IAN BOYNE: Women Will Always, Tragically, Be Seen As Meat...."My girl, yu serious, eeh? A ramp me a ramp wid yuh 'cause yuh body look so good!"

Ian Boyne, Columnist Published: Sunday | August 10, 2014 

Karen Lloyd's In Focus article last week, 'My vagina isn't public property', provoked an unprecedented number of responses to any article in this section.

Model (File Photo)

She recounts a man's groping her breast, to which she responded with a slap across his face, with his retorting in apparent surprise at her ingratitude for his expression of interest: "My girl, yu serious, eeh? A ramp me a ramp wid yuh 'cause yuh body look so good!" Lloyd says, "This is not only a personal issue ... . The vast majority of Jamaican women are harassed daily on the street by men who believe they have some inherent right to women's bodies. All my female friends share similar experiences on a regular basis."

Lloyd says, "Even more frightening is the fact that we hardly take street and sexual harassment seriously. Men will continue to grab and grope women in public because it is not a 'big deal' and is usually met with impunity at best and a 'forward' at worse by onlookers."

Lloyd has a big wish: "Perhaps I am asking too much, but one day I would like to be able to go through my day freely without being treated like a piece of meat to be positioned, handled and devoured." I doubt she or her children will live to see that day. Even if she is never touched or even spoken to suggestively, it is likely that men will still view her as a commodity to be positioned, handled and devoured, even if evolved social norms frown on it.

The sexual revolution did not liberate women from objectification and commodification. Women are seen in Western society as consumable meat. We, men, are the primary beneficiaries of the sexual revolution.

Men are socialised to see women as objects of their sexual gratification. And especially in our macho culture, which sees itself as threatened by 'growing homosexuality', some men are becoming even more aggressive in asserting their heterosexuality. Well, what one person calls sexism, others would celebrate as liberation. For London School of Economics Sociology Professor Catherine Hakim in her thought-provoking book,Erotic Capital: The Power of Attraction in the Boardroom and the Bedroom (2011), even feminists have unwittingly sold out to patriarchal ideas about what is proper for women, and have ignored the power of erotic capital. more