La grande arnaque. L'expropriation de la sexualité des femmes

Abstract

Beginning with Malinowski's question about why the Tobrianders define female sexual acts as services requiring payment, the centrality of sexual-economic exchange in relations between women and men in most societies is examined. Male monopoly of resources leads to women'use if sex as a resource along a continuum ranging from marriage to modern prostitution. In his asymmetrical exchange (that may include not only sexual service but also domestic, reproductive and other forms of labor), men give various kind of payment and women give sex. Men control sexual knowledge. Female sexual knowledge, experience and imagination are widely stigmatized to the point that girls and women are forbidden knowledge of their bodies and desires. We seem to be faced with a global class system linking sexual oppression (with its widespread violence), limitation if knowledge, and economic exploitation. Women work longer hours than men, but are made to depend on men and on sexual-economic exchange and are expropriated of their sexuality. This rip-off, specific to gender relations, closes the circle of violence and expropriation, and of the intellectual and physical suppression of women.