Notes about Sexuality and Religion

Intro

1982 Barnard conference on sexuality picketed

“Yet the power of the ecstatic moment – this is what freedom is like, this is what love could be, this is what happens when the boundaries are gone – is precisely the power to reimagine the world, to reclaim a human identity that’s neither victim or oppressor, to affirm difference not as separation but as variation on a theme.”

Chapter:

Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex? June 1981

“What is especially disconcerting, to those of us who believe that an understanding of sexuality is crucial to a feminist analysis, is that feminists are as confused, divided, and dogmatic about sex as everyone else.”

…

“Our most passionate convictions about sex do not necessarily reflect our real desires; they are as likely to be aimed at repressing the pain of desires we long ago decided were too dangerous to acknowledge, even to ourselves.”

…

Two very different groups opposed the pro-sex feminists; conservatives who believed that women really want marriage and monogamy, and the man-hating lesbians, who considered all heterosexual sex to be rape.

“The separatists tap into the underside of traditional femininity – the bitter self-righteous fury that propels the indictment of men as lustful beasts ravaging their chaste victims. These are the two faces of feminine ideology in a patriarchal culture: they induce women to accept a spurious moral superiority as a substitute for sexual pleasure, and curbs on men’s sexual freedom as a substitute for real power.”

…

“In this culture, where women are still supposed to be less sexual than men, sexual inhibition is as integral to the ‘normal’ woman’s identity as sexual aggression is to a man’s; it is ‘excessive’ genital desires that often make women feel ‘unfeminine’ and unworthy.”

…

“Last year [1991 ?] NOW, on the advice of its lesbian caucus, passed a resolution specifically excluding from its definition of lesbian rights certain forms of sexual expression that had been ‘mistakenly correlated with Lesbian/Gay rights bu some gay organizations and by opponents of Lesbian/Gay rights seeking to confuse the issue’: pederasty, pornography, sadomascochism… and public sex. While the impetus for the resolution seems to have been in opposition to the ‘boy love’ movement, its effect is to endorse the moralistic rhetoric and the conventionally feminine sexual politics of the antiporn campaign.”

…

“Puritanism is not the only obstacle to a feminist understanding of sex. If self-proclaimed arbiters of feminist morals stifle honest discussion with their dogmatic, guilt-mongering judgments, sexual libertarians often evade judgments at all.”

…

“I don’t think the can. Adults can too easily manipulate children’s needs for affection, protection, and approval; children are too inexperienced to understand all the implications of what they’re agreeing to (or even, in some cases, initiating). And it seems to me that what attracts adults to children is precisely their ‘innocence’ – which is to say their relative powerlessness. There is the question, though, of where to draw the lines. At what age does a child become a young person, and when does the protection of children from exploitation become a denial of young people’s sexual autonomy? Some 15-year-olds are more mature than many adults will ever be. And I agree that the public’s readiness to equate all adult-child sex with child molesting comes in part from a need to deny that kids have active sexual desires.”

Nature’s Revenge July 1981

Re feminist anti-porn movement and conservative new right

“,,,the argument of the two groups are uncomfortably similar. If anti-porn feminists see pornography as a brutal exercise of predatory male sexuality, a form of (and an incitement to) violence against women, the right also associates pornography with rampant male lust broken loose from the saving constraints of God and Family. Nor have conservatives hesitated to borrow feminist rhetoric about the exploitation of women’s bodies.

This peculiar confluence raises the question of whether the current feminist preoccupation with pornography is really an attempt to extend the movement’s critique of sexism – or whether, on the contrary, it is evidence that feminists have been affected by the conservative climate and are unconsciously moving with the cultural tide.” 

Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution began as talk at conference in 1981

 “Confronted with a right-wing backlash bent on reversing social acceptance of non-marital, non-procreative sex, feminists like me, who saw sexual liberalism as deeply flawed by sexism but nonetheless a source of crucial gains for women, found themselves at odds with feminists who dismissed the sexual revolution as monolithically sexist and shared many of the attitudes of conservative moralists.

Since the mid-80’s, the intensity of the sex debated has waned, not because the issues are any closer to being resolved, but because the two sides are so far apart they have nothing more to say to each other.”

Reasons?

