Desire/Desirability: Gender Asymmetries in Heterosexual Erotic Attention

Abstract

This article proposes to synthesize sexual social constructionism, radical feminism, and cognitive sociology in order to identify and analyze “gender asymmetries” in heterosexual erotic attention. These gender asymmetries are evident in widely circulating androcentric imagery and prevailing linguistic conventions used to denote heterosexual activity, in erotic schematizations that differentially ascribe erotic meaning (and thereby erotic attention) to bodies that have been classified as “female,” and in interactional dynamics and constructions of sexual‐selfhood that perceptually foreground the desires and somatic sensations (subjective embodiment) of men and background those of women. Irreconcilable accounts of sexual interactions from the #MeToo Movement are cited to illustrate the analytic purchase of the proposed conceptual framework for clarifying issues of pleasure parity and consent.