Elle Beau ❇︎
2 min readMay 20, 2024

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Although I've already linked you lots about this, here's a quote that kind of sums up trying to assess this sort of thing in a patriarchy:

Context is everything. If women were told, “Imagine you are propositioned by this guy, and there is no way he will kill you and there is no way he’ll be a jerk and it’s guaranteed that he’ll be skilled enough to give you an orgasm and you won’t get pregnant or get an infection or disease, and your mom will never know and neither will anyone in your dorm or neighborhood. He won’t make disparaging remarks about your body or gossip afterward. He will text you after or not, and want to see you again or not, depending on what you wish he would do.” And so on. These are the kinds of conditions we would have to engineer in order to get an accurate sense of what a woman’s sex drive might be like under circumstances conducive to actually feeling entitled to have and admit to having a sex drive. Until such a test exists, we need to consider the likelihood that we are only measuring men’s willingness to admit they are sexual compared to women’s willingness to do the same. Guess who wins that contest?

Martin, Wednesday. Untrue (p. 65). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.

Meanwhile, "in some other cultures, such as the Canela in Brazil, in a traditional marriage ceremony, the bride and groom lie down on a mat, arms under each other’s heads, legs entwined. The brother of each partner’s mother then comes forward. He admonishes the bride and her new husband to stay together until the last child is grown, specifically reminding them not to be jealous of each other’s lovers."

The Aché of Paraguay considers a man and a woman sleeping in the same hut to be married. The marriage dissolves if one of them takes his or her hammock to another hut. “Marriages generally did not last long, and were interspersed with short romances in which one spouse might temporarily desert for a few days or weeks. Postreproductive women report a mean of thirteen spouses in a lifetime.

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Elle Beau ❇︎
Elle Beau ❇︎

Written by Elle Beau ❇︎

I'm a bitch, I'm a lover, I'm a child, I'm a mother, I'm a sinner, I'm a saint. I do not feel ashamed. I'm your hell, I'm your dream, I'm nothing in between.

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