more than sexual predators whom heterosexual women should approach boldly, responsibly, and at their own risk. 32 In short, investigating the context of individual women's erotic lives from the "view from somewhere different" asks us to recognize as well as reconsider patriarchy's oppressive claim on women's sexuality. In subsequent chapters I will continue to explore the dialectical relationship between women's sexual oppression and our liberation by pursuing the kinds of issues in women's sexuality raised above.
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Despite any one woman's capacity for sexual agency, the current context for renaming and revalorizing women's sexuality is still one of patriarchy. This context is inscribed by androcentric concepts and norms for women, many of whom remain far from sexual liberation. Therefore, feminists must be as location-sensitive to, and as philosophically demanding of, our new ways of thinking and acting as of our old ones. Some feminists have argued that to do any theorizing about women's sexuality at all requires the use of a fundamentally new language in order to reflect more accurately the nature of female eroticism. 33 Yet we must be just as wary of our re conceptualizations as our pre conceptualizations, since they will inevitably draw on the very social location from which we would liberate ourselves. This caveat is by no means an argument for delegitimizing the feminist enterprise. It is a strong recommendation for continuing to localize the discourse and particularize the context in women's efforts to effect change in our sexual lives.
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Indeed, the many contextual differences in women's sexual experience remind us that a feminist philosophy of sex that adopts the "view from somewhere different" is woman-centered without being "Woman"-centered: such a philosophy can investigate the complexity and diversity of individual women's sexual lives without devolving into the essentializing prescriptions that have misrepresented women's sexuality using more traditional models. A feminist philosophy of sex from the "view from somewhere different" also recognizes the common ideological and institutional constraints under which women live and our shared capacity to resist and transform conditions oppressive to us. In this way feminists may simultaneously acknowledge the diversity of sexual experience among women and establish our common gender identity as women.
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Moreover, a feminist philosophy of sex from the "view from somewhere different" recognizes that one woman's sexual experience can vary widely in different contexts; her sexual experience may also vary greatly over the course of her life. Sex can be scary, passionate, funny, unsuccessful, unsafe, painful, boring, publicly humiliating, privately beautiful, extremely personal, consciously political, cheerfully avoided, or regrettably absent, each in a different woman's life, or all in a single life. Gayle Rubin describes contemporary sexual norms as differentiating so-called good sex from bad: "good" sex is heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and noncommercial sex, coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occurring at home; "bad" sex is practiced by the homosexual, the unmarried, the promiscuous, the nonprocreative, or the commercial sex worker, any of whom may masturbate, engage in orgies, have sex across generational lines, or have casual or public sex with or without the use of pornography, sex toys, or sadomasochistic sex roles. 34 A feminist philosophy of sex from the "view from somewhere different'' questions the value of universal prescriptions of sexual norms without deconstructing the norms themselves,
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