http://www.warresisters.org/node/1008
By Judith Mahoney Pasternak
Spring 2010
About a century and a half ago, medicine and technology began to
reduce the high price of sex in the United States and Western Europe.
It became possible to imagine, at least, both an end to unwanted
pregnancies and a cure for the known sexually transmitted diseases.
(Of course, no one could guess at the time what new and deadlier STDs
the future held.)
In response to those changes, a wide range of people began clamoring
for parallel changes in sexual mores. Medical doctors, philosophers
in the old disciplines and in the infant social sciences, and
revolutionaries alike argued for greater sexual freedom for women and
men. Almost immediately, however, counter-arguments arose, from
conservatives and counter-revolutionaries but also from advocates of
progressive social change, with some of the debates revolving around
women's political, social, and economic inequality.
Aside from those progressives whose sexual positions, so to speak,
remained old-fashionedly conservative, the two opposing trends among
those advocating change could be characterized, broadly speaking, as
that of the sexual liberationists vs. the sexual protectionists. The
former sought the right to have sex with whomever they pleased, and
the latter sought the right not to have sex, except when and with
whom they chose.
Among early feminists, for instance, for every argument for free
love, like those put forward by English writer Mary Wollstonecraft,
there was someone like suffragist Susan B. Anthony, arguingin an era
in which the law didn't define a man's forced sex with his wife as
rapethat women's autonomy resided in the ability to say no to sex,
even with their husbands. In a somewhat separate development late in
the 19th century, professionals in various fields began (rather
timidly at first) advocating tolerance for homosexual men, homosexual
acts, and, ultimately, for lesbians as well. During the turbulent
years before and after the First World War, anarchist Emma Goldman
and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich spoke for the liberationists,
identifying sexual freedom with economic and political liberation,
and in Reich's case even linking sexual repression with fascism.
Meanwhile, famed birth-control pioneer (and socialist) Margaret
Sanger sided more with the protectionists; her contraceptive crusade
sought not so much to expand sexual freedom as to shield married
women from the consequences of their husband's lust; she also
promoted eugenics and wrote with scorn and contempt about
prostitutes, young women who engaged in love affairs, and "habitual
masturbators."
Then came World War II and the unprecedented era of explosive
technological and social change that followed it. The postwar years
are now generally remembered as a period of political and social
conservatismthink McCarthyism and the banning of the word "pregnant"
from television, that new barometer of sexual mores. Yet in fact all
the changes and demands for change that flowered in the 1960s were
already in motion in the postwar '40s and the '50s. World War II
resisters began refusing to pay war taxes in 1948, and Catholic
Worker and War Resisters League activists first refused to take
shelter during so-called civil defense drills in New York City in
1955. The civil rights movement achieved major victories with the
1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that struck
down "separate but equal" school segregation and the Montgomery,
Ala., bus boycott a year later that ultimately ended segregation on
public transportation. And in 1951 The Kinsey Report had informed the
world that a Sexual Revolution (which had perhaps been accelerated in
part by the wider use of condoms and penicillin during the war) was
well under way.
An Era of Liberation
It is true, however, that all those changes came to full fruition
during the '60s. They also led directly to the new movements of the
late '60s and '70s: first the women's liberation movement, which was
followed in short order by the gay liberation movement that would
become the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement,
along with movements for the liberation of smaller sexual minorities,
like adherents of cross-generational sex and sado-masochism. And as
those movements ripened, the same opposing trendsliberationists vs.
protectionistsarose that had existed during earlier stages of the
Sexual Revolution.
Again, those demanding free sexual access for all tended to consist
of members of the dominant group in society, that is, men,
predominantly white, predominantly upper class, who had long chafed
at the rules and conventions that barred them (theoretically, at
least) from engaging in sex with categories of people including
unwilling partners, young children and adolescents, people of their
own sex (i.e., other men and boys), and respectable unmarried women
of their own classes. On the whole, the protectionists tended to
consist of members of those groups that had always been held as the
rightful sexual property of the members of that dominant group,
primarily women of their own class and people of color.
