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Nowadays you can be as sexy as you like, but can you be a feminist?
Is the chocolate brown background too dark?
Can you ever have too much chocolate?
And:
Is it contradictory to want writing about sex to be politically correct?
In a far away land and a parallel time, I became an expert on sex.
When I was young I was a naive and ignorant kid. Nobody helped me understand that I was drop-dead gorgeous. I was petrified of men and of sex. I lived in the countryside, where to be a gay man was to be a freak and two women together was inconceivable. Unsurprisingly I failed to realise that the fact that I thought women are more beautiful than men meant that I wanted to sleep with them.
I went to university and tried sleeping around, thinking that lots of sex equals sexual freedom. (Sometimes I was just lonely and wanted someone to cuddle me.) I had lots of bad sex and felt even more trapped. I had lots of gay men friends because I was still frightened of sex and they were the only ones I could safely flirt with. They are so lovely to me. One of them helped me go to London to live and others took me to gay clubs where I would sometimes see someone gorgeously dressed and think: Wow! another woman, and then:Whoops, not a woman after all. Gradually I made friends with groups of black and Asian lesbian women. We learnt feminist anti-racist politics not through books but through practice. I went on marches against Section 28, worrying that the police would take my photo and that one day I might be imprisoned for standing up for sexual freedom. I read and talked about whether sado-masochism is a re-enactment of slavery, of child abuse we experienced, or whether it's just good dirty fun.
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I tried to fit in with the androgynous dress codes of the mainstream lesbian world, only realising much later that I love to dress up - I am a high femme, although I also loved to play rugby (the team used to be very grumpy when I appeared after the showers in my little dresses).One fine day I managed to go back to university and do my PhD. I read and wrote about issues of identity I'd struggled with for decades, including sexuality.
Academic thinkers from Freud to Foucault argue that it's in sexuality that we form and continue to formulate our identities. This is the realm in which we engage with our core selves and with others (society) at a visceral level, making a persona. This isn't the self-absorbed one-on-one activity that we tend to think it. We can only do this within the available ideas which society provides to us about who we might be and how (Foucault calls this discourse).
So what is the current discourse available to us to formulate our selves within?
Like "Joe Blow", I noticed the surge of interest in 50 shades of grey. I haven't read the book and don't intend to since reviews suggest it's badly written and not even an accurate account of the Bondage and Sado-Masochism world (BDSM). What intrigued me was that mums at my daughter's swimming class were avidly reading this account of a billionaire tortured by yearning to play out his sadomasochistic desires on a young virginal girl. What were they getting out of it?
In our society, women are not encouraged to be sexually pro-active. I was outraged recently while talking to a young student of mine about her essay on intimacy when she revealed that she thinks it would be wrong to approach a man she likes and ask him for a date. I thought that ridiculous sexual code of conduct had long gone. I was cross because I suffered tortures at times, thinking, Shall I say something? about someone I fancied - lesbian women are worst off here since they're mutually shy and sometimes just glare at each other before going shyly off home alone (in fact come to think of it, maybe my grumpy rugby team mates actually fancied me? What a missed opportunity!) Once I did say to a man who had been flirting with me, Are you serious, how about it? and he said, Oh no! which was embarrassing but we are still friends and I could get on with life. Too embarrassed to say anything, I once snogged a man on a train who was failing to make a move on me although I wore skimpier and skimpier outfits to our office, and I was with him for twelve years. Imagine if I'd felt I really must wait for him to make a move, I'd still be waiting.
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Hilarious fun though it might be to be tied to the bedposts and have my toes sucked, I think we do need to talk about the possibility of an equal partnership and mutual pleasuring in sex. That has to be a sexual pleasure based in the ethos of equality that is feminism. Feminists argue that submissive women and dominant men is an inefficient and unbalanced mode of production, that we could all get more out of a world where there is diversity and sharing of responsibilities and activities.
I'm not an expert on BDSM but I imagine that the pleasure in it comes not from the total domination or submission of one over and under another. My ignorant impression is that what's really exciting and wonderful about BDSM isn't so much the dominatrix sex, it's that one person holds the other in their power and doesn't abuse them, that within an adrenaline fuelled world in which power is nakedly acknowledged, the dominant partner controls the subordinate and manages the pleasure they share with absolute love and care. Absolute love and care - who could resist. Gimme that blindfold!
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Actually I think that sexuality is not just fun and games, that when you have sex with someone it isn't just about a quick thrill or wham, bam thank you and come again next Friday, Ms. Plumber. Sometimes it can be but I think that after a while, when you go and lie naked and caressingly often with someone you like, parts of you from way deep down come up asking to be loved. Most of us have not been brought up in a confident loving belief in ourselves as people deserving of the tenderest love and affection so when some small part of us from way down, sometimes some part of us which was hurt in the past, comes surging up asking for affection, the prospect that we might not get it can become so scary that we will behave in all sorts of strange ways trying to push that part of us back down again.
