Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (11 page)

More than any factor the feminist critique of mothering as the sole satisfying purpose of a woman’s life changed the nature of marriage and long-time partnerships. Once a woman’s worth was no longer determined by whether or not she birthed and raised children it was possible for a two-career couple who wanted to remain childless to envision a peer marriage - a relationship between equals. The absence of children made it easier to be peers simply because the way in which patriarchal society automatically assumes certain tasks will be done by mothers almost always makes it harder for women to achieve gender equity around child care. For example: it is very telling that in the wake of feminist movement the patriarchal medical establishment which had previously downplayed breastfeeding suddenly began to be not only positive about breastfeeding, . but insistent. This is just one aspect of child-rearing that automatically places more responsibility on the birthing female whether she is heterosexual or lesbian. Certainly many women in relationships with males often found that having a newborn baby plummeted their relationships back into more sexist-defined roles. However when couples work hard to maintain equity in all spheres, especially child care, it can be the reality; the key issue, though, is working hard. And most men have not chosen to work hard at child care.

Positively feminist interventions called attention to the value and importance of male parenting both in regards to the well-being of children and gender equity. When males participate equally in parenting, relationships between women and men are better, whether the two parents are married or live together or separately. Because of feminist movement more men do more parenting than ever before, yet we have not achieved even a semblance of gender equity. And we know that this equal participation makes parenting a more positive and fulfilling experience for all parties involved.

Of course the demands of work often create the obstacles to more participation in child care by working parents, especially men. Until we see major changes in the way work is structured time-wise, we will not live in a world where life is designed to allow men the time and space to parent. In that world men might be more eager to parent. But until then, many working males who are overtired and underpaid will all too willingly accept a woman doing all the child care, even if she is overtired and underpaid. The world of work within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has made it harder for women to parent fully. Indeed, this reality is leading women who might choose a career to stay home. Rather than sexist thinking about male domination becoming the factor which takes women out of the workforce and puts them back in the home, it is the fear that we are raising a society of “parentless” children. Many women find competitive careerism leaves little time for nurturing loving relationships. The fact that no one talks about men leaving work to be full-time parents shows the extent to which sexist thinking about roles prevails. Most people in our society still believe women are better at raising children than men.

To a grave extent women, who on one hand critiqued motherhood but on the other hand also enjoyed the special status and privileges it gave them, especially when it came to parent-child bonding, were not as willing to relinquish pride of place in parenting to men as feminist thinkers hoped. Individual feminist thinkers who critiqued biological determinism in every other area often embraced it when it came to the issue of mothering. They were not able to fully embrace the notion that fathers are just as important as mothers, and can parent just as well. These contradictions, along with the predominance of sexist thinking, have undermined the feminist demand for gender equity when it comes to child care.

Nowadays mass media continually bombards us with the message that marriage has made a comeback. Marriage never went out of fashion. Often when people proclaim that it is making a comeback, what they really mean is that more sexist-defined notions of marriage are “in” again. This fact is troubling to feminist movement because it is just as clear today as it was yesterday that marriages built on a sexist foundation are likely to be deeply troubled and rarely last.

Traditionally sexist marriages are more and more in vogue. And while they tend to breed the seeds of misery and dissatisfaction that served as a catalyst for feminist rebellion in domestic relationships, the factor that breaks with tradition is that these bonds are often severed quickly. Folks marry young and divorce young.

Patriarchal male domination in marriage and partnerships has been the primary force creating breakups and divorces in our society. All recent studies of successful marriages show that gender equity creates a context where each member of the couple is likely to be affirmed. This affirmation creates greater happiness, and, even if the marriage does not last forever, the peer friendship that has been the foundation of the bond continues. Significantly, in future feminist movement we will spend less time critiquing patriarchal marriage bonds and expend more effort showing alternatives, showing the value of peer relationships which are founded on principles of equality, respect, and the belief that mutual satisfaction and growth are needed for partnerships to be fulfilling and lasting.

Before feminist movement, before sexual liberation, most women found it difficult, if not downright impossible, to assert healthy sexual agency. Sexist thinking taught to females from birth on had made it clear that the domain of sexual desire and sexual pleasure was always and only male, that only a female of little or no virtue would lay claim to sexual need or sexual hunger. Divided by sexist thinking into the roles of madonnas or whores females had no basis on which to construct a healthy sexual self. Luckily feminist movement immediately challenged sexist sexual stereotypes. It helped that this challenge came at a time in our nation’s history where dependable birth control was made accessible to all.

Before dependable birth control female sexual self-assertion could lead always to the “punishment” of unwanted pregnancy and the dangers of illegal abortion. We have not amassed enough testimony to let the world know the sexual pathologies and horrors women endured prior to the existence of dependable birth control. It evokes fear within me just to imagine a world where every time a female is sexual she risks being impregnated, to imagine a world where men want sex and women fear it. In such world a desiring woman might find the intersection of her desire and her fear. We have not amassed enough testimony telling us what women did to ward off male sexual advances, how they coped with ongoing marital rape, how they coped with risking death to deal with unwanted pregnancies. We do know that the world of female sexuality was forever changed by the coming of feminist sexual revolution.

For those of us who had witnessed the sexual pain and bitterness of our mothers, their out-and-out fear and hatred of sexuality, coming into a movement, just as we were becoming more sexual, that promised us freedom, pleasure, and delight was awesome. Nowadays females face so few obstacles inhibiting their expression of sexual desire that our culture risks burying the historical memory of patriarchal assault on women’s bodies and sexuality. In that place of forgetfulness efforts to make abortion illegal can focus on the issue of whether or not a life is being taken without ever bringing into the discussion the devastating effects ending legal abortion would have on female sexuality. We still live among generations of women who have never known sexual pleasure, women for whom sex has only ever meant loss, threat, danger, annihilation.

