Loose Women, Lecherous Men (3 page)

Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

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

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
13.53Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 8
sex may be overly intellectualized or humorless for some, too politically contentious for others. This problem may only be exacerbated by my determination to give the reader some sense of the emotional turmoil and psychic tension that many women living under both individual and institutionalized heterosexual intimidation confront on a daily basis. Under such constraints, I am convinced that what counts as reason in Western culture must accommodate the experiences of real women living the real contradiction of being both the sexual objects of men's gaze and the defining subjects of our sexual experience as women.
In short, writing this book has taught me that there is much concerning traditional analytic philosophizing about sex that needs reevaluation and rejuvenation. I believe that contemporary feminist philosophical investigation can bring a unique and valuable perspective to discussions of sex and sexuality. My own recommendations for advancing the dialogue on women's sexuality are admittedly not free of bias toward my own race, class, sexual preference, age, marital status, physical ability, or gender. One of the claims of this book is that each of us is partial to our own social perspective but that such partiality can be a source for recognizing and celebrating the differences among all of us. What I hope is that the combination of political, sociological, historical, and philosophical commentaries that have provided the resources for this book will help the reader make some positive sense out of the partiality that each of us brings to our own, and others', sexual lives.
Yet I also believe that cohesion and cooperation, not deconstruction and dismemberment, is what gives contemporary feminism its strength to foment change. Thus, I will remain loyal to those philosophical schemas that aim at combining, without universalizing, women's efforts from disparate quarters to effect liberation and transformation for all women. At the same time, my enterprise is profoundly postmodern in its refusal to authorize the framework I set forth as
the
feminist philosophy of sex but merely as one possible framework among many that can encourage ongoing conversation about women's sexuality.
 
Page 9
1
What is a Feminist Philosophy of Sex?
Overview
Feminist philosophy is a discipline rich in its diversity of speculative argument and practical politics. Despite our differences, feminist philosophers are united in the vision of a philosophy free of the misogyny and male bias that have characterized so much of Western philosophical tradition. Feminist philosophy's challenge to this tradition has been the challenge of repairing the distortions, centering the marginalizations, and valorizing what were once considered the trivial, if not invisible, facets of
woman's
nature,
woman's
knowledge, and
woman's
happiness.
1
However, contemporary feminists also agree that unless feminist philosophers attend to women's diversity, women will remain stereotyped by the same kinds of restrictive and ahistorical paradigms as those advanced by traditional philosophy. Therefore, many feminist philosophers have advocated the exploration of the complexity and variety of women's experience. Such an exploration has been recommended as a way of learning about women by listening to our individual voices, differentiated by such features as race, class, and sexual preference. In so doing, feminists hope to avoid the essentialism of claiming some single, immutable, and universal nature of "Woman."
2
A feminist philosophy of sex reflects these feminist philosophical values. Both ancient and contemporary traditions in the philosophy of sex can be characterized by speculative and critical inquiry into the nature, meaning, and value of sex and sexuality.
3
A specifically feminist philosophy of sex can be characterized as one that re-
 
Page 10
gards speculative and critical inquiry into the nature, meaning, and value of women's sexuality as philosophically valuable and as one whose express purpose is
not
to trivialize, distort, or ignore the variety and complexity of women's sexuality in any discussions of human sexuality. A feminist philosophy of sex acknowledges that women compose a diverse group whose members vary by such features as race, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual preference, age, and physical ability. To avoid the ontological myopia of traditional essentialist claims about women, a feminist philosophy of sex acknowledges the diversity of women's sexual experience, and values, for their own sake, the voices that give testimony to that diversity.
From more traditional philosophical discussions of sex, we might learn that the term "sex" has several meanings: an essential and biological maleness or femaleness; a culturally relative and socially constructed masculinity or femininity, usually referred to by the term "gender"; the activity constitutive of the arousal and pursuit of erotic passion and pleasure; the capacity for reproducing the species; and the expression of spiritual communion and love. Normative evaluations accompanying such conceptual clarification might focus on what constitutes good versus bad sex and the role of good sex in a life well lived. However, many feminists have been critical of traditional philosophical analyses of sex and sexuality for the ways in which such approaches fail to situate men and women within a context that is sensitive to what feminists refer to as the politics of gender. From this perspective, all human interaction is gendered, such that any understanding of sex, as well as art, science, law, education, and the family requires an analysis of the way such institutions are influenced by cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity. Moreover, it is argued that such conceptions of gender delineate relations of status and power between men and women. Therefore, women's and men's sexuality examined through the gendered lens of contemporary Western culture requires an examination of the ways in which individuals' sexual preferences and desiresthe how, when, where, and with whom of erotic arousal and satisfactionare influenced by the relations of dominance and submission that characterize the traditional gender roles of Western culture.
4
The assertion that some societies do not regard men as the dominant gender or that gender relations are only contingently oppressive is nevertheless consistent with the claim that an understanding of the culture in which women and men live requires an understanding of the gender relations of that culture. The feminist philosophy of sex introduced in this chapter provides a framework for thinking and talking about women's sexuality within a gendered context of contemporary Western norms, in which the diversity of women's voices, often silenced or marginalized by traditional philosophical approaches to women's sexuality, can be heard.
The strength and unifying vision of this feminist framework is its recognition that women's sexuality can be exploited as a powerful tool for the social, economic, and political subordination of women. Many feminists point to the pervasive sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, pornographic degradation, and spousal abuse of women as strong evidence of the prevalence of powerful social institutions supporting men's subordination of women through heterosexual sex.
5
According to this view, women's sexual desires and preferences are carefully circumscribed and controlled by cultural sanctions aimed at maintaining heterosexual male power, status, and privilege. Such sanctions are patriarchal, according to Marilyn Frye, when they form part of "insti-
 
