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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 56
isfying sex for women, but the "view from somewhere different" can give individual women the epistemological and moral tools to begin making, even demanding, the kinds of changes in their sexual lives that will give meaning and value to them.
Indeed, as Simone de Beauvoir would remind us, promiscuous sex alone empowers no one under conditions of women's economic disenfranchisement. More women are talking about their affairs, and more women are having affairs, as more women gain the economic clout to be able to survive independently of heterosexual monogamy. But the sexual empowerment of a handful of promiscuous career women will have little or no practical meaning for those millions of women whose livelihoods continue to depend on the sexual and domestic demands of men. Many women struggling to defend themselves against men's sexual violence in the absence of the economic and legal means to prevent it will find feminists' claims that sexual promiscuity promotes women's liberation insensitive at best, classist and racist at worst; nor will it do to encourage teenage girls to be promiscuous without teaching them about the responsibilities that accompany women's sexual agency and about the contradictory and oppressive patriarchal climate in which their sexual choices are evaluated. Nevertheless, the mere fact that some women are beginning to take control of their own sexual destinies and are choosing to do so
by choosing to be promiscuous
cannot be underestimated in a society whose social voices are women's voices only when women
act
on the belief that we will be heard. The following section details some of the specific ways in which patriarchy thwarts the sexual empowerment of promiscuous white women and women of color and the ways in which sexual stereotypes are used to favor heterosexual white men over homosexual white men and men of color.
Good Girls and Bad Girls
In a way, my life has been an upside-down experience. I never made love
to the men I married, and I did not marry the men I loved. I do not know
if that makes me a good girl gone bad, or a bad girl gone good.
Beatrice Wood,
I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood
Women's heterosexual subordination by men is a subordination of
identity
. In a patriarchal society, women are defined in terms of our heterosexuality and reproductivity in order to serve the needs and maintain the privileges of men. Therefore, women's sexuality under patriarchy must be very carefully circumscribed lest it gain an independent credibility and power of its own. Men's ideal of women is that we be sexual only
in a certain way
.
America's good girl/bad girl stereotype defines the parameters of acceptable sexual behavior for women, circumscribing our identity as women under conditions of male status and privilege. Sheila Ruth calls this stereotype one of the heterosexual "serviceability" of women to emphasize how much a woman's identity is defined by her sexual access to men:
75
the sexually "serviceable" woman is a heterosexually available mistress or lover, sensuous, responsive, and receptive. Wives sometimes fit
 
Page 57
this stereotype, but only when their husbands have not grown sexually bored with them. The sexually serviceable woman is a sexually "good" woman, playful yet submissive, eager, perhaps slightly mysterious. As a playmate fantasy, she can be even more independent, experienced, exotic, or dangerous. She is to be distinguished from the nonsexual "good" woman/mother/wife, who is nurturing where the sexually serviceable woman will be challenging, virginal where the sexually serviceable woman will be carnal. The sexually "nonserviceable" woman is a bitch-temptress, immodest, coarse, and demanding. She is a promiscuous woman who is "nonserviceable'' despite her availability to men because she is ungovernable, indiscriminate, and selfish. The seductive lustiness of a serviceable woman becomes salacious, lewd, and uncomfortably lascivious in a nonserviceable woman. Her nonsexual counterpart is cloying, manipulative, and catty. A nonserviceable woman is "bad."
The irony in these distinctions is that they are arbitrarily and ambiguously applied. Feminists not only object to the content and restrictiveness of the stereotypes; we also object to the fickle, tenuous, and often contradictory ways in which women are asked to instantiate them. A wife may be congratulated by an ambitious husband for the way she successfully flirts with his boss at a company cocktail party. Having lost his chance at promotion, he may regard her identical flirtation as an insensitive assault on his masculinity or as an irritating habit of "the bitch who can't shut her mouth." If her clothes are not sexy enough, she is "frumpy." When in those very same clothes she seduces the wrong man, she is "sleazy." Many husbands want a wife who is simultaneously sexually available and chaste, the virgin who is a whore in bed. A woman is "bad" whether she strays on purpose or by accident because, like a servant, she is supposed to know what is expected of her.
What these examples suggest is that a woman is "good" only by being
both
an experienced sexual seductress and a nonsexual maternal caretaker with the capacity to know not only which role suits which occasion for which man but also how to play both roles at once. Success in one social setting is no guarantee of future success even in the very same setting. The feminine stereotype of an anxious woman fussing over her appearance, caring more about her hair than her opinions, is testimony to the insecurity of her position, not merely personal vanity. By being required to fill contradictory social roles whose demands women cannot confidently predict, women must inevitably fail to be "good." The quote from Beatrice Wood at the beginning of this section represents the feelings of many women who get the mixed message that the good girl is bad and the bad girl is good. What difference does it make, when no matter what she does, she doesn't get it right?
Commonly used sexual terms to describe women are terms used to describe the promiscuous woman: trollop, vamp, slut, hussy, whore, pickup, Jezebel, tart, bawd, vixen, floozy.
76
Such a woman is loose, easy, and indiscriminatea "nonserviceable" woman for men, to use Ruth's phrase. Not surprisingly, these terms are used by men primarily to insult or denigrate women, since a woman who is promiscuous is "bad." Women are so closely identified with these terms that they are used by both men and women to insult women outside of any explicitly sexual context ("Who does that hussy think she is, humiliating me like that?," or "The slut brought me ham when I ordered sausage.") Sexualized terms for women like "broad," "skirt," and "tail" do not necessarily connote promiscuity, so they are often used to refer to "serviceable"
 
