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Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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Page 106
spect would reduce the eroticism. It may also be that the kind of lesbian sadomasochism in which each partner attempts to satisfy the other's particular sexual preferences is
both
power-polarizing sex
and
egalitarian sex. I have been arguing that trying to determine what kind of sex is the "right" sex, by excising the concept of care respect from its application in a caring and cooperative community of difference, forecloses sexual debate and arbitrarily stifles the sexual needs of some in favor of others. As I suggested at the end of chapter 1, adopting the "view from somewhere different" means destabilizing our notions of moral rightness or political correctness toward a more uncertain future that nevertheless has the distinct feminist advantage of freeing oppressed voices to pursue their identity in diversity. In this way my sexual ethic of care respect reflects Raymond Belliotti's "engaged fallibilistic pluralism" and Laurie Shrage's moral pluralism, both of which are neither absolutist nor relativist; rather, these moral perspectives appreciate the ways in which culture and context define the parameters of ethical behavior in ways that make moral judgments meaningful even if they are not universally binding.
111
It could be argued that this ethic of care respect reinforces the nurturing role that has restricted women to domestic and sexual servitude. Women take care of
others
, but no one takes care of
them
. My suggestion is that we adopt Marjorie Weinzweig's model of "autonomous relating to others," which I introduced in chapter 2. This model requires knowing what we want and enjoy for ourselves, a knowledge gained from the state of personal moral development that Weinzweig calls "autonomous being oneself" in which we choose to act for ourselves alone, not because "we hope that somebody else will take care of us if we act as they wish."
112
This kind of autonomy is meant to limit the advantage often taken of the woman whose identity is so bound up in the needs of others that everyone's needs are met except hers. Yet Weinzweig, like Dillon, recognizes the importance of an active care and concern for others in a world that is composed of interdependent members of
communities
, not of isolated individuals. Thus, Weinzweig advocates the further development of an "autonomous relating to others" in which a woman attempts to understand how her own needs and the needs of others may be met within a community of both shared and competing interests. A woman who develops this way of living recognizes that she is part of a larger community in which the satisfaction of her individual needs will influence, and be influenced by, the pursuit of the needs of others. In this way she can be sympathetic, available, and understanding of others in ways that do not undermine her agency or self-definition. Sexual relationships in which this kind of care respect is mutual can enhance each partners' ability to express her or his individual preferences without forcing those preferences on others or ignoring the preferences of others.
113
Moreover, from the "view from somewhere different," women's autonomy in an actively caring community includes what Joyce Trebilcot calls "taking responsibility for one's sexuality." Taking responsibility for one's sexuality encourages women's sexual agency and self-definition by asking each woman to reflect on the meaning and value of sexual difference in her life. Trebilcot's responsibility for one's sexuality echoes the "view from somewhere different" when she recommends that women begin to get in touch with the "dissonant, unacceptable, threatening, puzzling aspects of ourselves."
114
In this way women can begin to discover our own sexual needs and
 
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appreciate the differences of sexual preference and desire within and among women. Such responsibility implies being sensitive to the ways in which an individual woman's race, class, age, nationality, cultural and family history, and physical ability or appearance shape her sexual life. This responsibility also encourages women to consider in what ways our sexual desires and preferences may be a function of patriarchal rules and standards that have been defined without listening to women's voices. In taking responsibility for their sexuality, women help each other recognize the extent to which women may contribute to, as well as overcome, the oppressive sexual stereotypes outlined in chapter 2. Thus, a sexual ethic of care respect in which each person takes responsibility for her or his sexuality is one that recommends that we acknowledge, understand, and promote the agency and self-definition of a community of persons with a wide variety of sexual experiences, preferences, and desires. In this way individual sexual needs can be reflectively identified in the social context in which they arise and can be met with the active care and concern of a community of persons responsive to those needs.
In summary, a feminist sexual ethic of care respect is an ethic reflective of, and derivable from, the "view from somewhere different." A feminist sexual ethic of care respect recommends that all persons express an active and sensitive concern for sexual difference by advocating care respect not only in our personal sexual relations but also in our attitudes toward the sexual lives of others. Thus, it is an ethic that eschews any notion of a politically correct sexuality that would stifle sexual diversity in deference to the "view from somewhere better" or the "view from nowhere." Nevertheless, it is an ethic that can condemn the sexual exploitation or abuse of women by recognizing sexual oppression as both the failure to respect persons of diverse social locations as equally valuable and the failure to "world"-travel in order to promote the sexual agency and self-definition of others. Instead of deconstructing difference from a ''view from everywhere" in which "good" versus "bad" sex no long has any meaning, the "view from somewhere different" constructs a sexual ethic to accommodate difference within the moral parameters of care respect. Within such parameters, individual women can decide for themselves how the erotic figures in their lives, so that their sexuality will have meaning and value for them. Weinzweig's autonomous relating to others insures that women's lives combine caring for themselves and caring for others. Trebilcot's concept of taking responsibility for one's sexuality requires that women understand the context of the eroticization of power from which many of our notions of what counts as good sex springs.
Adopting a feminist ethic of care respect implies not assigning normative status to sexual difference without considering the particular historical and social location in which that difference is practiced. Paula Webster has suggested that many feminists have been afraid to embrace sexual difference simply because difference has traditionally meant deviance and division within the movement; tolerating, much less encouraging, the dominant/submissive sex of lesbian sadomasochism or butch/femme role-playing was believed to splinter feminism by alienating those women for whom a woman-identified sexuality means eschewing power-polarizing sexual roles. Yet Webster strongly contends that "[t]he more we know about the dimensions of our hungers, their finite limits and requirements, the more entitled we may feel to speak of our own wishes and listen with compassion to our friends."
115
By adopting the
 
