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Sunday, April 09, 2006

Feminism vs. sexuality, or, the false dichotomy that will not die

Since as far back as I can remember, I’ve considered myself a feminist. I have a baby photo of me wearing a Ms. t-shirt. I was raised from about age 2 on by my single mom, and she always instilled in me a sense of pride in being a woman and taught me that I could do anything I wanted to, supporting me through countless incarnations, whether that meant going off to play chess at age 15 in Brazil or doing civil disobedience in Hegins, Pennsylvania by running out on a field in front of scary, racist hunters and freeing some pigeons.

But the feminism I grew up with is not quite the feminism I believe in today. Perhaps that’s true for a lot of women my age, and even different for those the next generation down the line. But for the women of my mom and Anna Quindlen’s generation, the mixing of sex and feminism is largely a tricky proposition. They grew up in a time after Bettie Page, but before Susie Bright. A time when sexual liberation was largely a male-driven movement, when Robin Morgan et al said “Goodbye to All That,” when feminism and femininity were largely at odds.

Now it seems like we are coming back around to this at oddsness, but in an entirely new way. I hate the term postfeminist and think it’s used largely to negate the changing reality of feminism, the way we can create and recreate and play with and live this word that is so often divisive and abstract. Postfeminism seems to me to say that feminism is what happened in the (60s/70s/80s), that it’s irrelevant to women’s lives today. But if it’s not, it’s largely used to say that, once again, we used to teach girls they could be President, now we teach them they can be strippers.

What’s completely missing from that analysis is how our sexuality informs and influences our lives. I was just talking at dinner tonight about how we lack sexual icons, that no one’s really come along to claim Madonna’s crown in the way that she sparked the imaginations and early erotic educations of so many young women. The problem with throwing out the pagaentry and fucking in favor of corporate boardroom (or White House) driven feminism, is that, well, we still have bedrooms and sex drives and orgasms (or the pursuit of them) to attend to. Ignoring sex doesn’t make it go away, and to basically say that sex, sexuality equality, sexual politics, and erotic experimentation, the pursuit of happiness in our sex lives, has no place in feminism, is to ignore the ways gender roles get played out during sex. It’s to ignore the real revolution in women’s sex lives that started largely after the official sexual revolution, one that can be traced back to Betty Dodson’s orgasm workshops and on to Monica Lewinsky and today to all sorts of things such as the rise of burlesque, the boom in erotica, especially women’s erotica and African-American erotica, the genre of couples porn, sex toys being sold on Amazon.com, etc.

There are so many examples, but, as I’ve been talking about here, there is also a backlash. A vibrator is one thing, a rape fantasy another. Sex and the City is one thing, posing nude is another. For every Catherine Millet or Toni Bentley, there’s a Sara DeKeuster or Jessica Cutler being taken to task. Or a Joanna Angel being excoriated for all sorts of things. There’s a way that women especially don’t take their fellow women seriously if they dare to state, demand, and show off their sexuality. What about the idea that women have brains and bodies, and we know how to use them? There’s a line in “#1 Must Have” by Sleater-Kinney that goes “watch me make up my mind instead of my face,” and it’s not that I don’t know what Corin’s talking about. She’s arguing against the idea that all we are are pretty faces, all we should be are sex objects, and of course it’s understandable to rebel against that, to not want to be only known for our sexuality. The problem, though, is that in rejecting that previously ill-fitting role, we haven’t allowed for the emergence of powerful and sexual women. Of women who know there’s a marketplace for their bodies, but who want to control the supply and create the demand. Women who aren’t being pimped out by someone else, but are controlling, masterminding, coordinating their bodies and brains, and not just to make money. Not just to “act like a man” either, which is probably one of the most galling charges of this new brigade of feminist sexual policewomen. If the only options are to “act like a man” or “act like a woman,” what are we to do? How are we to fuck? How are we to realize who we are sexually? This is not just a women’s issue, though, and I’d really like to see more of the male fans of, say, Jenna Jameson or Joanna Angel or just sex in general stand up for themselves and their right to an erotic life, a fantasy life, a fully realized sexual road map. I interviewed one such man, Tom Birdsley, creator of Steak and Blowjob Day, for my upcoming Voice column about cocksucking, and was really impressed at how un-macho he was. I’ll get into it more in the column, but I think it’d be easy to look at something like that and simply go “wow, what an asshole” without even trying to understand where he’s coming from. When we blanketly condemn sex workers, we are also condemning their consumers, and, well, I wouldn’t be too shocked if men who are tres vocal about being anti strippers and anti porn weren’t jerking off to both.

