RE: Images of Gender in Media Advertising
Well... I am not opposed to much you are saying here, then. I disagree with all sorts of it, but perhaps you were right earlier when you suspected my original response wasn't really 'responding to you half the time'.
There is one thing that I won't let go, though. You talk about 'outdated visions of masculinity or femininity'. You claim that having sex with husbands 'was' an 'expectation' as if it is no longer... not to sound like a monster, but if my wife doesn't want to have sex with me, we are done unless she has a damn good reason. I didn't marry her so that she could use her monopoly over sex to bully me. If my wife began denying me sex on a whim, I'd consider that a form of 'cheating' (not playing by the rules of the game). If you don't want to have sex with a man, don't marry him. Are you married? Your argument, here, is baffling to me. Good men are worth taking care of and they will take care of you and appreciate you. If you don't feel as though your husband is entitled, you are with the wrong man. Honestly. My wife is entitled to anything I can offer her.
'As a woman, I do not get to walk around alone at night without feeling unsafe in most places'. This second point is, again, perplexing. Males are physically stronger than females. Males enjoy little to no consequences from sex and have done so for all of human evolution. Therefore, rape is a gear that human males come equipped with and human females are designed to fear since it strips them of the choice of partner. What in the fuck does this have to do with culture? Our culture militates against it. I quite literally support the death penalty for aggravated rape, do you? I doubt it.
Weaving the two points together, traditional masculinity and femininity were well conceived and apply today just as much as they always have. Understanding them well and taking them seriously helps people really understand the unique challenges each gender faces. Yes, men have to focus much more on not destroying the world and women have to focus on not getting destroyed, but men have to watch out for dangerous men, too. A man is far more likely to be murdered, for example.
"not to sound like a monster, but if my wife doesn't want to have sex with me, we are done unless she has a damn good reason."
I can move past my initial reactions here and say that I do understand your related point-- I would not want to be in a sexless marriage (not married, by the way) either, and I would not want sex to be a bargaining tool or whatever. Just that if a husband or wife or partner does not feel like having sex in a particular moment, that should be cool.. Sex is great, but most people are not always in the mood, right? That's the basic right that should be protected.
Traditional masculinity and femininity are not reflective of human nature, as you assume. Not all societies in history and around the world share the Western version of these ideas-- that is why it is culturally specific.
They are problematic because the role given to the female is undervalued, economically, and because they place both men and women in boxes more generally. They are learned, not natural as you suggest.
For most of the 1800s, biological justification was used to maintain the false idea that white people were naturally superior to non white people. Racial divisions were deemed "only natural", making them sound legitimate. Your reasoning is also based on biological determinism. The idea that men should be workers and women caretakers, has long been legitimized using such an argument. (Women have the natural role of giving birth, but does this mean that their primary role should be household labor and caregiving? Not all societies work like this. Ours never even has-- even in the 1950s when these ideas were really being promoted. Working class white women and women of color have historically had to work, for example.) You simply cannot argue that OUR CULTURAL IDEAS are human nature. It is dangerous, not too mention debunked pseudo-science. Your argument naturalizes rape, basically. That is a sad vision of human nature.
Partners in a marriage should not have to see sex as a bargaining tool. Neither party should use it as threat or show of power. Women enjoy sex too. But it should be consensual and anyone in a relationship should be allowed to not be in the mood sometimes.
Science naturalizes rape and people like me advocate the death penalty for this sort of 'natural' behavior. I don't care if someone feels like raping or if someone feels like whatever, just don't do it. It doesn't matter to me that many of our female ancestors were raped by our male ancestors because it is a scientifically legitimate mating strategy; it ends now because we have constructed a conceptual framework for ourselves that repudiates some of our worst instincts. Western man protects women, he doesn't hurt them. That is a timeless construct.
You ascribe to me the 'biological determinism' label. Well, that is a loaded term and if it weren't already loaded, you loaded it with 'women in the kitchen' stuff, none of which I said. My mom was a CFO, very non-traditional. That doesn't change the fact that females and males are extremely different by nature. Please let me know clearly if you contest this point... if you do... well... I don't know. Talk about 'pseudo-science', that is anti-science.
As for the differences, this is why genders are helpful. How to manage the differences? Genders. You see, your comparison of race and gender suggests something that I don't think you want to suggest - that is, since males and females are biologically substantially different, then Africans and Europeans would have to be biologically substantially different, i.e., more than just phenotype.
Me, I suspect that the differences truly are mostly skin deep. Therefore, it wouldn't make sense to have the logical equivalent of 'x' to 'race' as 'gender' is to 'sex'. You seem to be treating inter-sectional rhetoric as it is has truth value. It doesn't. It is a way to divide up the population based on identity so as to try to get a plurality of votes in an election by offering sops to these groups.
Whatever partners do, it ought to be consensual. A wife telling a husband that she won't have sex with him is not consensual. A husband telling a wife that she will have sex with him is not consensual. A husband taking a girlfriend is not consensual, a wife taking a boyfriend isn't. Both partners should do their best to keep the other happy and when they are failing, they owe an explanation. A wife who isn't having sex with her husband better be able to explain how she can demand monogamy and not give him sex.
That is all I am saying. If she can, then fair play... I don't like to be too personal, but my wife suffers pain in her vagina and can't have sex sometimes. That is fine, I don't want to have sex with a suffering person anyways, total turnoff. If a guy didn't care and insisted you have sex with him nonetheless, don't marry the guy; or chastise him and tell him to stop being a selfish monster. If he tries to force himself on you, resist and call the police. If you think a woman in such a situation would be returned from the police station to be raped, I dunno. Find a real world example. My dad was a police officer, I know how he would have dealt with it in the late 70s, spoiler alert, the guy woulda lost teeth.