This sounds, I hate to say it, very American. Is the research based on a cross-cultural study? I have lived in the U.S., and in Europe and in North Africa. I am happy to report that women outside the U.S. are having sex for romance, passion, and procreation, as well as chores and the like. Women in the U.S., if the woman in the study are from the U.S., as I suppose, have inadvertently stumbled upon George Bernard Shaw's feminist view of marriage. The researchers seem to have unwittingly found out, moreover, that the marxist-feminist critique of the commodification of sex in marriage (see, e.g., Engels on the role of marriage in furthering the institution of private property) has been adopted in the U.S. as what anthropologists would call a "folk theory" as well as a folk practice. That is, sex has a certain exchange value not just in, for example, prostitution, but in the every day lives of women who would abhor that their lives actually institute a radical critique of the institution of marriage. These women may not be feminists, in other words, but they exemplify the usefulness and bring a certain realism, in fact, to well known feminist critiques.
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This sounds, I hate to say it, very American. Is the research based on a cross-cultural study? I have lived in the U.S., and in Europe and in North Africa. I am happy to report that women outside the U.S. are having sex for romance, passion, and procreation, as well as chores and the like. Women in the U.S., if the woman in the study are from the U.S., as I suppose, have inadvertently stumbled upon George Bernard Shaw's feminist view of marriage. The researchers seem to have unwittingly found out, moreover, that the marxist-feminist critique of the commodification of sex in marriage (see, e.g., Engels on the role of marriage in furthering the institution of private property) has been adopted in the U.S. as what anthropologists would call a "folk theory" as well as a folk practice. That is, sex has a certain exchange value not just in, for example, prostitution, but in the every day lives of women who would abhor that their lives actually institute a radical critique of the institution of marriage. These women may not be feminists, in other words, but they exemplify the usefulness and bring a certain realism, in fact, to well known feminist critiques.
September 17, 2009 - 7:08pmThis Comment
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