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What SRE doesn't do is provide lessons on relationships. Young women and men aren't told, You're a beautiful and funny person who will be loved. They aren't given advice on how to treat someone who is probably as ignorant, shy and vulnerable as they are with respect and tenderness. Young men and women are taught to put a condom on a banana but they don't learn to have the respect for each other that would mean they offer to put a condom on before having sex.
Where do these young people go to for advice about how to conduct sexual relationships? Well, I expect nowadays they turn to the internet. Here they will find raging debates about whether it's contrary to freedom of speech to publish fictional stories about incest, bestiality and non-consensual sex with children. This is an important debate but in the furore about this, a debate about how to provide young people - and many of us ill-educated older people - with a set of stories suggesting how you might go about respectful, tender, loving sexual relations with someone (or more than one person) you are attracted to, is absent.
So again, I think we need a feminist erotica, a means of marking out fiction about which we can say: Um, take a look at this, when our kids are growing up and looking about them for examples of how to do it. Sure, if you think you might like being tied to a post and told you are a filthy slag then you can get some stories about that and consider it. But here is something about a man who treated a woman with tenderness and love and enjoyed that, about a woman who was confident and knew what she wanted and asked for it respectfully.
Babette Cole has written the hilarious children's stories about Princess Smartypants, who turned a dreary old Prince into a warty toad when she wanted to carry on playing with her dragons and not have to get married. (If you are having to talk about the birds and bees with a much younger child, check out her hilarious Mummy Laid An Egg.) One day Princess Smartypants will grow up, she already knows that arrogant bastard Princes are not the only option - there are the lovely old dragons, but do Princes know that they are allowed to be gentle and affectionate, that having 20 pictures of naked girls' breasts on their smartphone is not the best way of demonstrating your virile masculinity.
For my daughter's sake, I hope we can write an erotica that will tell them so.
2 comments:
Great post! I think that to understand our attitudes to sex it is necessary to recognise that our society is based on millennia of sexual repression. Even in the decadent days of ancient Rome the wild sexual behaviour was a breach of repression which occurred only amongst the ruling class. The plebs weren't invited to the orgies. :o) The word "civilise" means "to tame". Civilisation is a structure which is founded on the taming of disruptive psychological (and political) forces. And one of the most disruptive forces is sexuality. This is true for us because we are neurotic and thus prone to jealousy and to the channelling of aggression into our sexual activities. For our nearest living biological relatives the bonobos sexuality is not a disruptive force. It is quite the opposite, acting as a kind of social lubricant. But the more neurotic we are the more we fear the disruptive potential of the erotic. The most censorious members of our society are those who are most neurotic. And because we live in a patriarchal society, watered down though it may have been by feminism, men are often still afraid of the sexuality of women. Many men feel that sex is great as long as they are the ones calling the shots during the act. But women who own their own sexuality and actively pursue pleasure are considered sluts. Women are often oppressed by this situation - their neurosis makes it hard not to conform to what they see as the dictates of society. But we all want pleasure. BDSM can be all about not having to take responsibility for one's own pleasure. If we are ordered to do what we wanted to do anyway we get to have our cake and eat it too. And the "slut" label can be two-sided. It is a term of abuse, but it can also be a licence. In my erotica writing I didn't use the term for quite some time because I thought it would be seen as offensive. When I experimented with it I found that some women loved it, picking out lines in which a female character proudly declared herself a slut as their favourite in the story. I think that, with the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey, we are seeing an important breakthrough in women's sexuality. The first stage is fear of the erotic. The second stage is a willingness to experience the erotic while safely tied down. The third stage is freedom.
And I can relate to what you say about initiating sex. I'm a male who, even at 49, finds that virtually impossible, and since our society does not encourage women to make the first move, I've lived a life of near celibacy.
One of my favourite books is The Slut's Cookbook by Erin Pizzey (who started the first battered wives' refuge in London). I discovered it as a student and was blown away by her hilarious approach to life as well as love of cooking. ("Try to do most things well in advance so you can have time to paint your toe nails.") This is my blogpost on the book on my other blog: http://www.anthropologicalmum.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/return-of-slut.html.
I think you are right about the BDSM interest leading to greater freedom. Even though I suspect 50 shades of grey is so poorly written I'll throw it across the room if I try to read it, I'm glad it's out there opening the mental doors to repressed housewives everywhere.
As regards the repression, Foucault argues that repression in itself creates a kind of space in which something exists. He suggests that the Victorian era, rather than being the great age of repression, was an age when by constantly saying: Sh!, Sh! and covering even the legs of pianos, people were ensuring they always thought about sex. Some writers I work with argue that it's the dynamic that's important, a sort of movement between what's permitted and allowed us as identity: heterosexual family, and what we publicly repudiate as not acceptable: homosexuality, hysterical women's sexuality. It's in the movement, the discourse that we create our identity, we need something to repudiate, to push away saying: That disgusting identity is not me, so that we can make a space for ourselves in which to be.
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