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"view from somewhere different," we recast sexual deviance as one of many different sexual practices, none of which is the object of feminist condemnation without the contextual analysis that the dialectic between gender and sexuality and the sexual ethic of care respect recommend. From this perspective, the bonding, nonpolarized sex of the cultural feminist becomes only one of many sexual practices for which women may take responsibility; such responsibility involves reflecting on the ways in which encouraging bonding and intimacy in women's sexual relationships may reinforce women's subordination to, or debilitating dependence on, our partners. So, too, from the "view from somewhere different," the more polarized sex advocated by some sex radical feminists is understood as one of many avenues of sexual exploration open to women; at the same time, recognizing the dialectical relationship between gender and sexuality means recognizing that radical sexual practices exist within a sexually politicized milieu in which the eroticization of power is notorious for the sexual oppression of women as well as children. Recognizing such possibilities is not ''giving in" to the power of the patriarchs. Such recognition is essential if we are to minimize misinterpretations of women's reclamations of erotic power and use them to transcend an oppressive sexual politics and head toward a new vision of feminist sexual liberation.
Conclusion
The "view from somewhere different" is a perspective that recognizes the complexity of normative judgments by refusing to close discussion that would reduce tensions among alternative points of view. This perspective recommends that we attempt to negotiate such tensions so that a diversity of normative voices can be heard. Such negotiation reflects the fact that the "view from somewhere different" approaches issues in feminist philosophy of sex with an appreciation for the dialectic between gender and sexuality, which is itself a relation of tension and instability. Thus, earlier in this chapter I argued that sexuality should be reconstituted as a differentiated category of nonstigmatized sexual variation. From such a perspective, both normal and perverse sex become forms of sexual difference. Within this framework, no sexual preference is advantaged by being "normal," yet quite different normative evaluations of sexual practices remain morally meaningful within a broader context of care respect. Indeed, understanding both the normal and the perverse as two types of sexual difference from the "view from somewhere different" has the added benefit of revealing the ways in which normative judgments about sex may involve pragmatics
and
aesthetics
and
ethics. The "view from somewhere different" recognizes social locations in which our normative judgments about sex will include a variety of value concepts that cannot be easily separated.
I argued that the "view from somewhere different" can reveal the strengths and weaknesses in both cultural and sex radical perspectives on sexual difference. The "view from somewhere different" incorporates the tensions between them into an inclusive feminist philosophy of sex whose ethic is defined in terms of care respect. Cultural feminism's emphasis on the way gender informs sexuality is important for recognizing the patriarchal context in which women's sexual desires and preferences develop. A sex radical's emphasis on the way sexuality informs gender is important for
 
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recognizing women's desire to transcend sexual oppression toward a broad-ranging conception of sexual exploration, pleasure, and agency. The "view from somewhere different" recommends that we explore the often tempestuous tensions between these two views in an effort to reflect the complexity and contradiction in much of our thinking about the relationship between gender role-playing and erotic role-playing, between the sexes and sex.
A paradox of liberation is that complete freedom in a world of scarcity and competing self-interests results in conflict; but partial freedom means making decisions favoring some values over others, which also produces conflict. Adopting the "view from somewhere different" means questioning the presupposition that there is some politically correct set of sexual values that one individual or group can define for the rest. By neither ignoring, rejecting, nor transcending difference, the "view from somewhere different" positions us to begin learning how to talk to each other in ways that help mediate conflict but do not ignore the internal tensions of debates over sexual practice.
116
As feminists, we must be mindful of the ways in which women's attitudes toward sexual difference, from conservative to subversive, are affected by the patriarchal milieu in which they develop. The "view from somewhere different" is itself socially constructed from within this milieu, which will inevitably tend to bias its conceptual and normative frameworks. Feminists should be both sympathetic toward, and suspicious of, that which is made other, different, or outside the status quo, since otherness has been the historically oppressive place of women. Yet as sex radical feminists contend, it would be a mistake to continue to allow male-identified sexual values to command all the attention of women in pursuit of a woman-identified life. By questioning the presupposition that difference is bad, feminists pave the way for a reassessment of sexual difference that can promote the sexual agency and self-definition of all women. From this perspective, we can continue to explore the dialectic between gender and sexuality in the debates over sex work discussed in the next chapter.
 
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4
I Only Do It for the Money:
Pornography, Prostitution, and the Business of Sex
Overview
Feminists from a variety of theoretical backgrounds target the sex industry as a paradigm of the institutionalized sexual subordination of women. Many radical feminists contend that dancing in strip bars, working as prostitutes, or posing for pornography reduces women to marketable sexual commodities in a patriarchal environment that legitimizes men's unconditional sexual access to women. Socialist feminists expand on the radical critique of androcentric sexual politics with their own critique of patriarchy's class hierarchies and economic exploitation of women. Many socialist feminists contend that commercial sex workers are primarily driven to the trade by a combination of poverty and inexperience in a discriminatory economic climate and that they tolerate their work in virtue of cultural stereotypes of women as the sexual objects of men. Under such circumstances, many sex workers are exploited by male porn producers and club managers or bullied and abused by photographers and pimps. Similarly, it is charged that young girls are coerced by their parents to have oral or anal sex with each other and adults for pornographic videos or films; and teenage runaways suspicious of social agencies that would return them to abusive parents are easy targets for sweet-talking but dominating pimps.
1
Kidnapping and confinement for the purpose of prostitution are not uncommon, particularly in less industrialized countries with large populations of homeless and destitute women and children. Liberal feminists, who believe women's sexual liberation can be won with women's equal protection under the law, would add that even where prostitution or

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