The Sexual Contract
The Sexual Contact
While reading “The Sexual Contract” by Carole Pateman, I began to question my own contract that I live in my everyday life. I feel that being a Latina from immigrants parents, I can see how in some ways men in my family have dominate their wives or partners. This hit a nerve for me as I began to compare the original contract with the sexual contract. I know that times have changes especially in the United States. But in some countries, women are very suppressed and have no rights. Women are only used for bearing children and for their husbands sexual relieves.
Women through marriage and after having children are not incorporated into a sphere that “is and is not in civil society”. Women have no part in the being economically independent. Women had no say in their reproductive right during this time. Many women didn’t have a say on who they were going to marry. Men always dominated the whole concept of “family”. While times have change as more women are educated, have jobs, have rights on contraception. We are currently living in a time where if we don’t stand and have our voices heard we can lose those rights again. With only 3 weeks after being elected president of the United States, our President “Trump” has made it clear that he thinks he can make choices on women reproductive rig. As I continued reading “The Sexual Contract” by Pateman, “the original contract creates the modern social whole of the patriarchal civil society” (pg. 12), men go back and forth in the private and public sphere, their sexual rights runs in both. The men are quickly to claim the rights over sexual access to women’s bodies making it a “obligation” for women to fill their husbands or partners sexual desire. For the most part no one mentions the problems that come with excluding women from the original contract but new contracts are in placed. Where men can use women for sexual fantasy as in prostitution. Men will pay women for sex in many cases.
Moreover, women have been working hard to eliminate the indifference between men and women. Making the new term gender neutral a more unique definition. The contracts have in some ways defined what is masculine and feminine in modern times. I shall continue to read and educate myself on the different contracts. Also, I can change or teach my family on how be more gender neutral.
