“A woman must take care for her reputation.” A microcosm of oppression is encapsuled in this one precept. It sets up a system in which some women are esteemed at the expense of other women.
Wollstonecraft believes that male chastity would solve the problem of women’s oppression. I will try to connect some of the dots in her argument. Strictly mathematically speaking, there must be unchaste women for the males to be unchaste with. This creates the basis for esteeming the women who aren’t unchaste. Oppression follows.
Wollstonecraft then criticizes women who are unchaste! (Commentators have pointed out, she is a prude.) Basically, this is a criticism of heterosexual women. She blames women whose chastity is ‘only for show,’ i.e., for public consumption. A woman must take care for her reputation, so she is careful with whom she is seen, etc. But then she finds an agreeable partner. Her chastity ends there. Then it becomes a game of sating the unchaste male, so glutting his appetite that he has neither the strength nor the inclination to pursue other women, in effect, chastening him (only for show) by drainage. This creates much work for the woman, and leads to a mercenary attitude. This is a well-known phenomenon, and has more recently been characterized by Alexander Sanger, Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom for the 21st Century.
Take Wollstonecraft’s superficially-chaste woman as the anti-feminist. What would her opposite be? The woman who is unchaste, but only superficially so, i.e., the women who is not careful to appear chaste, who does not take care with whom she is seen, i.e., who is perhaps too friendly or too intimate with more than one man, but who is nevertheless actually not just the anti-chaste woman, the anti-Madonna, the whore, but who is chaste in fact, as it were, in secret.
Men would have to rearrange their ideas about women in order to accommodate the feminist woman. They would have to get used to the idea that a woman expressing friendliness or physical contact is not giving the green light for sexual intercourse. They would have to get used to a whole range of signs and signals, which had previously indicated availability, interest, and consent, now indicating nothing of that sort.
Unless that occurred, as a practical matter, such a woman would find herself overwhelmed with unwanted male interest. Beyond the misinterpreted signals would lie simple lack of masculine restraint. In order to be tolerated by the feminist woman, the male would have to dial back their sexual aggressiveness to absolute zero. They would have to become chaste.
Wollstonecraft believes that male chastity would solve the problem of women’s oppression. I will try to connect some of the dots in her argument. Strictly mathematically speaking, there must be unchaste women for the males to be unchaste with. This creates the basis for esteeming the women who aren’t unchaste. Oppression follows.
Wollstonecraft then criticizes women who are unchaste! (Commentators have pointed out, she is a prude.) Basically, this is a criticism of heterosexual women. She blames women whose chastity is ‘only for show,’ i.e., for public consumption. A woman must take care for her reputation, so she is careful with whom she is seen, etc. But then she finds an agreeable partner. Her chastity ends there. Then it becomes a game of sating the unchaste male, so glutting his appetite that he has neither the strength nor the inclination to pursue other women, in effect, chastening him (only for show) by drainage. This creates much work for the woman, and leads to a mercenary attitude. This is a well-known phenomenon, and has more recently been characterized by Alexander Sanger, Beyond Choice: Reproductive Freedom for the 21st Century.
Take Wollstonecraft’s superficially-chaste woman as the anti-feminist. What would her opposite be? The woman who is unchaste, but only superficially so, i.e., the women who is not careful to appear chaste, who does not take care with whom she is seen, i.e., who is perhaps too friendly or too intimate with more than one man, but who is nevertheless actually not just the anti-chaste woman, the anti-Madonna, the whore, but who is chaste in fact, as it were, in secret.
Men would have to rearrange their ideas about women in order to accommodate the feminist woman. They would have to get used to the idea that a woman expressing friendliness or physical contact is not giving the green light for sexual intercourse. They would have to get used to a whole range of signs and signals, which had previously indicated availability, interest, and consent, now indicating nothing of that sort.
Unless that occurred, as a practical matter, such a woman would find herself overwhelmed with unwanted male interest. Beyond the misinterpreted signals would lie simple lack of masculine restraint. In order to be tolerated by the feminist woman, the male would have to dial back their sexual aggressiveness to absolute zero. They would have to become chaste.