Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #test

Loose Women, Lecherous Men (17 page)

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
3.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
Page 64
People can of course lie, withhold information, not know they are infected, or simply be careless. But these factors are as much a feature of monogamous relationships as promiscuous ones: one act of sexual penetration is sufficient to contract the disease, an act consistent with sexual exclusivity. Furthermore, someone with a monogamous partner of several years' duration can still pass the disease on from a previous partner who was an unknown carrier. HIV has come under critical scrutiny of late, since its latency in some carriers and dormancy in others makes its causal link to AIDS subject to question. AIDS is still a much-misunderstood medical problem that cannot convincingly be used to argue for what feminists have claimed is an already suspect sexual traditionalism.
89
Furthermore, HIV is also contracted through the infected blood of blood transfusions as well as infected needles. Yet the argument offered in response is not that blood transfusions are wrong or objectionable, only that we should take extra precautions to insure the use of untainted blood. Similar notes of caution are offered to those of us who drive Los Angeles freeways. Such freeways can be lethal. Such freeways are
often
lethal, such that driving them puts people at high risk. Yet the watchword for California drivers is caution, reduced speeds, sobriety, and attentiveness behind the wheel, not
absence
from behind the wheel. The fact that promiscuous sex is high-risk sex in an era of AIDS is insufficient reason to conclude that promiscuous sex should be avoided or that promiscuous sex is wrong. It is an argument for precautionary measures with regard to promiscuous sex that may not have been taken at a different point in our sexual history. Compare Laurie Shrage's comments about the role of commercial sex in the spread of AIDS: "To blame commercial sex providers for the spread of AIDS is like blaming commercial airline companies for the spread of terrorism. Instead, we need to respond by requiring that the industry take extraordinary precautions to abate this epidemic, just as we require commercial airline companies to take extreme precautions to abate terrorism; we do not shut them down."
90
This is not to argue that condoms or AIDS tests constitute safe sex for the promiscuous. Without a reliable and detailed sexual history on every sexual partner, there is no foolproof way to avoid contracting HIV and also have promiscuous frontal or anal intercourse. Feminists have long claimed that heterosexual sex has seldom been safe for women in a world of frequently unaffordable antibiotics or reliable but expensive contraception, inaccessible abortion, rape, dishonest sex partners, and violent or errant husbands. With the advent of AIDS, men are just beginning to feel a sexual threat whose generalized angst has been felt by women for centuries. One of the ironies of the AIDS crisis is that men's condom use in response to AIDS has encouraged men to share in both contraceptive responsibility and sexual safety, a responsibility men have often sought to avoid. Yet feminists have often argued that unless women take full responsibility for our contraception and sexual safety, we will be denied the full control over our bodies that sexual autonomy requires. On the other hand, others question why we should equate sexual safety with sexual desirability, when part of the eroticism of sex for at least some people is sex that is dangerous, mysterious, or taboo.
91
In any case, the requirement of safety in sex is an unrealistic and androcentric basis for objecting to promiscuous sex, particularly when contemporary monogamy can be so cruel to women.
 
Page 65
Many writers have suggested that AIDS has been exploited by those who would condemn alternative sexual preferences in favor of sexual intimacy, commitment, and monogamy.
92
Fear and uncertainty about AIDS has made already marginalized groupsgay men, IV drug users, and prostitutesinto easy scapegoats for a disease that both scientists and the general public still do not fully understand. While many women and men choose monogamy, even celibacy, amid such fears, I have argued that these fears should caution us about promiscuity but should not cause women or men to dismiss promiscuity as a real alternative for sexual pleasure, agency, and self-definition.
Conclusion
In a society in which monogamous marriage is both the common and accepted norm of sexual partnership, promiscuity will have derogatory meaning. (Compare "My congratulations on your marriage!" to "My congratulations on your promiscuity!") Nevertheless, in that same society, promiscuity is many things to many people. It can be premarital or extramarital sex, simple fornication, or the repetitious pursuit of several partners. In its repetition it is unlike monogamous sex, in which sexual activity is exclusive to one partner. Like monogamy, however, promiscuity can be loving or cruel, intimate or exploitative, committed or callous. Thus, if care respect is a woman's requirement for pleasurable sex, she can look for it promiscuously and in her promiscuous lovers if she does not find it monogamously. Furthermore, because care respect is flexible enough in its acknowledgment of particularity to accommodate the minimum of mutual consent required by sex radical feminists and the maximum of sexual intimacy required by cultural feminists, the ethic has value for uniting the otherwise disparate sexual ideologies of each.
From the "view from somewhere different," promiscuous sex can also bring sexual satisfaction, sexual growth, and sexual empowerment to women who would otherwise feel physically and emotionally trapped by the constraints of monogamy. From this perspective, women can begin to develop a contextual and dialectical understanding, indeed, a realistic understanding of the pleasures and risks involved in pursuing a promiscuous lifestyle. This understanding, I have argued, is an important first step in liberating individual women to determine for themselves the place of promiscuity in their lives. However, unless women can gain economic independence from men so that they are not confined to heterosexual monogamy for their very survival, the promiscuity of other women will remain a burden or a threat, or both.
Free of economic dependence on men, women who appreciate the dialectic between gender and sexuality can begin to unravel the complex dynamic of women's sexual oppression under patriarchy, an unraveling that is necessary if individual women wish to define their sexuality in their own terms. The existence of AIDS would appear to demand that all women be cautious in our choice of sexual partners. Yet women under patriarchy have never been promised that sex would be a safe and straightforward affair, nor has sex been easily defined in women's terms. Indeed, many feminists wish women would
stop
worrying about safety (its promise, they maintain, is a myth) and
start
exploring those alternative sexual preferences that
 