Page 58
women, as in "That's a nice piece of tail," or "Now that's a broad!" If women who are feminists object to these forms of address, men often react in disbelief, as if women were taking offense at a compliment.
Still, women can never be certain of our serviceability, given women's denigration in such phrases as "Who let this broad on the highway?!" When men use the term "bitch" to refer to particular women, the intent is to slur, degrade, vilify, since it refers to an animal in heat, an animal that indiscriminately and promiscuously copulates. Certainly the word implies "nonserviceable" when applied to women: "I can't stand taking direct orders from that bitch!'' Not only are women being male-identified sexually by such terms, but we are being identified with a sexuality that demeans us. Women might object less to an externally imposed identity if the value of that identity were positive. But women's promiscuity has become so imbued with negativity and our sexuality so filled with contradiction that it is no wonder Beatrice Wood regards her sex life as "an upside-down experience."
I am not arguing that words used to describe the sexually active man"lecher," "old goat," "roué," "gigolo," "rake," and the likecannot be offensive, even humiliating. My claim is that in a heterosexually dominated culture whose male advantage rests in pressing women's sexuality to the service of individual men, women will be judged "bad" when they fail to live up to particular men's sexual expectations of them, no matter how eccentric or contradictory. Furthermore, because women's identity is a function of our sexuality, such condemnation strikes at the very core of our self-image as women. Some men are lechers
and
overbearing; women are broads
because
they are overbearing.
In addition, special condemnation is reserved for the sexually promiscuous woman that is not matched by terms used to describe promiscuous men. A promiscuous woman is referred to as "dirt" in virtue of her sexual profligacy alone. "My girlfriend? You mean that whore? She's a piece of dirt." A promiscuous man is "dirt" when, in the course of being promiscuous, he has been sexually deceptive, disrespectful, exploitative, or mean. His promiscuity is primarily a function of what he
does
, not a function of who he
is
. Thus, a man who was promiscuous in his youth may, with an appropriate show of repentance, come to his marriage with his community's (and wife's) expectation that he will be faithful, while a woman with a similar history may still be regarded as suspiciously adulterous. A "dirty old man" who does no more than leer at young women is reviled not because he is promiscuous (although he would like to be) but because elderly men are ironically committed to a stereotypical asexuality that precludes the very sexual objectification of women encouraged in younger men.
Indeed, a dirty old man wishes he were a roué, and for good reason. A promiscuous man is often called a "stud," a "stallion," a "man of the world," a "man of experience." A young promiscuous man may be a "hot rod" or "sowing his wild oats." He is not identified with "used goods" or described as "loose" the way a promiscuous woman often is. Contemporary women who refer to their errant boyfriends as sluts complain, at least in part, because
their boyfriends are getting away with being sluts
no matter what their girlfriends think; but once a woman is heterosexually promiscuous, she must justify her behavior as in some way serviceable to men or be identified as a slut. (Thus, promiscuous women do not
get away
with being sluts; promis-
 
Page 59
cuous women
are
sluts.) Feminists like Mary Daly believe that the only way for women to empower ourselves sexually is to reconceptualize and reevaluate women's sexuality, with new terminology, if necessary, so that women's "pure lust" has meaning for women. Clarissa Pinkola Estes believes that there are "wild woman archetypes" throughout history that women need to regain access to in order to fulfill our sexual destinies as women.
77
In both cases, sexual empowerment for women is a function of eschewing patriarchal definitions of our sexuality in order to redefine it in women's terms. Absent a tendency toward gynocentrism, this approach is consistent with the perspective of the "view from somewhere different" since it encourages women to understand our social location in order to facilitate women's sexual agency and self-definition.
Yet here we confront a fascinating paradox: if women are
sexually
identified by heterosexual society, why are we
condemned
for promiscuous sex? Shouldn't the heterosexually identified female be encouraged to do what her male-identified culture expects of hernamely, have as much sex with as many men as possible?
The characterization of promiscuous sex in the first section of this chapter can provide the resolution to this paradox: recall that an important condition for at least some kinds of promiscuous sex is that it be the active and repetitious pursuit of different sexual partners. The promiscuous person, if nothing else, is the
agent
of her sexual desire. But in a patriarchal society, this is precisely the role reserved for the heterosexually active
male
. In such a society, women are sex
objects
, not sex subjects. Women are to be dominated and controlled through sex, not free to pursue an unabashed love of sex untainted by degradation or shame. If sexual promiscuity is sexual agency, that is, the active pursuit of sex by an autonomous subject, then the sexually promiscuous woman is regarded as attempting to take control of her sexual life. But this is anathema to a system of power in which the oppression of women through sex is a primary means of establishing and maintaining dominance over women. Thus, the harsher criticism that a patriarchal society lodges against the sexually promiscuous woman can be understood as intended to inhibit her pursuit of the kind of sexual activity which has long been the exclusive preserve of men and which signals rebellion against her oppressor. It is a striking feminist irony that the expression "loose woman" is both a symbol of women's degradation and profound evidence of women's attempts to liberate ourselves from the sexual dominance of men.
What these uses of language suggest is that in a culture whose power and status lie in the hands of men, sex is a badge of honor for men, a sign of power, dominance, and possession. However, race, class, and sexual preference intersect with gender in the social construction of promiscuity to narrow the range of this dominance. Sex is a badge of honor for
white, affluent, heterosexual
men. African American men are often sexually stereotyped by Anglos as primitive and dangerous sexual animals with enlarged penises, a sexuality threatening to many white men, commonly used by them to denigrate and straitjacket blacks. When a black man marries a white woman, he is often regarded by the black community as a traitor to his race and by whites as appropriating and defiling one of a white man's own.
78
When a black man pursues a woman of his own race, he may be regarded by whites as typical of an oversexed primitive in search of an equally lusty partner. If an African American man is homosexual, he may well be burdened with the additional heterosexist presumption
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