Women Issues and Prostitution Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Women Issues and Prostitution - Essay Example The misconceptions, which follow, are many towards the rights of women. Women indulge in prostitution are sometimes considered to be "exclusive" of this society irrespective of the fact that they are the mirrors of those dilemmas which we ignore or which we feel shame to admit to ourselves. Society should consider and face this dilemma in the form of "prostitution". We will discuss some of the most common problems faced by the women of Canada today. Because of the pervasive and deeply rooted attitudes toward the legitimacy of sexual coercion in our society, our conceptions of normal male and female derive from taking coerced sexuality as the natural standard. And given that this is true, it is scarcely surprising that it should be considered to be normal for men not to like women at least to some extent, since they must perceive women as being misers and hoarders of a commodity they are led to believe they desperately desire and need. Nor is it surprising that they should identify themselves as 'true men' in accordance with the degree to which they are aggressive and dominant. Aggressive and dominant men get what they want; it is merely the forms of aggressiveness and dominance which vary, and is only when the forms resorted to involve the use or threat of violence that we are prepared to call it 'rape' and to punish those who commit it. (Schlesinger, 1977) Let us consider some of the cases of women in this aspect. One woman in this study who complained of rape, a young woman classified as 'idle,' and who was 'known as' a frequenter of the old Yorkville area of Toronto, disagreed about the standard. She felt that the man 'had gone too far,' whereas his reply was 'that he had used no more force than is usual for males during the preliminaries.' In another case, again involving a young woman, the woman rather sagely remarked that 'usually guys stop when you tell them to. This one didn't.' It is significant too that in both of these cases the men were middle-class, one a businessman and the other a semi-professional, and the women involved failed to conform to the stereotyped image of the 'real victim.' If the cases had come to trial, they are not the sort of men likely to have been judged to have resorted to unacceptable tactics, or who would be sent to jail for what they did because the women involved were not 'real victims.' These men, in common with most accused rapists, did not see anything wrong in what they had done. What the victim experienced as rape, they believed to be seduction. However, it is unbelievable that virtually none of these offenders believed that they were doing anything wrong; they did not see themselves as acting any differently from other men in society, and did not see, and resisted seeing, themselves as men who had broken the law. Almost all of them either saw, or went to quite incredible lengths to see, their behavior as 'normal' and acceptable. The extreme case simply believes everything he does in relation to women is acceptable, and after that there are subtler shadings in