Loose Women, Lecherous Men (25 page)

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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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make performance-oriented or power-polarizing sex more satisfying, or less of an effort, than monogamous sexual commitment. A woman's age, self-confidence, emotional vulnerability, and physical ability also influence how she views her sexual life. Yet social location is not a predictor of desire, since one woman with a full life of sexual experimentation may long for a relationship of more constancy, while another may wish fewer of her partners wanted "the same old thing." So, too, the "view from somewhere different" will suggest to an advocate of sadomasochistic sex that her choice to "play at power" is as much a function of her race and class as it is her gender. Poor and working-class women often resent middle-class feminists who advocate sexual power plays as a means to liberation, because affluent women already have the power of time, money, and opportunity to explore sexual alternatives. For many more women, however, such sexual experimentation is a luxury that does not address their needs to find food, clothing, and shelter for their families. The reifying effects of interlocking oppressions are also exemplified when sexual difference among the affluent is tolerated as amusing eccentricity, while the same sexual variation in the poor or homeless community is labeled deviant or perverse. Furthermore, women of color may feel insulted by mostly white women's desires to dramatize and eroticize the roles of master/slave. Such dramas only arouse in many women of color profound and painful associations with white imperialist enslavement, making any play at such slavery a disrespectful one.
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The "view from somewhere different'' acknowledges that the disempowered do not have the power of parody and that racism and classism are potent forces in the oppression of women and in the marginalization of sexual difference.
The sexual difference sex radical feminists advocate is itself a social construction located in a milieu in which women are stereotyped as the sexual subordinates of men. Therefore, personal explorations of the relationship between sex and power will have profound political meaning for both sexual minorities and members of the status quo. The erotic play of power that is the sexual rebellion of the sadomasochist has meaning as social rebellion and not mere private fantasy precisely because of the dialectic between the personal and the political.
It is in virtue of this dialectic that a sex radical must recognize the dangers of misinterpretation that her dramas of dominance and submission carry. From the "view from somewhere different," her "world"-traveling commits her to ask of herself, "What is it like to be me in their eyes?" Without the ability to create a woman-identified model of the relation between sex and power, feminists have no way of loosening the patriarchal stranglehold on defining sexual power as the power of victimization. Yet it is in virtue of existing patriarchal constraints that sex radical feminists must, with renewed emphasis, work on ways to educate the larger community regarding crucial differences between patriarchal plays at sexual power and feminist ones.
Some sex radicals complain that this strategy assumes that a sex radical cannot practice a truly liberating form of sexuality until she can convince a disbelieving public that she is not doing something morally wrong. Such dependence on patriarchal approval for their sexual liberation strikes many sex radicals as hypocritical, if not patently absurd. From this perspective, a sex radical's responsibility is not to persuade a patriarchal status quo to accept her but to learn to accept herself. Sex radical feminists would argue that such acceptance is difficult when feminists treat women who
 
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enjoy the type of sex that eroticizes dominance and submission as co-opted victims of patriarchal brainwashing.
Yet I would argue that without recognizing and militating against the strength of her opposition, a sex radical feminist undermines her activism by reducing the political to the personal. If a sex radical feminist's aim is to transform the social meaning of sexual power, she cannot expect her practice of sexual difference alone to do the job. As Jeffrey Weeks points out in his argument for a radical sexual pluralism, recognizing what I have been calling the dialectic between gender and sexuality compels us to be "sensitive to the workings of power, [and] alive to the struggles needed to change the existing social relations which constrain sexual autonomy."
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Indeed, the "view from somewhere different" requires the dismantling of the traditional opposition of the normal versus the perverse, precisely because sex radical plays at power cannot subvert real political power when the status quo retains the option of remarginalizing them as perverse. Unless sex radical feminists actively seek to educate a wary public regarding a radical reconceptualization of sexual perversion, they will have done no more than convince the status quo of their internalization of traditional sexual norms.
Moreover, misinterpretation of a radical feminist sexual practice by women of color may be detrimental to feminism. As I noted earlier, women of color suffer from multiple plays at power that many white women do not. At a time when women of color struggle to find a place for feminism within the context of their struggle against racial oppression, women who claim the power to eroticize sex in their own terms may be regarded by women of color as simply white,
female
imperialists with whom women of color have little in common. By adopting the "view from somewhere different," sex radical feminists can open a dialogue about sexual difference with those whose social location represents oppression on many fronts.
Sex radical feminists can also work to deinstitutionalize aversion to children's sexuality by advocating strongly against the sexual abuse of children at the same time that sex radicals advocate in favor of children's sexual education and sexual play. The "view from somewhere different" encourages attempts to understand the individual sexual needs of children and to acknowledge that adults ascribe symbolic and sexual meaning to acts that children do not. This means recognizing that children's emotional vulnerability and eagerness to please make them easy targets for adult sexual exploitation. Moreover, because children lack economic or social independence from adults, children's ability to make informed sexual choices will be influenced by adults still in control of children's lives. The "view from somewhere different" also acknowledges the patriarchal context of adult heterosexuality in which children's social introduction to sex typically occurs. Therefore, judgments about adult/child sexual relations must be sensitive to the particular personal context of power dynamics within those relations as well as those cultural dynamics external to it. Indeed, there will be those for whom adult/child sex taps into deeply repressed horrors and fears. Because human sexual practice exists in a social milieu that influences and is influenced by sexual norms, sex radicals face the daunting task of restructuring the social and economic relationship between adults and children, if safety, dignity, and care is to be afforded to sexual relationships between them. The larger issue remains as to whether children under any social circumstances are psychosexually mature
 
