Nina Atwood and the Chauvinistic View of Female Sexuality

Nina Atwood's relationship advice books have always scared me with their unapologetically chauvinistic view of female sexuality. Naturally, if she were an only unenlightened fool to produce this kind of nonsense, her ideas wouldn't be so scary. They have, however, become widely disseminated in the media. So widely, in fact, to have become mainstream.

The main tenets of Atwood's chauvinistic teachings are:

a) the worst thing you can do for a budding relationship "is to get sexual too soon". A woman's central strategy has to consist of "putting off sex until you have a real relationship with a commitment." Atwood doesn't explain, of course, why any sane individual of any gender would start a "relationship with a commintment" before figuring out if you are even sexually compatible. There is even less explanation for why anybody would even want to start a "real relationship" with a person who uses sex as a manipulation device from the very start;

b) after sex, the man should feel "obligated" because your "self-respect as a woman demands it". The most annoying thing here is Atwood's use of pseudo-feminist vocabulary to justify a decidedly anti-feminist attitude. According to her, a woman has to trade sex for commitment and obligation. In her world, sex is what a man wants, while commitment is what a woman needs. This, of course, has nothing to do with reality. The need for commitment and/or for sex is not gender specific and has more to do with the needs of a particular individual at any given time.

In order to justify this ridiculous approach, Atwood brings out the old chauvinistic myth that for women, sex is about intimacy, while for men it's about physical pleasure: "For us, having sex creates more intimacy. We wake up the next day wanting the relationship to move forward. If we’re brutally honest, we have to admit that we wake up the next day halfway in love and thinking of him as a boyfriend. This is nothing to be embarrassed about - it is perfectly natural and normal for a woman to feel this way! In fact, it is how we are wired." There is no proof whatsoever for these sweeping generalizations, except the vague and baseless declarations about being "wired" a certain way. And we all know how stupid such statements are.

It's strange to me that Atwood never stops to think how insulting such a position is to women. She believes that we are such simple, one-dimensional creatures that in order to achieve intimacy with us and make us fall in love, all you need to do is get between our legs. Our souls are located inside our vaginas, so it's very easy to get inside them. Men, on the other hand, are much more complex. It's not enough to sleep with them to achieve intimacy or reach their feelings. I can understand why some male chauvinist would want to promote this vision of women. But a woman? It's mindboggling.