Sex in the City by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo Essay

The Book of the City of Ladies During the renaissance many different views of leadership surfaced. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, and William Shakespeare’s Richard III each present distinct views of what would make a good leader during the renaissance period. Shakespeare and Christine de Pizan’s views align most closely with Plato’s.

Some see gender as being “Black and White” and it is, literally. With numerous gender ideologies, not only is there division between the Black (African Americans) and the White (fair skinned Europeans), but between men and women as well. Generally, white men and white men only hold most of the power in the world that there is to possess and it has consciously been set up for them to do so. The technical name for this global concept is hegemonic masculinity. This highly sexist and blatantly racist model has been implemented by bigoted western agendas to then be culturally and systematically carried out for centuries; sometimes without question. In her novel “Black Sexual Politics”, Patricia Hill Collins masterfully highlights just how much hegemonic masculinity altered the once blissful power structure, not just in the western world but specifically within the homes of the Black community. She also confers the several quintessential benchmarks within hegemonic masculinity that the Black man must uphold in order for him to unambiguously maintain his “dominant” status.

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher and critical theorist. Her area of expertise is gender theory. She is most well known for her theory of gender performativity which states that gender is a social construct which is performative in nature. In simple terms what this means is that gender is not a quality that people have, but a pattern of behavior that people perform. The performance of gender, Butler contends, creates and reinforces societal gender norms which are perceived as “natural” and “normal” but are actually a set of learned behaviors which are fluid and constantly changing.

The Feminine Mystique is the title of a book written by the late Betty Friedan

An unlikely candidate to dispute the unfair, misogynistic treatment of women by men and society, Christine de Pizan successfully challenged the accepted negative views that were being expressed about women by the all-male literary world of her era. Part of Christine’s uniqueness stems from the time in which she lived, the middle to late 1300’s. The lack of a positive female role model to pattern herself after made Christine a true visionary in the fight for the equal rights of women. Her original ideas and insight provided a new and more intelligent way to view females. Pizan’s work, The Book of the City of Ladies, provided women much needed guidance in how to survive without the support of a man.

Prior to and throughout the late middle ages, women have been portrayed in literature as vile and corrupt. During this time, Christine de Pizan became a well educated woman and counteracted the previous notions of men’s slander against women. With her literary works, Pizan illustrated to her readers and women that though education they can aspire to be something greater than what is written in history. Through the use of real historical examples, Christine de Pizan’s, The Book of the City of Ladies, acts as a defense against the commonly perceived notions of women as immoral.

On April 8, 2014 Barack Obama issued two Executive Orders into legislation that were designed to help eliminate the wage differences between men and women. Although this is a good first step there is still a lot that must be accomplished in order for their to be equality on wages between males and females. Michael Kimmel’s book The Gendered Society discusses this issue within Chapter 9: Separate and Unequal. Coming at the issue from a very sociological perspective Kimmel argues that the wage gap is a “[…] major consequence of the combination of sex segregation and the persistence of archaic gender ideologies” (Kimmel 261). From my perspective, I agree with all of the points Kimmel is making and believe that this chapter provides an educational background on the inequality between men and women in the workplace. However, my qualm with Kimmel’s chapter is that he does not really discuss the patriarchal structure of capitalism as a whole. In this paper I will discuss the solid arguments The Gendered Society makes in Chapter 9 while also trying to relate them to my position that capitalism is sexist by nature.

Sharon Olds’ poem “Sex Without Love” wonders at the ability for two people to have sex and not involve emotions or pretenses of love. The poem argues that it is better to have sex without love under the premise that love is a false savior for people, and everyone is all alone anyhow. In other words, the claim is that personal interactions do not serve a purpose other than being a distraction, and they will inevitably end. However, the notion that attachment and love are false hopes for people and each person is all alone does not account for the inevitability of human interactions and the underlying importance of relationships. While the poem does not give its definition of being alone, complete isolation is virtually impossible and leads

The Book of the City of Ladies, published by the author, Christine De Pizan in the early 1400s, is known to be one of the earliest works of feminism. In her work Pizan constructs an allegorical city called “The City of Ladies,” a city where only women livelived, to defend the “chosen,” virtuous women from the misogyny of the male authors. Although the text may have sounded dreamy and fantastical for female readers at the time, listing their capabilities, intelligence and strengths, de Pizan cleverly includes a stratagem for females to follow in order to obtain rights. The article “Christine De Pizan’s City of Ladies: A Monumental (Re)construction of, by, and for Women of All Time” written by Jill E. Wagner analyzes the allegorical meaning

The Hollywood movie Pretty Woman (1990) is about a prostitute in Hollywood, marrying an extremely rich businessman, in spite of her mutual distrust and prejudice. The movie contains the basic narrative of the Cinderella tale: through the love and help of a man of a higher social position, a girl of a lower social status moves up to join the man at his level.

In the chapter of her book The Second Sex entitled “the Woman in Love,” Simone de Beauvoir characterizes the romantic ideal of the relationship with a man as a woman’s purpose as a form of self-deception (translated here as “bad faith”). The self-deception de Beauvoir describes is based in the thesis of The Second Sex. This is the idea that women have been deceived into believing that they are second-class humans. Western culture, according to de Beauvoir, teaches us that women are missing some elusive element of the self that endows men with freedom- a concept essential to the existentialist definition of the conscious being. Therefore, a woman can never find fulfillment as a thinking person as

Eavan Boland’s poem “It’s a Woman’s World” illuminates the fact that history has shaped an unfair role for women in today’s society. Boland criticizes the gender bias with regards to the limitations placed on women and their job choices despite their ability to be just as successful in the workplace as men. Regardless of the fact that the bias against women in the workplace is often overlooked, Boland aims to show the shared reaction of women to the gender bias prevalent in our society by using short sentence fragments, repetition, and a fire motif throughout the poem.

'Sex Without Love,' by Sharon Olds passionately described the author's disgust for casual sex in which she vividly animates the immorality of lustful sex through the variety of her language. The sarcasm used in this selection can easily be misunderstood and quite confusing if the words and lines are not analyzed with specific construction. Olds' clever use of imagery and frequent uses of similes, to make the reader imagine actual events, makes this poem come to life. For example, Olds describes making love as 'Beautiful as dancers.' (Line #2) in this line, she questions how one can do such a beautiful act with a person whom one is not in love with. Olds also describes sex as 'gliding over each other

Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities in order to enlighten the average Briton about the events of the French Revolution. The novel compares and contrasts cities of London and Paris, which represent French and British society, through the eyes of Dickens’ human characters. The two cities play such a large part in the novel that they become characters themselves, and the contrasting societies of the two cities become a conflict. In Charles Dickens’ classic, A Tale of Two Cities, the individualistic society of London champions the first feudalistic and later socialistic society of Paris.

In Marge Piercy's book, Woman on the Edge of Time, sex plays a major role in both the utopia and the dystopia. The portrayal of sex in the novel comes from a feminist point of view. The main character, Connie, is caught between a utopian world and a dystopian world where the takes on sex are on different levels. By using a feminist approach, the two worlds of sex can be examined and contrasted.