Female sexual freedom requires dependable, safe birth control. Without it females cannot exercise full control of the outcome of sexual activity. But female sexual freedom also requires knowledge of one’s body, an understanding of the meaning of sexual integrity. Early feminist activism around sexuality focused so much attention on just the politics of granting females the right to be sexual whenever we wanted to be, with whomever we wanted to be sexual with, that there was little feminist education for critical consciousness teaching us how to respect our bodies in an anti-sexist way, teaching us what liberatory sex might look like.

In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s females were often encouraged to make synonymous sexual freedom and sexual promiscuity. In those days and to some extent in the present most heterosexual men saw and see a sexually liberated female as the one who would be or will be sexual with the least amount of fuss, i.e., asserting no demands, particularly emotional ones. And a large number of heterosexual feminists had the same misguided notions because they were patterning their behavior on the model provided by patriarchal males. However it did not take women long to realize that sexual promiscuity and sexual liberation were not one and the same.

When feminist movement was “hot” radical lesbian activists constantly demanded that straight women reconsider their bonds with men, raising the question of whether or not it was possible for women to ever have a liberated heterosexual experience within a patriarchal context. This interrogation was useful for the movement. It not only forced straight women to engage in ongoing critical vigilance about heterosexual practice, it highlighted lesbians in ways that positively exposed their strength while also revealing weaknesses. Individual women who moved from having relationships with men to choosing women because they were seduced by the popular slogan “feminism is the theory, lesbianism the practice” soon found that these relationships were as emotionally demanding and as fraught with difficulties as any other.

The degree to which lesbian partnership was as good as or better than heterosexual bonds was usually determined not by both parties being of the same sex but by the extent of their commitment to breaking with notions of romance and partnership informed by a culture of domination’s sadomasochistic assumption that in every relationship there is a dominant and a submissive party. Sexual promiscuity among lesbians could no more be equated with sexual liberation than it could be in heterosexual practice. Irrespective of their sexual preference women who suffered emotionally by equating the two were disillusioned about sex. And given the connection between male domination and sexual violence it is not surprising that women who had been involved with men were often the most vocal about their sexual unhappiness.

The consequence of this disillusionment with the dream of sexual freedom was that many individual feminist thinkers either came away from coping with these experiences, and/ or the negative fallout a female friend or comrade faced, harboring repressed resentment about all sexual activity, especially sexual contact with men. Radical lesbians who had once been the lone voices calling women to account for “sleeping with the enemy” were now joined by heterosexual women who were choosing same-sex bonds because they were utterly disillusioned with men. Suddenly the discourse on sexuality, particularly all discussion of intercourse, that emerged made it seem that all coitus was sexual coercion, that any penetration of the female by the male was rape. For a time these theories and the individual charismatic women who spread the news had a deep impact on the consciousness of young women who were struggling to establish new and different sexual identities. Many of these young women ended up choosing bisexual practice or choosing relationships with men where it was agreed that the female partner would determine the nature of all sexual encounter. However masses of young females simply turned away from feminist thinking. And in this turning found their way back to outmoded sexist notions of sexual freedom and embraced them, at times with a vengeance.

No wonder then that the contradictions and conflicts arising as a consequence of the tensions between sexual pleasure and danger, sexual freedom and bondage, provided the seductive proving ground for sexual sadomasochism. Ultimately feminist interrogations of sexuality were all tied to a question of power. No matter how much feminist thinkers talked about equality, when it came to sexual desire and the enactment of sexual passion the dynamics of power and powerlessness evoked in the sexual arena disrupted simplistic notions of oppressor and oppressed. Nothing challenged the grounds of feminist critique of heterosexual practice more than the revelation that feminist lesbians engaged in sexual sadomasochism, a world of tops and bottoms, wherein positions of powerful and powerless were deemed acceptable.

Practically all radical feminist discussion of sexuality ceased when women within the movement began to fight over the issue of whether or not one could be a liberated woman, whether lesbian or heterosexual, and engage in the practice of sexual sadomasochism. Tied to this issue were differences of opinion about the meaning and significance of patriarchal pornography. Faced with issues powerful enough to divide and disrupt the movement, by the late ‘80s most radical feminist dialogues about sexuality were no longer public; they took place privately. Talking about sexuality publicly had devastated the movement.

Publicly the feminist women who continued to talk the most about sexuality tended to be conservative, at times puritanical and anti-sex. The movement had been radically changed, moving from being a site where female sexual liberation had been called for and celebrated to a site where public discussions of sexuality focused more on sexual violence and victimization. Mainstream aging feminist individual women who had once been the great champions of female sexual freedom for the most part began to talk about sexual pleasure as unimportant, valorizing celibacy. Increasingly women who speak and write openly about sexual desire and practice tend to dismiss or distance themselves from feminist sexual politics. And more than ever the feminist movement is seen primarily as anti-sex. Visionary feminist discourse on sexual passion and pleasure has been pushed into the background, ignored by almost everyone. In its place females and males continue to rely on patriarchal models of sexual freedom.

Despite sexual revolution and feminist movement we know that many heterosexual females have sex only because males want them to, that young homosexuals, male and female, still have no public or private supportive environment that affirms their sexual preference, that the sexist iconography of madonna or whore continues to claim the erotic imagination of males and females, that patriarchal pornography now permeates every aspect of mass media, that unwanted pregnancy is on the increase, that teens are having often unsatisfying and unsafe sex, that in many long-time marriages and partnerships, whether same-sex or heterosexual, women are having no sex. All these facts call attention to the need for renewed feminist dialogue about sexuality. We still need to know what liberatory sexual practice looks like.