Before Piper leaves to spend her first day and night in prison, she crawls on top of her boyfriend: “we have to make this the stuff of fantasies,” she whispers. And then they struggle through their tears to force one, last meaningful fuck.
This, says tv, is what women are. They can be smart and interesting, but above all, they must be nymphos. The entire scene is very beautiful and quite real, but it made me think about how instrumental women are in their own objectification. Television shows get this wrong a lot for me; men are wrongfully vilified as the sole source of objectifying remarks that reduce women to hot, horny things.
But the dialogue in Orange is the New Black, a show with an almost entirely female cast, seems to get closer to the truth. Sexual confinement cannot survive unless women adopt chauvinistic ideas as their own and then push them into the world: “ I am a catch because I am beautiful, and smart, and I want to fuck ALL the time.”
We have come a long way, baby, but there is no arguing that women internalize and perpetuate their own sexual oppression. Of course it is empowering for a woman to own her sexuality! For a woman to know what she likes and let it be known, but there is a problem when we believe that intellect is secondary to sex-drive. In a time where identity is intensely contrived, this sort of idea can force the element of performance into areas that should be reserved for intimacy or at least sincere pleasure.
It is true that we didn’t start this damn thing, and that the god damn patriarchy must be stopped, but it’s also true that self-objectifying comments come from women. We make them about ourselves and we make them about other women, sometimes without even realizing it. In Orange is the New Black, an ultimately empowering show, we can still find traces of self-subversion and self-objectification.
- “I know she is hard to leave. I mean we both know how she is in bed”
I would like to pretend that there is some external force bashing me into submission, telling me that sex- how much I want it, how much I have it, and whom I have it with– is the foundation of who I am.. but I have no doubt that I perpetuate these problems in my own way.
Anywho, do you think my hair looks cute in my default pic?
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Angie
The Show Tell Project 