over-sexualisation of (western?) society a large part of the reason for female oppression?

"the idea that women have sexual agency, focus on female orgasm, challenges to the shame-culture around sex before marriage, etc.)"

These things can be negative for some women e.g. the assumption that sex will happen on the first or second date or the hookup culture of Tinder. Pressure being put on women to have orgasms all the time as a validation of the man's ego rather than as something that is beneficial for the woman herself.

have you seen the reports and pictures of muslim widows in full cover up forced to troll for sex money along highways in ME?

It's definitely a money grabbing fetish.

Muslim women take their veils off as soon as they're inside, and don't wear them for sex.

Arabic men (generally) (seem to) prefer the dirty-white available girl stereotype.

There is a considerable amount of porn being made featuring women wearing Islamic dress, including full burkhas. I don't know if it is supposed to satisfy the Arabic porn market, or whether it is some kind of fetish among some western porn users.

Conformity is important.
Compliancy too.
In any opressive social system you are rewarded for being compliant. Rewarded with social approval and materialist gains, but never autonomy, real power or freedom because this belongs to those who set the terms.

Women who are extremely patriarch compliant (eg wearing hijab or working in sex services) may even convince themselves that they are empowered, but they are not powerful in a true way.

I agree, conformity is an important factor here. I am reluctant to take the "fragile male egos" line (of course I know there are people like that, some of them currently decorating the walls of my trophy room. But I digress...), because to a certain degree we all collude in conforming to and maintaining the status quo. Obviously, if the status quo is heavily weighted in your favour, then you will probably be more invested in defending it. But we all love conformity. It helps us reduce the complexity of our lives and makes it easier to make judgements and decisions. Which may well be why many women do that too.

"Why do they think it's all about them?" - Well, I think most of us would like to think it's all about us. (Or is it just me?) The difference is that mainstream culture tells men that it actually is all about them (try applying the Bechdel test to some of your favourite television series for an idea of how bizarrely skewed the "normal" worldview is!). And of course, if you constantly receive the same strong cultural message that every woman on earth is intensely interested in your needs and desires and that turns out not to be the case...well, that's disappointing, isn't it? And some men would seem to be very very bad at coping with disappointment.

I've got to go out now, but I'd love to come back to your points about childrearing, division of labour etc later on.

Interesting questions, rogue. Personally, I don't think much of this is even about sex at all. We are constantly bombarded with images of what corporate culture has decided is "sexy", with very little regard for what people actually look like or what they are personally attracted to. I believe that the set of signs that constitute "sexy" are more about power and the status quo than about actual desire.

I think that the main message men get from a woman dressing up to look conventionally attractive is, "I have done the work, bought the products, gone to all this trouble to look good for you." And therefore many men see this as confirmation of their view that it's a woman's job to look good for a man, you're complying with this, he's your boss and all's well with the world.

But on another level, the message is also, "I am complying with what our culture says an attractive woman should look like - for men in general. But not for you personally." And this creates anxiety, this suggests that a man's individual needs and desires are not being taken into account, that this performance (as he sees it) is not explicitly for him but for men in general. And that calls the whole narrative of romance and sexual attraction, which is supposed to be about individuality, into question.

And so you have two conflicting messages "You're the boss" vs "Not you in particular, though" with two conflicting responses, satisfaction and anxiety. And the response to this anxiety is frequently aggression.

Capitalism itself is not misogynistic but the advertising industry is undoubtedly because it targets people's vulnerability.

Sorry changing the first para to
*The advertising industry generally works whereby

(not capitalism)

Rogueantimatter, capitalism and profiteering generally works whereby you make someone feel like crap or you make them scared, so that they fork out money to buy rubbish.

Society judges women more harshly and to a bizarre standard whereby we have to look polished and unnatural and also be oh so happy about everything especially unwanted attention and missing out on promotion...

This makes women an easy target for capitalist mechanism.

Do you blame capitalism itself or society?

This is going to sound a bit flippant, but in Scandinavian countries their attitude to nudity is more relaxed. Eg in swimming pools you get unisex showers that everyone can see in plain view, and it's normal to be naked when showering.

Skinny dipping is normal fun behaviour, not taboo.

Our society's attitude to nudity especially female toplessness seems precribed by male sexuality-ownership.

The Burka/Porn image is powerful.

Exactly, scallops and Jeanne, why aren't men called hypocritical when they want us to cover up then they want us to get yer tits out. There is unbalanced emphasis on a woman's behaviour.

Ok cool! Sorry it might have been me being a bit dim last night and needing things spelt out in words of no more than one syllable. I was a bit shatterered!

Absolutely, that is what I mean. Male attitudes need to change.

Sorry for being unclear.

Yes I agree emphasising women's roles is not what needs to be done.

Male attitudes need to be challenged - is that what you mean.

Gah, sorry scallops, cross post.

I agree with you.

rogue - ok, I agree, if sexiness weren't the primary criterion for judging women, it might help.

But I am still uncomfortable with this.

If we lived in a decent society, women would be taken seriously no matter how we dressed, and no matter how much men treated us as sex objects. It ought to be that men who treat women as sex objects are seen as abnormal. To emphasise women's roles here is wrong.

Sorry that was to Jeanne (it took me rather a long time to write it!)

From the Saatchi gallery regarding the image of burka woman -

Rana depicts an anonymous figure dressed in a burqa. Upon further inspection, the work is actually a fragmented collage made-up of thousands of small, unfocused pornographic stills of women. By using both these representations of gender in a rigid manner, Rana is effectively destroying them both, forcing the viewer to look beyond them and critique the so-called machinery of truth from which they are born.

Ahh right. Yes I agree it's not all about women's sexuality (although I think women's sexuality gets defined by men partly through objectification).

I took 'over-sexualised' as meaning that women are constantly being portrayed sexually in a way men aren't. And there is this expectation that women are there for men's sexual pleasure. I thing there is quite a lot of evidence that this isn't getting any better and in some respects getting worse. Porn has been mentioned which is undoubtedly more readily available and more of how men define women's sexuality.

I think the proliferation of things like porn is a patriarchal counter move to those acknowledgements of female sexuality you've mentioned.