Women's sexuality be damned

It seems like everyone is very interested in what women are doing in their bedrooms, and who they’re doing things with. And such intrusive interest has gone beyond the usual victims of Hollywood starlets to others.

There’s a recent scandal involving a Canadian woman (who is not a Hollywood star, I  might add) who is going through a public inquiry because she is an adult who liked to have sex, and had a husband who might have been too eager to offer up her private photos to the internet. This was a pretty big media story in Canada until the Olympics started, but I won’t mention her name here because I don’t want to be adding to the number of Google searches that mention her private affairs rather than her professional ability.

From what I can gather, the story seems to boil down to this: the woman and her husband (who was also in the legal profession) had an active sex life. In fact, the husband seems to have enjoyed exhibiting his wife’s sexuality very freely online, without his wife’s consent. He even solicited one of his clients on his wife’s behalf without her knowledge.

These are juicy stories, I won’t deny that. But why are these making national headlines? Why are we questioning a person’s professional ability (which doesn’t happen to be connected to her sexuality, by the way) to do her job based on what she does in her bedroom?

I wonder why we’re so appalled when we find out “real” women have been sexual — and sexual in a way that is “off script” — when marketing seems to push it on us constantly. I wonder, with so many photos being snapped these days and stored god-knows-where, how anyone would ever be able to keep a job, if this kind of shaming is becoming the norm.

Posted by RK on August 1, 2012

http://jroselkim.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/womens-sexuality-be-damned/