Page 66
make the dangerous or the taboo into the supremely erotic. My claim is that promiscuity pursued from the "view from somewhere different" provides one way for individual women to begin reclaiming and reevaluating their own sexual pleasure. The extent to which the ethic of care respect derived from this perspective can accommodate both the socially acceptable and the taboo in sex is the subject of the next chapter.
 
Page 67
3
Challenging the Normal And The Perverse:
Feminist Speculations on Sexual Preference
Overview
The "loose women" described thus far pose a threat to patriarchy by challenging the constraints of monogamy imposed on women by an androcentric heterosexuality. However, women in search of sexual liberation may also challenge patriarchal appropriations of women's sexuality by challenging traditional heterosexuality's dominance over what constitutes "normal" sex. Along these lines, a feminist reclamation of sex for women would mean redefining and rediscovering so-called deviant or perverted sex as a way to subvert the patriarchal subordination of women that "normal" heterosexuality reinforces.
Such a reclamation of women's sexuality is not without its feminist critics, however, since feminists past and present have had a love/hate relationship with sexual deviance. On the one hand, feminist consciousness-raising has been instrumental in revealing to women the extent to which we have unquestioningly accepted patriarchal norms that fail to address women's sexual pleasure, agency, and self-definition. Feminists' recognition of the importance of clitoral orgasm, masturbation, and fantasy for women's sexual pleasure is in large part due to feminists' determination to secure sexual agency for women as the defining subjects of our own erotic needs.
1
Therefore, one would expect feminists to tolerate a fair amount of the sexual deviance traditionally referred to as sexual perversionfor example, homosexuality, consensual sadomasochism, or the pederasty commonly known in the gay community as man/boy loveif only because the stigmatization of such sexual minorities
 