Page 11
tutions, relationships, roles, and activities which are male-defined, male-dominated and operating for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege."
6
Many feminists claim that when a woman lives in a patriarchal society, her sexual exploration, pleasure, and agency become targets for her sexual restriction, repression, and violation.
7
A feminist philosophy of sex explores the nature and extent of this oppressive environment and seeks to expose women's sexual subordination in an effort to promote change. Thus, philosophy of sex is uniquely positioned to benefit from a feminist analysis, since philosophy of sex examines those very relations in which women's autonomous voices are often submerged, if not silenced altogether.
However, I believe it is a mistake for a feminist philosophy of sex to define women's sexuality solely, or even primarily, in terms of men's sexual subordination of women. In so doing, feminists run the risk of recreating and reinforcing the very victimization from which we would extricate ourselves. Feminists must expose the often brutal, coercive, and humiliating nature of women's heterosexual experience if we wish to garner women's support and justify an activist feminist agenda for change in women's sexual lives. On the other hand, women's sexuality is also the source for women's pursuit of erotic pleasure, our creation of erotic fantasy, and our expression of erotic communion. The experience of this aspect of a woman's sexuality encourages her to view herself as a sexual agent and sexual subject, not merely as the sexual object of male heterosexual subordination. Indeed, women's sexual agency is essential, if women living under conditions of gender inequality can be ascribed the power to mitigate, if not eliminate, our oppression. Yet women as well as men can be both ignorant and fearful of this dimension of women's erotic lives. A feminist philosophy of sex must encourage safe, honest, and open discussions of both the dangers and pleasures of women's sexuality, if this philosophy seeks to facilitate each woman's discovery of the meaning and value of the erotic in her own life.
8
The Dialectical and Contextual Relationship between Gender and Sexuality
The role of sexual agency and self-definition in a caring and cooperative community and the extent of women's sexual freedom within oppressive social institutions continue to be debated among feminists and traditionalists alike. The introduction to this book outlines some of the controversies over how women's discovery of their sexuality should be realized: examples include choosing promiscuous experimentation over monogamous commitment, traditional femininity over radical sexuality, feminist partnerships over depoliticized sex. Indeed, many women do not regard their sexual preferences as choices at all but simply as ways of living out their sexual lives. To promote constructive dialogue and negotiate tensions among conflicting views, we need an epistemological framework for thinking and talking about a wide variety of perspectives on women's sexuality. The framework that I will outline in this chapter and that will inform the remainder of the book describes women's sexuality both as a function of women's sexual oppression under conditions of individual and institutionalized male dominance and as a function of women's sexual liberation under those same conditions. Such a framework defines a dialectical and variable relationship between the politics of gender and the erotic possibilities of sex: a woman's
 
Page 12
gender circumscribes her sexuality within the framework of dominance and submission constitutive of Western cultural conceptions of masculinity and femininity; in opposition to sexual oppression, sexuality informs gender with potentially liberating strategies for transforming women's sexual exploration, pleasure, and agency.
Conceived as a fluid, variable, and often unstable relationship between her sexual oppression and her liberation, a woman's sexuality may be both oppressive and liberating over the course of her life, often simultaneously so. A disaffected wife grown tired of her sexual relations with a domineering husband may find care and consideration in a lesbian lover. Women who have found a sexual community in which to live out their sadomasochistic fantasies may feel the constant anxiety of being "found out" by more conservative family and coworkers. An actress who regards her pornographic performance art as an expression of sexual liberation may also be a woman whose audience interprets her display as her consent to be the sexual subordinate of men. The sexually harassed employee may be motivated by her harassment to organize her company's first formal grievance procedures. All such examples suggest that women's sexual lives are dialectically situated within a culture that circumscribes women both as the subordinated objects of an oppressive heterosexuality and as the defining subjects of our sexual experience as women. Because women live in such a culture, each woman's knowledge of her own "true" sexual needs and desires is constrained and complicated by the contradiction of living as both object and subject of her sexuality. Such contradictions play themselves out in ways unique to the character and history of each woman.
Given the variety and complexity in women's sexuality, I take seriously the postmodern feminist injunction to be wary of universalizing prescriptions of sexual norms. Postmodern feminists would argue that any feminist philosophy of sex is misguided if it aims to reveal "the truth" about women's erotic lives. The dialectical framework I have introduced for understanding women's sexuality suggests that women's sexual lives are misrepresented by perspectives that do not appreciate the intersection of gender, sexuality, and male heterosexual domination. However, many postmodern feminists would claim that a gendered perspective of this type is no more universalizable than the stories traditional Western philosophy has told about women's sexuality. Competing feminist theories of women's sexual subordination, like all theories, become texts to be interpreted, stories to be told about the way the world appears from the perspective of the storyteller. According to many postmodern feminists, we can hardly expect feminism in general, or any feminist theory in particular, to tell us how women as a class
ought
to understand women's sexuality, when feminists have faulted the whole of Western philosophy for doing the very same thing.
9
The feminist philosophy of sex described thus far has challenged the position of power and authority of those who traditionally ask the questions of philosophy by challenging the legitimacy of sociopolitical and intellectual hierarchies that have historically stifled the philosophical voice of women. It is a challenge that reminds us that those who ask the questions in philosophy determine what the questions are, how they are formulated, what methods are used to answer them (including who is consulted as an expert in the field), and the answers that are ultimately given. If the theoretical foundation for any feminist philosophy of
sex requires
us to appreciate a

Other books

Shafting the Halls by Cat Mason
Unbreakable by Rachel Hanna
The Gladiator by Harry Turtledove
Time Enough for Love by Suzanne Brockmann