature that I see subtly taking over in our laws become a more open and dominate way of thinking. I for one believe that sexual liberalism is important to have because I think it promotes a safe and healthy culture that realizes that sex is a natural thing that we shouldn’t have to hide or be ashamed of, but I also believe that we aren’t going about it the right way right now. What we should be thinking about as a society is the right way to go about changing what we see on the ads without it being mistaken for an attack on our sexual liberalism. I believe that we need to educate ourselves on what sexual liberalism really is and how it’s supposed to look like. I feel that once we do that we as a whole country will be better able to meet the needs of everybody and we will understand that what we see on the TV ads is not sexual liberalism and it is not what our sex culture should be based around.

1.
Moore, Crystal . "The Contemporary Crisis in Sexuality." Lecture, April 29, 2014.