Epäilyttävä naishenkilö

Mielikuvia yksineläjänaisen seksuaalisuudesta

Authors

• Arja Mäkinen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30666/elore.78590

Abstract

Plenty of impressions, expectations and fears are associated with single women’s sexuality. This article explores some of those associations, introducing four culturally familiar stereotypic images of unmarried childless women and their sexuality. The author has called those images the traditional spinster, the female city single, the sad loser and the maybe lesbian. All those images represent single women’s sexuality in a somehow strange and dubious way. The article is based on 34 interviews. All interviewees are 30–47-year-old Finnish women, who are both unmarried and childless. The perspective of the article is social-constructional; women’s sexuality as such has been examined as it becomes constructed through the interviewees’ talk. According to the interviewees the space for a single woman’s sexuality is narrow if a woman does not want to be treated as asexual, oversexual or homosexual. Yet, the women who were interviewed are able to resist stereotypes and construct positive images about themselves as sexually normal and acceptable heterosexual women. They do not describe themselves as different – but other people do.