Complete with this divisive, binary way of thinking about life/career vs. sexuality is the continuing denigration of women who work in the sex industry. Sex workers are in many ways the last frontier of the sexual revolution, and until we value them, as well as sex industry consumers, I don’t think it’s fair to say we’re living in a truly sexually free time. Maybe it appalls some people that educated, smart, talented, go-getter women would actively choose to make sex their career. Just like I don’t understand why gay marriage poses a threat to straight marriage, I still haven’t quite gotten it through my head why these women are so threatening, but clearly they are. I was all set to post about Joanna Angel’s recent hiring at Spin when I came across Anna Quindlen’s column about Miss America, and how she is in stark contrast to what Quindlen (side note: I feel so weird criticizing something by someone who used to be, and still sometimes is, one of my favorite writers, even though one of my very first letters to the editor of The New York Times was about one of her columns on teens and smoking. Still, it’s weird, like “who the fuck am I to criticize Quindlen?” but I have a part in my book about her too, about the whole “babe/do-me feminism” which is the exact same issue I’m addressing, this either/or, career vs. sexuality mentality.) Anyway, Quindlen wrote:

Feminism killed off Miss America, but not in the way originally intended or predicted. It didn't manage to overthrow unrealistic and bizarre standards of female beauty; if it had, Hollywood wouldn't be chockablock with bobblehead starlets who think an oyster cracker is an entree. And it didn't succeed in liberating women from being seen as sex objects, not when porn star Jenna Jameson can natter away on television about her career as though she were a bank manager.

It’s 2006, and I think it’s time women stopped being so snobby and acting like they know which are the “right” careers for women. I’m not saying we should all encourage our daughters to be porn stars, but should we really be encouraging them to be bank managers? The point is, the reason it was called “women’s liberation” is that women were trying to liberate themselves from oppressive, mandatory beauty standards, and from oppressive, mandatory ways of fucking, or rather, getting fucked. There’s a world of difference between women only being seen as sex objects, and women being appreciated for their full talents, potential, and, yes, looks—sexuality included. It’s hypocritical and false to claim that we never want that kind of attention, even if you only want it from one person at one time. Part of what the new wave of erotic entertainment has brought is a sense that women can be like porn stars—at home. They can be the perfect schoolteacher or PTA mom or bank manager during the day and come home and be the wild dirty whore in the bedroom . . . if they want to. That last part is vital and essential, because obviously without it, we’re back to those same old pre-sexual revolution standards. But to deny women the opportunity to be who they truly want to be, whether that’s a porn star/sex columnist, or a porn star, or a stripper, or a sex writer, or just someone who’s curious about what’s out there, is patronizing, condescending, and sexist. Do I think there’s room for improvement in the choices women are given in terms of what to look at? Could there be more porn/erotica/adult entertainment geared towards women? Of course. But, just like girls reading Gossip Girl books doesn’t mean they’re taking them 100% at face value, women watching even the filthiest porn doesn’t mean we check our brains at the door. We can make up our minds and our faces and our pussies. We don’t have to do any of those, but we can, or at least, should be able to if feminism is going to continue to be relevant. I’m not saying sex is the only frontier where feminism is relevant; of course it isn’t, but it is one frontier and the reason I harp on this so much is that it also appears to be the frontier most easily attacked by the holier than thous, yet another version of “my sex is better than your sex/you should feel embarrassed/guilty/you should be ashamed of yourself.” Whenever I hear those things, you can bet I take it personally, because it helps create a culture where some kinds of sex are “normal” and other kinds aren’t. Where one or two sex partners at a time are okay, but six is too many. Where you can be “20 times a lady,” but not 80. Where you’re just one step away from being a sex addict.

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