I’d be a little remiss if I didn’t use that old adage “a picture’s worth a thousand words” to start because well, the above photo pretty much says it all. But dissecting the concepts that make it a statement is what you really have to do.

DISCLAIMER: Anything in this article that objectifies women further is part of my conditioning as a man in western society – sorry.

I went out over the lonely-hearts weekend to kinda get at this fixation with the perceived need for companionship. It’s fucked up how we’re bombarded with these ideas that we, male and female, only attain value through our desirability. Creating that demand is done most often by being with someone. Whether it’s you dancing with some girl in a bar, or you watching someone having a flirtatious conversation, or just seeing a couple in the street, we always gauge their attractiveness out of habit. Men typically wonder what a girl is like in bed, and have the imaginary sexpliot in their head, after about .5 seconds of seeing her.

American society is probably the most sexually repressed western culture in the modern world. That comes from an invasive dominant morality in our daily lives. Think about it for a second. The Crucible, The Scarlet Letter, and Jungle Fever are all laced with themes of desire, fear, and shame for making some sort of sexual mistake. Oppression by the church was so bad in the Middle Ages that it indirectly created secular society. But that shit didn’t go away. When John Ashcroft (the shining symbol of draconian moral authority) is the nation’s figurehead of law enforcement, do you think that John and Jane Q. Public are ever going to be their unadulterated selves in or out of the bedroom? We can’t show a titty on television without all hell breaking loose!

We live in a culture where everyone subscribes to the idea that if somebody’s lower on the totem pole, they’re all good. Oppression is the only thing I ever knew that trickled down to anybody. But we need a pretty package to wrap every contradictory social construct in, otherwise it doesn’t work. The woman is the perfect vessel of sexuality and morality, and with that, condemnation.

We all want sex. Men try to excuse promiscuity with biology and women try to display sexual readiness and a level of selectivity. It’s an age old story, fixed with the glue that makes objectifying women possible – fantasy.

Female virtue is connected to virginity, which is connected to moral standing as a member of society, and that’s connected to investing the time to acknowledge her existence. The first fantasy is taking some girl’s virginity. I use the word ‘taking’ because dominance is based on conquest. Now she’s lost some value in the morality department after she failed to hold up the flag by letting her panties fall, but she gets points in the prospect department because she now feeds in to another fantasy – the slut fantasy.

Men have inherent privilege in a system controlled by men, and a sense of entitlement to whatever the fuck they want, including the female body. That’s why guys get ready to go out on a Friday night and say to themselves “Yo, I’m gonna find some hos tonight and fuck somebody.”

Most men are easily over-stimulated when they walk into a place where the market forces of sexuality apply. The primal signs of mating season are pretty much everywhere. Y’all know the drill: tight clothes, that lipstick that makes your lips look wet (which makes men think you like to suck dick), asses wiggling all over the muthafucka, lots of noise, smiles, and a little alcohol has most men thinking “Every girl in here wants to fuck [me]!” And being that men fail at their genetic imperative more often than not, they come home and say “For real, fuck those bitches!” knowing they’ll be out next week. The slut fantasy allows men the illusion that sexism is natural, by owning women and dismissing them at will.

In reality, or better yet in the future, when all the shit you did in your twenties is over, men don’t want the “sluts” at the club. They want the girl from band camp! And that feeds into the final fantasy – the “pussy’s so good I could marry this girl and she knows how to act right” fantasy (a.k.a. the Ill Nana). This is in our heads most of our adult lives believe it or not, we’re just brought up to ascribe and prescribe status to women based on a fucked up system of social logic.

See, the way it’s set up now, there are too many social obligations for women to maintain in order to be recognized. If you’re not gonna play that Virgin Mary game, you need to be characterized as a man in some respect in order to be considered present and accounted for. If you don’t want to be bound by dominant social constructions you’re a slut, a bitch, or a lesbian. That’s too easy. The only way get out of that trap is for women not to pander to those narrow characterizations of themselves to get male attention, and for men to realize arbitrary labels and so-called entitlement to women don’t get you the girl you really fantasize about. Who do we think we are, anyway?