Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Sheila Jeffreys.

The last chapter considers how we can move beyond heterosexuality as a political institution and the form of desire, heterosexual desire, which derives from it. No liberation is possible for women in a world in which inequality, and specifically the inequality of women, is sexy.

https://archive.org/details/anticlimaxfemini0000jeff or:
https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/AnarchismRadicalFeminism3/Anticlimax-SheilaJeffreys.pdf

Loc 197 Preface to 2011 edition
The feminist opposition to this ideological challenge to women’s equality, and to the severe harms suffered by the women who are abused in the making of the materials, was defeated in the 1980s through an alliance of ‘sex liberal’ feminists in support of the industry. I show in this book how ‘sex liberals’ argued that porn was just ‘sex’ and would serve to liberate women. The result of this defeat of the feminist challenge was the development of a form of pseudo-feminism in the 1990s which defended men’s traditional model of sex and said that women’s enthusiastic embrace of it could be empowering (Johnson, 2002). Pseudo-feminists proclaimed that they were pro-sex, unlike the terrible prudes who had said that sex was political and questioned what sex meant for women. This development has been called, by some, ‘third wave’ feminism, but in fact a movement so dedicated to the defence of male domination should not be considered any kind of feminism at all. Its greatest success lay in eliminating the work and ideas of those pesky second wavers and women’s libbers, from women’s studies course materials, and from public consciousness. Radical feminist theorists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself were traduced and accused of all sorts of sins against ‘sex’. This backlash ‘feminism’ embraced pornography as useful to teach women about sex, and stripping as a way for women to express agency and sexual freedom. The sex industry went from strength to strength, defended against the possibility of feminist criticism by the women’s auxiliary of male domination, the pro-sex, fun feminists (Jeffreys, 2011).
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Location 466 Introduction
The last chapter considers how we can move beyond heterosexuality as a political institution and the form of desire, heterosexual desire, which derives from it. No liberation is possible for women in a world in which inequality, and specifically the inequality of women, is sexy. We need to envision, and start to build, a world in which the connection of power difference and aggression to sexual feelings will be unimaginable. The crucial question on which Anticlimax ends is how to construct homosexual desire.
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Location 4325 Chapter 4 The Failure of Gay Liberation
The feminist campaign against the sexual abuse of girls has created something of an embarrassment for the paedophiles. Feminists see the abuse of children by men as a political crime of the powerful against the powerless. Feminists do not accept that there is some harmless form of sexual use of children called paedophilia. Between all adults and children there is a huge imbalance of power which is further exaggerated between men and female children.

The issue of power imbalance caused a furore at the Boston conference at which NAMBLA was formed. Some men argued that the issue of power was important and had not been much addressed at the conference. Tom Reeves argued that not only was the man not dominant over the boy but that it was actually the other way around. The boy, he said, had power over the man.

He argued that the boy ‘has the dominance’ in physical, emotional, and spiritual terms and ‘has the power over the man’. A woman from the audience swiftly told Reeves that it was ‘bullshit’ to say the child had more power ‘given the way we’re structured in this world and the fact is, it’s not your right to say it’.142

But Reeves did say it and went on to found NAMBLA. There is a contradiction in the paedophile argument here. Paedophile lobbyists put forward their sexual interests under the guise of children’s liberation and paedophile literature makes much of children’s lack of power and self-determination vis-à-vis adults in order to argue for their right to sexual self-determination. PIE even campaigns against corporal punishment in schools as its token gesture towards children’s rights. But paedophiles can’t have it both ways. Either children lack power in relation to adults or they do not. Paedophiles who recognise that the feminist argument needs answering seriously produce more sophisticated ways of getting round the issue of power imbalance. Eric Presland accepts that inequality of power is an issue. His solution is that paedophiles give up their power as men and adults, which they can do simply by labelling themselves paedophiles and so becoming part of an oppressed group. He explains,

Paedophiles who define themselves as such are giving up their power in an immediate and dramatic way. They are placing themselves in the category of the most despised and powerless in our culture.143

This does not, on examination, seem like a real solution. The fact that a man defines himself as a paedophile is not likely to outweigh the difference in age, money, social and sexual experience which he would have over any boy.

The paedophiles do not have a good answer to the problem of power imbalance. The incorrigible obtuseness of the paedophile lobby on the issue of power should cause us to realise that the theorists of gay liberation, whether paedophile or supportive of paedophiles, simply have no conception of power or the abuse of power in the arena of sexuality. Radical gays have a libertarian position on sexuality. They take a free-market approach and condemn laws in restraint of trade. They choose to assume that all players are equal.

Male gay literature does not usually mention women. Where women are mentioned the writers have real difficulty in grasping that gender difference is about power difference, and a power difference which might mean that women and men are not all free and equal agents in the market of sexuality. To such writers children and slaves are included in the free market as free agents too.
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Location 4983 chapter 5 Feminism and Sexuality
As early as 1971 Susan Griffin’s article, ‘Rape: the All-American Crime’, set out the framework of the feminist analysis. She stated that rape was learned behaviour, and a product of the way malesupremacist culture constructed male sexuality.32 Aggression was expected from the male and passivity from the female. She attacked the myths developed by male-supremacist culture to legitimise rape such as that ‘all women secretly want to be raped’ and that ‘most or much of rape is provoked by the victim’. She pointed out the lack of any clear dividing line between rape and sexual intercourse, evident in the difficulty courts have in distinguishing between ‘mutual’ and ‘forced’ copulation. She stated that ‘the basic elements of rape were involved in all heterosexual relationships’ since ‘in our culture heterosexual love finds an erotic expression through male dominance and female submission’.

Location 5029
The issues of incest and marital rape strike blows at the fundamental institution of male supremacy itself, the heterosexual family. The serious contradiction faced by heterosexual women became much more pronounced as the prevalence of child sexual abuse and relationship rape was revealed. How could the trust and innocence required to get women to love and marry men, and produce children with them, be sustained in the context of this knowledge? Since feminists first started to discuss the issue of incest and sexual abuse in articles such as Florence Rush’s ‘The Sexual Abuse of Children: A Feminist Point of View’ it has become clear that rape of girls by fathers, brothers and other adult males is vastly more common than the sexological literature estimates.35 Year by year, as women and girls learn that they will be believed and we learn to look for sexual abuse, we become aware that the real extent of such abuse surpasses any estimates we are bold enough to make.
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Location 5443
The article ‘Talking Sex’ by Gayle Rubin, Amber Hollibaugh and Deirdre English was first published in Socialist Review in the US in 1981. It was reprinted in the British Feminist Review in 1982 because it ‘gives a useful insight into the debates as they are developing over there’,67 Paula Webster’s article ‘Pornography and Pleasure’ appeared in 1981 in the Sex Issue of Heresies. Both articles mention the slide shows that anti-pornography feminists were showing to raise consciousness about pornography. The slide shows seem to have been an igniting event for these writers. Webster states that, ‘Dogmatism, moralising, and censorial mystifying tended to dominate the antiporn campaign.’68 She was enraged by the anti-pornography slide show. She complains that only ‘pernicious’ meanings were given to the pictures by the presenter.