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enough to make free and informed decisions about their sexual lives and exactly who is to decide when such maturity occurs.
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From the "view from somewhere different," sexual preference is problematic when advocated by either a cultural or sex radical feminist alone, since both cultural feminism's egalitarian sex and sex radical feminism's eroticization of power are rebellions to patriarchal norms that fail to acknowledge the full range of individual women's erotic needs. Cultural feminism's epistemological presuppositions about female nature and sex radical feminism's essentializing marriage of sex, power, and pleasure must be questioned if we are to avoid a "view from nowhere" that would profess to know the truth about women's sexuality.
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Both cultural and sex radical feminisms can be expanded and transformed by the incorporation of their visions for women's liberation into the dialectic between gender and sexuality. Feminist sexuality from the "view from somewhere different" captures a cultural feminist's contention that women's sexuality must be contextualized by the patriarchal climate in which women live. The "view from somewhere different" also captures a sex radical's warning that we should not restrict women's self-conceptions to male-identified definitions but should offer individual women the opportunity to experience sexual autonomy by exploring their sexual lives in their own terms. This perspective has the advantage of advocating a sexual agency and self-definition for women that recognizes and promotes sexual diversity over a broad spectrum of gender, race, and class, since from the "view from somewhere different" no single sexual difference is the only sex worth knowing.
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The "view from somewhere different" acknowledges that there are divisions among feminists within cultural and sex radical factions and that simply defining the issue as a debate between two discrete brands of feminism may be practical for the exposition of argument but is misleading in its apparently rigid categorization of types. As I noted earlier, for example, some feminists do not object to sadomasochism restricted to the bedroom. They simply reject the notion that such sex advances the feminist agenda of women's sexual agency and self-definition. Some sex radical feminists are much more interested than others in community activism in support of sexual difference. I also mentioned previously that many feminists who do not consider themselves cultural feminists have many of the same complaints against sex radicals that cultural feminists do. Similarly, many feminists who are not sex radicals also have trouble with aspects of cultural feminism. The "view from somewhere different" maintains a healthy skepticism toward the idea of a
resolution
to the variety of problems feminists raise concerning women's sexual difference, as the dialectic between gender and sexuality is a fluid and flexible one defined by historical and political context. As Muriel Dimen writes:
Where does this leave us? In an ambiguous, uncertain spot. The idea of political correctness masquerades as eternal truth which we would all like to believe is possible, because it makes us feel much more secure. But everything changesexcept the existence of contradictions. With social transformation come new ones. I do not believe that an eternally true consciousness of what is politically correct in sexuality, or in anything, is possible. Or, to say the same thing in other words, the road to false consciousness, no matter how you wish to define it, is paved with politically correct intentions.
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Given the added importance, mentioned in chapter 1, of recognizing bias in the philosophical investigator's social location, any attempt on my part to offer a final conceptual or moral solution to the question of sexual difference would be hypocritical. Indeed, the "view from somewhere different" is itself partial to sexual diversity in ways that cultural feminism is not. As I argued in the previous section, the "view from somewhere different" recommends an appreciation of sexual diversity in order to open, not close, the question of the normative status of a variety of sexual practices and preferences. Pat Califia has argued that sexual difference should be a matter of taste ("vanilla" versus ''rocky road"), not morality. Other feminists have argued that sex should engage our moral attention precisely because the personal obligations and social benefits that make up our sexual lives are so important to US.
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The "view from somewhere different" recognizes that there will be contexts in which oppressive sexual relations command our political attention as well as those contexts in which the most sexually intimate affairs recommend pleasure over politics. However, all such contexts are superseded by a feminist ethic of care respect from the "view from somewhere different," which acknowledges, understands, and promotes the individual sexual needs of one's partner from a historicized and socially located perspective. Such a perspective is also partial to difference in order to capture the sexual variety that would be lost if we were to deconstruct the notion of difference by adopting the "view from everywhere." By stressing the importance of the dialectical relationship between gender and sexuality, the "view from somewhere different" paves the way for a dialectical approach to understanding the relationships between the political and the personal, the dominant and the submissive, the moral and the aesthetic. My contention is that such a perspective provides both a theoretical and a practical basis for understanding the presuppositions of contemporary feminist debates over sexual preference as well as a basis for believing that to try to resolve such debates is to foreclose the pursuit of women's sexual liberation.
This perspective also makes questions about women's "real" sexual preferences moot, since from the "view from somewhere different," social location makes all "real" choice partial and historicized. Therefore, it seems misleading to ask Ellen Willis's question, "What would we choose if we had a real choice?"
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From the vantage point of the "view from somewhere different," claims about women's sexuality make sense only when women's "real" choices are understood as contextually and politically situated ones, not socially isolatable choices free of cultural constraints. Whether or not women consent to their sexual relations cannot resolve the dispute between cultural and sex radical feminism, since there is no clear sense in which our socially constructed desires can truly be said to be "free" of political and ideological forms. Sarah Lucia Hoagland admits that we have all been "infected erotically . . . by the patriarchal ideology of authority, of dominance and submission." Moreover, Sandra Lee Bartky makes the important observation that feminists should not underestimate what she calls the "obsessional dimension of sexual desire," which would militate against feminists easily or satisfactorily changing our sexual preferences to match our politics.
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However, I believe Bartky would agree that any difficulty we may have in adjusting our sexuality to suit our feminism does not mean that women cannot break free of sexual restraints imposed on us by an oppressive patriarchy; nor

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