First of all, I’m talking about 10,000 years of conditioning and second of all, are you actually purporting that we’re past those rules…..? ROFL! Women’s sexuality is still plenty policed today. If it weren’t we wouldn’t even have words like slut in our vocabulary. Women wouldn’t still be wearing bras — something most women hate, etc., etc. And most telling of all, no-one would ask a woman who’d been raped what she was wearing…….
Women quite often don’t even make eye contact with men when out in public — because they’ve had enough experience with that being taken as an invitation or a show of interest which then leads so something in between leering, comments, or other unwanted attention such as following, or groping. Have you paid attention to the news about how many times a woman saying no to a man in public gets her harmed or killed? That’s the same 10,000 years of patriarchal conditioning in play. A woman who isn’t being demure must be “asking for it” — whatever that means… That might not be happening to every woman but they are well aware that it does happen and since there is no way to know whether or not it will in this instance, the inclination is to avoid eye contact. How are you going to notice all the hot, attractive men around you while still doing that?
You can scoff at the way I live my life all you want (I can guarantee I’m having a lot more fun than you are) but having been a woman on both sides of that equation, I can report with a fair amount of certainty that going through life with the social conditioning that comes out of patriarchy and now no longer being constrained by that has made a huge difference in the way I notice and allow myself to feel attracted to those I encounter in public. And why does me being in a narrow demographic make me incapable of speaking about what the larger societal dynamic is — particularly since I’ve been in the larger dynamic as well and am uniquely qualified to speak about the differences between the two? You’re kinda making my point for me — that any woman who is not sexually demure and subservient gets public censure — in present time.
I’ll repeat — your brain functions largely the way that you allow it to function. Evolutionary psychology would tend to indicate that women have been not allowed to and are still not allowed by current norms to express sexuality in public. Women are supposed to be sexy (for men’s enjoyment). They still aren’t supposed to be sexual.
