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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5122 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 5, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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How so?

You can argue that, I don't know, Catwoman is exercising a BSDM paraphilia. But then you'd have to compare the overwhelming number of films selling some form of sex appeal. Forget Jabba's palace, Princess Leia's stay on the Death Star was suggestive as hell. Look at the pre-PG13 era to see how many of those were marketed for kids.

The romance genre has plenty of catering to women's libidos, but usually in the complete opposite direction--dominant or animalistic men (or vampires, or whatever). Meanwhile, I'm not sure that exhibitionism has made it mainstream at all. Tricky to search for examples, though...

How so?

Modesty, or rather the lack thereof. I believe there exist a significant number of women who "get off" on their ability to cause men to desire them. They behave and dress in ways that exploit men's sexual arousal to gain power over them. A SFW example of this are shirts like this, purposely designed to draw attention to sexual characteristics (breasts in this case) and then shame the viewer for being drawn to them. It is particularly egregious in the context of trans women and drag queens, as they are simply behaving the way many cis-women do normally, but people are threatened by amab behaving that way.

But then you'd have to compare the overwhelming number of films selling some form of sex appeal.

No, that is orthogonal to my argument. Sexualization can be used in many different ways.

The romance genre has plenty of catering to women's libidos, but usually in the complete opposite direction--dominant or animalistic men (or vampires, or whatever).

“Men’s greatest weakness is their façade of strength, and women’s greatest strength is their façade of weakness.” The man's "dominance" in the romance genre is entirely performative. It is there merely to remove the responsibility of the woman for what happens, because women aren't supposed to want sex. He is still doing exactly what she wants him to.

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