Nan Bauer Maglin & Donna Perry, "Bad Girls"/"Good Girls": Women, Sex & Power in the Nineties

GENERATION X DOES THE SEX WARS

The world polices women--even now in this so-called postfeminist era--into silence about sex, socially constructed modesty, and self-regulating repression of behavior and fantasy. Jane Sexes It Up--a book of confessions and kinks--begins with this recognition of the very real limits on what a woman can say about her sexuality without putting herself in physical danger and/or social exile. Before going all out--balls to the wall, if you will--I want to acknowledge what we are up against. Each contributing essayist puts herself out there in the world, naked and exposed, not because she thinks it's safe to speak frankly about sex, desire, bodies, and personal histories, but because she knows it's not. The fact of living in a rape culture underlines the bravery and seriousness of essays that might otherwise be taken as flippant, a-historical, privileged post-feminist play. Our writing is play, but it is play despite and in resistance to a context of danger and prohibition, not a result of imagining there is none.

Young feminists in particular feel the edges of feminist history grind against the conservative cultural contexts in which our lives unfold; we live inside the contradiction of a political movement that affirms and encourages expressions of female and/or alternative sexualities, and the "real world" of workplaces, families, and communities which continue to judge women harshly for speaking of sex, much less expressing one's deviant acts and complex erotic imagination. Against a backdrop of half-truths and hypocrisy, this book is an action. Jane Sexes It Up erupts from the pressure points of women's lives. Shoves propriety aside.

When I first imagined this project I thought that in writing it I would force feminism's legs apart like a rude lover, liberating her from the beige suit of political correctness. I wanted feminism to be bad like me. A young feminism, a sexy feminism. I found myself saying things like, "I'm not that kind of feminist," all sly innuendo and bedroom eyes. Early in my research, however, I discovered that that kind of feminist is mostly a media construct--oversimplification spiced with staged cat fights.

The spirit of Jane Sexes It Up, and many of its topics, already appeared on the U.S. feminist scene more than a century ago in the form of debates between Social Purity activists (against prostitution) versus advocates of Free Love (formarriages and other sexual experimentation), and then again two decades ago at the now infamous Barnard conference on April 24, 1982, "The Scholar and the Feminist," where a conflict over what kinds of topics should and should not be covered turned into a long, divisive, legislative, media-mediated war over feminism's position on sex. The feminist Sex Wars that ensued got snagged once more on the seeming impasse of women fighting for sexual pleasure or against sexual danger.

PRO-SEX or ANTI-SEX.

Carole Vance's Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, an anthology of essays from the conference, would have been the template for essays in Jane Sexes It Up--if we'd ever heard of it. But revolutionary ideas about sexual politics are consistently misrepresented or simply disappeared in most narratives of U.S. history. This face of feminism--the smart-ass take-no-shit anarcha-orgasmic feminist persona Gen X-ers
thought we invented--is suppressed in the mainstream media (I can only begin to imagine the ways corporate sponsors, women's tenuous positions as news reporters and anchors, and dominant American family values in the air like a toxic odorless gas converge to eclipse this unruly body of political thought). Whatever conflicts exist within feminism, the first lesson for each generation must be about the politics of representation (which histories are handed over, which are not, and why); for it is frequently against representations of feminism as puritanical or anti-male or just plain crazy--not against feminism itself--that many young women posit our sexy "new" brand of bravado.

Rather than forcing ourselves on feminism, then, the Jane generation means to reconnect with our movement. The women who confess their messy desires in the following pages diverge purposefully from the path of "patriarchy's prodigal daughters" (young women trading on chic renunciations of feminism) to forge a feminist sexual identity informed (not imprisoned) by the women whose writing came before us. Feminism--often addressed by young women as a strict teacher who just needs to get laid--is a name we want to reclaim for the intersection of smart and sexy within each of us. A theme emerges as several writers arrive via various routes at the same negotiation between feminism's most trenchant critiques of sexual politics on one hand and its devil-may-care libertinism on the other, finding fragments of desire and indignation in each direction, piecing together the useable past.

Vance's introduction to Pleasure and Danger bears repeating in this context, as we resist with her the loss of sexual pleasure as the "great guilty secret among feminists":

The truth is that the rich brew of our experience contains elements of pleasure and oppression, happiness and humiliation. Rather than regard this ambiguity as confusion or false consciousness, we should use it as a source-book to examine how women experience sexual desire, fantasy, and action.

Jane Sexes It Up holds tightly to this belief that individual women's stories, narrow in scope and deep in reflection, aid in advancing the complexity of feminist social theory.

Young women define our politics in part by the second-wave feminist legacy of sexual freedom--disrupting norms surrounding the body, unsettling rigid gender roles, and observing few, if any, boundaries on our speech as erotic creatures. Germaine Greer may have grown out of her "Lady, Love Your Cunt" days, but we are smack dab in the middle of ours. Yet sex-positive spokeswomen, often anti-intellectual in tone, fail to give women new ways of thinking about fucking, new ways of understanding what's happening in our beds and to our bodies.

