I have just done my weekly readings for one of my uni subjects about sexual trafficking amongst Thai and Burmese women. It was pretty heavy-going.. combined with last week's work on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa, this subject has left me rather depressed.
When the AIDS thing became mainstream in the '80s in western countries, it was passed off as a 'gay disease', but in Africa and developing countries it is the women who are most affected because of their lack of rights when it comes to sex. Women are not people, they are objects, used and taken at will by men who feel they are entitled to sex.
I read that article a couple of weeks ago and haven't been able to get it out of my head, and it seems rather apt at the moment with my uni subject.
Is it true that even in our supposedly more enlightened, feminised equal opportunity western culture that these attitudes still prevail in men? I would say yes. You only have to watch weekend music shows to see it is true. It never matters how the man looks, he can be 400 kilos, 150 years old, wrinkly, grey-haired and have no teeth but in most of the music clips, even the most unattractive man is surrounded by scantily clad, thin, beautiful gyrating women because sex sells. But not only that, it's female sex that sells.
If an unattractive woman was to sit around in fur coats covered in bling singing surrounded by dancing buff men in budgie-smugglers no one would take her seriously. It'd be a joke!
Where does this entitlement for sex come from? Media? Culture? Society? Do ALL men feel this way? Is it really about sex and getting jollies? Or is it also about male ego, masculinity and power? I would say so.
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