Posted by Paul (63.196.1.4) on October 24, 2003 at 16:44:02:
In Reply to: Christina Aguilera is a slut. posted by m1s1n on October 13, 2003 at 09:27:26:
I think that she is a manifestation of the virgin-whore dynamic that is at work in our patriarchical society. Women are expressed in most media as hyper-sexual but expectations in the real world are for them to be sexy, but not have sexy, and not be "slutty." You run this tension straight into another modern tension about women being independent and strong, but still womanly, which in historical terms is a contradiction in terms because women are supposed to be weak and dependent on men. So what happens is when Christina tries to throw off the stigma of being weak, she also throws off the virgin part of the dichotomy. But the problem is that the virgin-whore scale is a wholely patriarchical situation, unlike the weak-strong scale, wherein men have set themselves up on the good end of the scale (strong), and women are now trying to occupy that space as well. Essentially you need to discard or at least radically change the entire sexual dynamic as part of identity building.