In a 1999 roundtable discussion with the bright lights of sex-positive feminism--Betty Dodson, Susie Bright, Sallie Tisdale, and Nancy Friday--Nerve.com, an enormously popular e zine of "literate smut," asked, "How do you reconcile your feminism (or whatever you choose to call your convictions about sex and gender) with the more traditional feminine roles, behaviors, fantasies, positions and exclamations that you may engage in (and perhaps even enjoy) in the bedroom?" Susie Bright (a.k.a. Susie Sexpert, a regular columnist for *Playboy*) answers,

What a weird question. I think you are trying to say, How can you be a feminist in the boardroom and a submissive in thebedroom? Is that it? I don't have to "reconcile feminism," how ridiculous?I challenged feminism and demanded that it get a grip and come to terms with human sexuality. My whole written legacy is about that. I don't sit in bed with my dildo trying to rationalize anything!

Sallie Tisdale makes a similar response: "Once upon a time, I thought to be a feminist meant to eliminate all thoughts of submission. I couldn't--I didn't. I enjoy submissive postures and play sometimes--I don't see it as an issue or anything needing analysis anymore."

Seductive, this image of throwing feminism across the room like a pair of bottom-cupping panties. But as brave and brash as these women are, as alluring as their model of uncritical sexual freedom may be, their perception of sexuality "not needing analysis anymore" stems, I conjecture, from the wisdom of experience rather than widespread cultural change; in fact, they gloss over a very real conflict in many women's lives--especially those of us living far from big city sex-positive cultures, even more so for a generation that was still in middle school in 1982 when the Barnard Conference touched off the first skirmishes over sexual correctness among second-wave feminists. Crazy as it may sound, the feminists of Generation X are sitting in bed rationalizing our dildos.

Yet in feminist writing about sexuality, you get either the critique or the clit--not both--reproducing the mind/body split of masculinist Western philosophy which feminists fight in every imaginable arena in the world--except this one. Conversely, the sex-negative critique--what's wrong with fucking--has been creatively imagined and forcefully argued. Reading Andrea Dworkin unquestionably new ways of seeing sex, prompting a click in one's mind, marking that moment when something that has gnawed just below the surface of your consciousness, just below the level of language, emerges into plain sight. Sex-positive writers have established no corresponding framework for understanding what we--as women, as feminists--*like* about sex. Or how to manage the relationship between what we like and what leaves us less enamored.

WHEN ENOUGH OF US TELL EACH OTHER IT'S OKAY

"Only women can liberate other women; only women's voices grant permission to be sexual, to be free to be anything we want, when enough of us tell one another it is okay."

Nancy Friday, Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women's Fantasies

The seeds of this collection, germinating long before I'd ever heard of any sex wars, lie inside a story about a girl named Bone, in her masturbation fantasies. They are not what you would call "appropriate." In them, what she wants and what she doesn't want get twisted together in startling configurations. Bone has been sexually abused by her step-father, and she tells herself stories that turn this abuse into a scene she controls, into something erotic. Alone in bed she pulls cold metal chain links over her bare belly, a large rusted hook retrieved from a nearby river resting ominously between her legs, slippery with her body's response to the pictures in her head. She imagines her step-father beating her-something he does often and severely--and she comes. Bone stands among the leather belts hanging down around her in Daddy Glenn's closet, feels their tough hide, breathes them in. Daddy Glenn raises welts on her legs, bubbles of water and blood form on her pre-teen backside. I picture this scene on my knees, forehead against the wall behind my bed, positioned over my lover's mouth.

Bone's story--Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison--is about more than abuse, invoking the transformative power of the erotic imagination to turn elements of an abusive environment into materials for escape: fantasy, masturbation, orgasm. Even this interpretation, though, is me putting a public feminist face on my messy wet response to the book. I shrink from the horror of "my abyssal self, my underworld." Recognizing desire as both socially constructed and beyond social construction, Allison insists that a space must be made for women's wants--even when they are ugly, inexplicable, frightening--and I believe her. Sometimes the best thing feminism can say to a woman is, "Go easier on yourself, Girlie. You don't have to make sense at every moment. You don't have to measure up to some abstract structure called the right thing to do."

In an essay called "Public Silence, Private Terror," Allison directly addresses this theme so powerfully dramatized in her fiction, calling for an honest look at "how we all actually live out our sexuality." She holds out her naked hand, taking some of the lonesomeness out of her admission that "we are all hungry for the power of desire and we are all terribly afraid." In feminism, "[t]he myth prevails," she concludes with dismay, "that 'good girls'--even modern, enlightened, liberal or radical varieties--don't really have such desires." Despite my expectation that a number of feminists will join mainstream culture in condemning the desires confessed in these pages, Jane Sexes It Up presses forward sex-positive in a culture that demonizes sexuality, and sex-radical in a political movement that has been known to choose moral high grounds over low gutteral sounds. We press forward with this improper feminism in the spirit of Bone, the fictionalized but familiar girl-child inside us all who combats the abuse heaped on her body with stories of her own desire.

Published with permission from Four Walls, Eight Windows (2002)

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