Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women’s Subordination | Male Sexuality and the Social Control of Women (PDF Chapter 4)
In this chapter, Sheila Jeffreys examines the way in which the exercise of the male sex right serves to enforce the social control of women through sexual violence. The scale, scope and variety of forms of men’s sexual violence towards women is very considerable and cannot be covered here. In this chapter Jeffreys will concentrate on sexual violence against women in the public world outside the home, looking at the effects on women’s lives of men’s sexual practices from sexual harassment to sex murder, which are at two ends of the spectrum. It will not cover stranger rape. These forms of men’s violence restrict women’s lives and opportunities. They circumscribe women’s human rights to work, to freedom of assembly and freedom of movement, and freedom to take part in cultural and political activities. Sexual harassment in the form of sexualised outdoor advertising and graffiti serves to mark the built environment as male and limits women’s rights to equal citizenship. The focus of this chapter is the practice seen, before feminists named it in the 1970s and made its harms visible, as benign or natural, sexual harassment.
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