Page 68
can be considered yet another example of the patriarchal oppression of alternative sexual expression that many feminists have sought for themselves.
On the contrary, social purity feminists of the late nineteenth century sought to protect'' women in the sex trade from the apparent male tyranny of prostitution by condemning women's promiscuity and masturbation as sinful, with the goal of encouraging all women to adopt the highly stratified social roles defined by traditional heterosexual marriage. In doing so, they only succeeded in replacing one kind of repressive sexual compliance with another.
2
Between 1969 and 1971, the National Organization for Women (NOW) attempted to purge its membership of lesbians, seeing in what Betty Friedan had called the "lavender menace" a retreat to a male-identified sexuality that was regarded as antithetical to feminism and disruptive of the movement.
3
Yet in the following decade, lesbianism was to become a defining political statement for many erstwhile heterosexual feminists discouraged by the seemingly inevitable power dynamics of compulsory heterosexuality. This merging of the politics of feminism with the sexual preference of lesbianism was captured by Ti-Grace Atkinson's pronouncement that "feminism is the theory; but lesbianism is the practice." However, since many lesbian feminists (like most heterosexuals) regard their sexuality not as a conscious political choice but as a sexual orientation or way of life, such a merger has continued to be a source of controversy among lesbian as well as heterosexual feminists.
4
Many lesbian feminists who reject heterosexual sex as dehumanizing to women continue to separate themselves from a gay male community that they regard as perpetuating an oppressive sexuality: performance-oriented, casually (if not anonymously) promiscuous, objectifying, and misogynistic. Yet other lesbians and gay men who favor traditional, if not closeted, versions of heterosexual family roles and non-sadomasochistic "vanilla" sex join forces to divorce themselves from political efforts at legitimizing the consensual bondage and discipline of gay and lesbian sadomasochism or the moral acceptability of pederasty. Their belief is that such "'queer' queers" conform to the very stereotypes of grossly perverted sexualities that the status quo exploits to insure the marginality of the homosexual community. Many heterosexual and lesbian feminists reject all practitioners of sadomasochistic sex for their apparent internalization of the sexual dominance and submission paradigmatic of patriarchal power.
5
By 1980, NOW had come out against sadomasochism as well as the pederasty and pedophilia referred to by the sex radical community as cross-generational sex for precisely the same reasons the organization had rejected lesbianism a decade earlier: sexual preferences that replicated the oppressive power relations of patriarchy were anathema to feminism. Moreover, sadomasochism was regarded as encouraging violence against women, pornographically depicted as bondage and discipline that women both need and want.
6
The feminist rejection of alternative sexualities found another public outlet in the disruption by some feminists of the 1982 Barnard College Scholar and the Feminist IX conference on sexuality. Objections by such groups as Women Against Pornography, Women Against Violence Against Women, and New York Radical Feminists that conference leaders and seminars were exploring sadomasochism and cross-generational sex resulted in confiscation of the conference di-
 
Page 69
ary, accusations of sexually perverse practices, and the cancellation by a major corporation of funding for any future conferences.
7
Conflict over the acceptability of sexual deviance within the feminist community continues to the present day. In addition to their concerns regarding sadomasochistic and cross-generational sex, many feminists reject the cross-gender dressing of transvestism or the overt gender dressing of drag, both of which may be exemplified by lesbians exhibiting the masculine and feminine sexual roles of "butch" and "femme." From this view, such behavior only mirrors the oppressive male-identified gender roles from which many feminists seek to liberate themselves. Transsexualism has been touted by some sex radicals as a reclamation of a self-identified sexuality in a world where biology is mistakenly regarded as destiny, while other feminists believe that biological sex changes represent the misplaced efforts of people deluded by rigidly constructed patriarchal sex roles into trying to get their bodies "right."
8
Many feminists have long regarded pedophilic incest between parent and child as a viciously convenient vehicle for the victimization of women, since the incest is often repeated over many years and commonly initiated by an adult male relation toward his preteen female charge whose emotional and material dependence is exploited by a powerful patriarch.
9
Mothers of incest victims are often unjustly accused of either insidiously encouraging the incest or "looking the other way"; conversely, they may be vilified for depriving an abusive husband of his legal visitation. Their husbands, on the other hand, are often perceived as needing no more than family therapy when incest cannot be legally proved. Yet other feminists have argued that to describe women primarily as victims of male lust is to play right into the hands of a patriarchy determined to define women's sexuality in men's terms and that men who love boys or women who love girls are much less likely to recreate the patriarchal power dynamics of adult male heterosexual pedophilia.
10
Feminism's conflict over the meaning and morality of sexual deviance can be represented by the two factions of feminism introduced in chapter 2: cultural feminism and sex radical feminism. Cultural feminists characterize heterosexual relations that are not self-consciously feminist in terms of the sexual objectification of women, which is in turn regarded as paradigmatic of the dominant/submissive power dynamic definitive of patriarchy. According to cultural feminism, any replication of this power polarization in social institutions such as pornography or prostitution, or in sexual relations such as man/boy love, butch/femme sexual role-playing, or sadomasochism, must be rejected as antifeminist. Cultural feminists contend that women's sexual needs and values are those of fully consenting and self-determining moral agents whose desire for intimacy and affection is inconsistent with the dominance and submission of polarized sexual roles. Indeed, for cultural feminists, sadomasochism is the essence of a patriarchal ideology that empowers some to compel others to do their bidding. From this view, women's liberation is a liberation from male heterosexual victimization in pursuit of a reclaimed, unifying, female sexuality of care, sensitivity, and intimacy.
Sex radical feminists regard both women's and men's sexuality under patriarchy as controlled and repressed by a heterosexist status quo, in which acceptance of the sexual norm is insidiously accomplished through individual and institutional social
BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
3.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Death Kit by Susan Sontag
Places in My Heart by Sheryl Lister
The Lazarus Plot by Franklin W. Dixon