The most vociferous challenges to the Sexual Revolution came from
segments of Second Wave feminism. Although the movement claimed to
speak for all women, it was in fact as overwhelmingly white and
middle-class as the era's peace and student movements, and much of
its theory was rooted in the lives and values of white, middle-class
women. It did, however, expose much that had previously been hidden
or ignored by a society in which men undeniably held more power than
women did. Its critiques included new analyses of rape and the sexual
abuse of children (the latter running directly counter to the segment
of the gay men's movement advocating liberation of inter-generational
sex, or "man-boy love") and, perhaps most influentiallyand most
controversiallyopposition to pornography as a powerful factor in
women's subordination. By 1980, that analysis had created its own movement.
A Civil Rights Issue
Anti-pornography activists declared that the "graphic depiction of
the sexual subordination of women" itself degraded women in the real
world, and that its influence spread beyond its audience into the
culture at large, turning women's degradation into big business. In
an attempt to avoid being labeled censors, a segment of the movement
reconceived pornography as a violation of women's civil rights. More
than one municipality passed ordinances defining pornography as
exactly that, theoretically providing its victims with the right to
sue the perpetrators of such violationsthat is, the purveyors of pornography.
But no sooner did the anti-porn movement gain steam and credibility,
than an opposing tendency arose. Defining themselves "sex-positive
feminists," its members claimed that the anti-pornography movement
both underplayed women's authentic sexuality and agency as sexual
beings, and exaggerated the impact and influence of pornography.
Asserting that pornography was no more monolithic than mainstream
culture, they declared that, while much of it was misogynist, often
brutally so, individual works could appeal to women as well as men.
As to the impact of pornography on culture, they pointed out that
Madison Avenue's tens or hundreds of thousands of commercials a year
dwarfed all the productions of the porn businessand were watched,
not only by men learning how to treat women, but by women and young
girls learning how they should live and act and think.
Early in the 1980s, this division erupted into a head-on
confrontation, in the course of which many anti-porn activists
accused the sex-positive advocates of being bad feminists or not
feminists at all. The conflict, which became known in Second-Wave
Feminist history as the "Sex Wars," bitterly divided the women's
movement, which appeared to lose much of the transformative power it
had wielded during the previous decade.
The LGBT movement, on the other hand, retained its vitality and
indeed continued to gather steam throughout the later years of the
20th century and into this one, toppling one barrier after another.
As this is being written, some U.S. jurisdictions recognize same-sex
marriage, and the two-decade "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding
homosexuals in the military is about to be countermanded by a more
open acceptance of gay men and lesbians. (The latter move has not
been welcomed as a progressive one by all segments of the movements
for change, particularly anti-militarists.)
'Where the Money Is'
The Sexual Revolution, in short, remains a work in progress.
Certainly, large numbers of people in the United States and Europeof
almost all sexual preferenceslead vastly freer sex lives than their
counterparts did a century ago. To what extent those changes have
been accompanied by advances in freedom along other axes, however, is
open to question, but it is also certain that women have not yet
achieved equality, that we still live in a patriarchy, and that
patriarchy continues to color every aspect of our lives, including
our sex lives.
It's also certain that patriarchy, the actually existing one in the
global North, is inextricably mixed with capitalism. When a reporter
asked the notorious Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he answered,
"Because that's where the money is." In this world,
patriarchywomen's subordination, including the sexualizing of that
subordination in a wide range of media and venuesis where the money
is. Ending that subordination may well require dismantling the
capitalist economy and its racial, class, and other structures of
subordination, and patriarchy itself.
--
Judith Mahoney Pasternak, who edited this magazine (under its former
name) for 10 years, was one of the few members of New York Radical
Feminists who took the "sex-positive" side of the so-called Sex Wars
of the 1980s.
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