“Woman as sex object” is one of patriarchy’s oldest tropes, mostly due to that thousands-of-years-old attitude that a woman’s personal desire and sexual free will are inherently bad. Even a brief scan of our language’s slang for women will reveal that female desire is worthy of shame no matter what a woman chooses to do with it, which can only be one of two things per our culture’s rules: having a lot of sex, which earns her the reputation of a whore, or opting to withhold it, which gets her labeled a prude.
