For those of you who are not familiar with the Oprah Winfrey Show, it is a family talk show that covers a wide variety of topics ranging from family issues, parenting, adolescence and on occasion a heart throbbing celebrity comes on to promote whatever new product they have coming out.
I’m not a daily watcher, since I’m too tired to watch television when I come home unless it’s something really worth watching. However, since I had the day off on Friday, I decided to tune into it to see what the topics of discussion that day were.
The topic they were discussing was: “Women pleasuring themselves”.
They were going into deep detail of womens emotions and what they experience during this phase of discovery. Common phrases were “heavy necking and petting” , “getting in touch with yourself to understand what that feeling is, so when you’re with a man, you know if it’s caused by him or yourself” etc.
There were 3 women on the panel including Oprah and a male actor (forget what his name is but I know he’s married to Kelly Ripa)
Anyways, back to the topic of women pleasuring themselves and how Oprah can talk about anything she wants. I won’t disagree that this is an important topic to discuss. But if a man brought it up in a normal discussion I do not think it would get the same reaction as if Oprah/a woman brought it up.
Is it the fact that men know nothing about this space that disqualifies them from participating in this conversation? Do we not have any valid viewpoints that can add to the already misunderstood realm of self-liberation? I would have to go with the thought that there is a select group of men who can speak knowledgeably about this topic but it’s the one’s that don’t know anything and say outlandish things that gets the rest of us in trouble.
The fact of the matter is, Oprah can say whatever she wants (to some extent) because she has established credibility. If a male wanted to bring this topic up he would have to be very careful because the male population has a whole hasn’t been anointed this credibility yet.
So how do we get to this stage? Baby steps. We can’t get there over night and many men will do things to send us back in the wrong direction.
What can you do as an individual male to break ground in this space? Leverage Oprah.
If we want to get into these conversations all we have to do is tell women our viewpoints, wait for their surprising reaction and say, “What? Oprah agrees with me!”.
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