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Sex is simply a human activity, and a pleasant enough one. But it's gotten so much nonsense, so many expectations and judgements, hung off of it that it can seem more like a ball and chain weighing you down than a simple pleasure or gift shared with someone you love. It can be hard to figure out what you want from the noise and chatter of what the world tells you you should or shouldn't want.
And unfortunately, feminism has sometimes fallen into the habit of putting as many rigid expectations on sex as the rets of the world has. It's not really a surprise; second wave feminists grew up in the same world that attached expectations and political ballast to sex. Naturally, they would fall into the habit of doing the same thing. And sex, for good or ill, be it by Pat Robertson or by Andrea Dworkin, has been loaded down with a thousand different meanings, none of which are connected to a woman's enjoyment.
Oddly enough, it's also been heterosexual sex that's been the most loaded down with lead weights, despite the fact that lesbianism has been more vilified. In the eyes of the world, lesbians don't do anything in bed (false), so there's no need to regulate their activity. There is a pervasive belief, and you can sadly find it offered by some feminists, that lesbians don't have sex so much as just "lie around and hug." Why regulate that? When it's admitted that they do have sex, it's usually presented as a show for the boys, and not as something that the women do for their own enjoyment.
But heterosexual sex has been recognized as existing by the world at large. And that means that it has had centuries in which to define and constrict it. The heterosexual sex drive for women has been stomped, buried, and molded until it fits the shape that the world wants it to fit.
Chaste. Pure. Calm. Maternal. Morally informed. And definitely not what we know it to be -- powerful, lustful, and strong enough to make you feel as if your head is going to melt sometimes. Men's sex drives are glorified, recognized as strong enough to knock him over (or knock us over). Ours are sentimentalized, maternal, and gentle.
Or at least that's what they're supposed to be. We know different.
And we're intererested in recovering sex from the politics that have taken it away from us. Heterosexual women struggle against being told that their sex drives make them weak and dependent on men -- your lust is your Achilles heel, in other words. And they struggle against both the right wing and the left wing, who both say this, one with a smile, the other with a sneer. Lesbian women struggle for visibility in a world that doesn't think they really exist. And they struggle against the entrenched feminist attitude that they are also more morally pure, more perfect, and never lustful. Bisexual women struggle simply to exist, to explain what we are to both sides of the argument, who want to call us one thing or another, or say that we're confused.
So it's not surprising at all that sex has been one of the hot button topics, and the one that, along with money, most clearly divides the second wave from the third. The second feels a lot more comfortable with defining certain kinds of sexuality as bad or wrong for women. The third has a more strongly held belief that what we do in our bedroom is no one's business but our own, but at the same time, we recognize that sex has been turned into something bad and confused.
Like the second wave, we think that sex has been turned into something that is bad for all parties concerned, especially women. Unlike the second wave, we think it's high time that this was addressed.
09/28/07 at 0:16