Sex and Raunch Culture

[ladylade]

I just finished reading Ariel Levy's article on Raunch Culture ("Get a Life, Girls"), and she makes an interesting point about how we separate sexy from sex. (Mostly because sex is a commercial image now.) She used Paris Hilton as a prime example, which was awesome, and she talks about how Paris Hilton looks sexy during photos, but isn't sexual in bed--she doesn't really have an expression when she has sex. (I guess she watched Hilton's sex tape?) She used that as an example between commercial sex and actual sex, but I was struck by how she describes Hilton as looking bored while sex. This might be the case: Hilton might not have been into the sex, or the sex might not have been great. But I think Levy failed to make a primary distinction between commercial sex and actual sex--namely, that commercial sex is external and actual sex is internal. That's not a reference to vaginal or anal or oral sex, I mean that the feelings of sex are internal. Maybe Hilton really was bored, but it might have been just as likely that she was enjoying the sex, but wasn't very externally expressive about it. I think that people often forget that sex isn't external, but rather something felt internally; no one can tell you that sex isn't great if it felt great, regardless of how you looked during it.

(The article was in my textbook, Race, Class & Gender. It's an anthology. You want a better citation, you should probably make it yourself because I really fucking hate making citations.)