How do girls live and what do they gain from the new sexual patterns so similar to the old macho patterns? The ways have changed, of course. Now relationships are freer, spontaneous and apparently egalitarian. But many girls find themselves having sexual relations that they did not want, and even being attacked by colleagues from their own group without, at first, given the context of trust, identifying that situation as a sexual assault. Many women who were young in the 1970s and 1980s will recall being pressured to have sex with acquaintances they were not in a relationship with simply because that was what freedom was supposed to be. And surely the damn phrase: “You are a narrow one” still resounds in her ears, which implied not being free enough, unprejudiced and self-confident, when, in reality, it was meant that she was not sufficiently … accessible. Your daughters or granddaughters may be going through the same thing.
Nobody is supposed to hand out sexual liberation certificates now. And that both girls and boys feel free to take the initiative and accept or reject a sexual relationship. But there is data that indicates that this freedom, for many girls, is not as free as it seems because the cultural pressure is very strong. We find disturbing data in the police reports of the large bottles, in the experience of the Equality Unit of the Complutense University of Madrid, which reports an alarming number of attacks by members of the gang, or in the statistics of hospital admissions by aggression. And also in the polls. Clear and concise data: one in five young women has been forced to have some unwanted sexual relationship. This is said by the 2021 barometer of the Reina Sofía Center on Adolescence and Youth, which also reveals that one in five men between the ages of 15 and 29 considers that gender-based violence does not exist and is just an ideological invention.
The point is that many girls are driven to adopt the same old male sexual pattern as their own. You satisfy my wish, I satisfy yours. Nothing to object if it is really a free decision. Although it would also be necessary to see what a sexual model brings to girls that does not take into account their emotions or their emotional needs. There are a considerable number of studies that reflect the different interests that both sexes have in a sexual relationship. For example, the one that shows that girls prefer to have their first sexual relationship in a loving context (J. Rodríguez Carrión and CI Traverso); or that girls give greater importance to affective bonding while boys value pleasure more (E. Gil and N. Romo); or that girls prefer intimate relationships and hope that the sexual act will serve to deepen a relationship, while for boys intercourse is only a means of pleasure and they are more concerned with the quantity of sexual relations than with the quality (M. Lameiras).
It remains to be seen how the sexual patterns of boys are influenced by the fact that most of them have their first approach to sexuality through pornography. According to a study led by Lluís Ballester, from the University of the Balearic Islands, the starting age has been advanced to eight years and habitual consumption to twelve. This first approach is important because it leaves an emotional mark and is what sets the mental framework of what is considered normal in sexuality. Most of the pornography accessed by boys extols a sexual pattern of violence and domination in which the woman’s body appears as a sexual object available to the man.
They no longer say “you are a narrow one”, because the language has changed, but the pressure is the same.
#free #freedom
