Blog Post: Reading Response 10 (Discussion Leaders 5-8)

For this post I decided to focus on the excerpt from the reading The Color Purple. A specific quote that I found compelling is:

Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button
that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody.
It git boner and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But
other parts good too, she say. Lot of sucking go on, here and
there, she say. Lot of finger and tongue work.

She say, What, too shame even to go off and look at yourself?
And you look so cute too, she say, laughing. All dressed up for
Harpo’s,
smelling good and everything, but scared to look at your own
pussy.

These quotes show how society denies women agency over their own bodies, particularly in terms of sexual autonomy. Celie has been having sex many times and yet does not know anything about sexual pleasure or about her sexual anatomy in general. Shug acts as a ‘sexually provocative’ character that teaches Celie about sex and about how to feel pleasure. It is particularly interesting how Celie is scared to look at her own body parts. This commentates on how society denies women sexual agency to the point that they feel embarrassment or shame over their reproductive organs.

This quote is also thought provoking because it shows that sex has been used by Celie’s husband as a way to control her and use her body for his own pleasure. He does not care about her as a person because if he did, he would have been taken time to care about her feeling pleasure.

I find Shug’s character in this quote to be particularly noteworthy because she inverts the control that Celie’s husband has when it comes to sex. Shug enjoys having sex with Celie’s husband, wanting to have pleasure by using Celie’s husband. When it comes to Shug, she is in control. Her character is interesting in the fact that she subverts gendered expectations about women’s bodies and sexual pleasure, taking back the control men have over women during this time.

This quote is definitely interesting in that it commentates on how sex is framed for men as something that brings about pleasure while it is framed for women has something that is only for the means of reproduction.