“But it also points up a fundamental failure on the part of pro-sex camp: the failure to put forward a convincing alternative analysis of sexual violence, exploitation and alienation.

These issues were of vital concern to an earlier wave o f sexual liberationists….”

[then discusses 1930’s – 60’s – Reich + Freud]  

[The Patriarchy] “also regulates sexuality per se, defining as illicit any sexual activity unrelated to reproduction or outside the bounds of monogamous marriage. According;y, the new right’s militant defense of traditional family values has a dual thrust: it is at once a male-supremacist backlash against feminism and a reaction by cultural conservatives of both sexes against the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 60’s and 70’s.

There is, of course, an integral connection between sexism and sexual repression. The suppression of women’s sexual desires and pleasure, the denial of reproductive freedom, and the enforcement of female abstinence outside marriage have been primary underpinnings of male supremacy.”

…

“If the women’s movement is to organize effectively against the right, it will have to develop a political theory of sexuality and in particular an analysis of the relation between feminism and women’s sexual freedom.”

…

“At its inception, the women’s liberation movement was dominated by young women who had grown up during or since the emergence of sexual libertarian ideology [in 1950s] ; many radical feminists came out of the left and the counterculture, where that ideology was particularly strong. Unsurprisingly, one of the first issues to surface in the movement was women’s pent-up rage at men’s one-sided, exploitative view of sexual freedom. From our consciousness-raising sessions we concluded that women couldn’t win no matter how they behaved. We were still oppressed by a sexual double standard that while less rigid was by no means obsolete: women who took too literally their supposed right to sexual freedom and pleasure were regularly put down as ‘easy’, ‘ aggressive’, or ‘promiscuous’.”

…

“Unfortunately, the movement’s efforts to make political sense of this double bind led to confusions in feminist thinking about sex that are still unresolved.”

…

“Historically, a woman’s main protection from sexual exploitation has been to be a ‘good girl’ and demand marriage as the price of sex – in other words, relinquish her sexual spontaneity to preserve her bargaining power. Furthermore, this strategy will not work for individual women if most women ‘scab’ by abandoning it, which implies the need for some form of social or moral pressure to keep women in line.”

…

“Whatever its intent, the effects of feminist’s emphasis on controlling male sexuality – particularly when that emphasis is combined with a neo-Victorian view of women’s nature and the conviction the securing women’s safety from male aggression should be the chief priority of the women’s movement – is to undercut feminist opposition to the right.”

…

“Many feminists who are aware that their sexual feelings contradict the neo-Victorian ideal have lapsed into a confused and apologetic silence.”

Review of Betty Friedan’s 1981 book The Second Stage 

“In her view the antifeminist backlash does not reflect a real social schism over the role of women, rather it is a conspiracy of right-wing extremists who are fomenting conflict over these issues in order to distract people from the economic crisis.”

 

page 88

“Some of us envisioned a society organized around communal households, in which adults as a matter of course were committed to sharing in child-rearing, whether or not they have biological children. With the conservative onslaught, debate on these ideas has been choked off so thoroughly that you would never know, unless you were there, that for a time these ideas had real currency in the culture.”

“Much of the early history of the women’s liberation movement, and especially of radical feminism… has been lost, misunderstood or egregiously distorted. The left, the right, and liberal feminists have all for their own reasons contributed to misrepresenting and trivializing radical feminist ideas. To add to the confusion, radical feminism in its original sense barely exists today. The great majority of women who presently call themselves ‘radical feminists’ in fact subscribe to a politics more accurately labeled as ‘cultural feminism’.

…

Though cultural feminism came out of the radical feminist movement, the premises of the two tendencies are antithetical.”

…

“By 1975 radical feminism had given way to cultural feminism.”

…

“While continuing to call itself radical feminist – indeed, claiming that it represents the only true feminist position – the antiporn movement has in effect collaborated with the right in pressuring women to conform to conventionally feminine attitudes.”

…

“Thoug there was surprisingly little resistance to the collapse of radical feminism, some movement activists did fight back. In 1073 Kathie Sarachild, Carol Hanisch and several other women revived Redstockings, which had disbanded three years before, and in 1975 they published a journal, Feminist Revolution. FR was an ambitious attempt to analyze the deradicalization of the movement and contained the forst major critiques of cultural feminism and Ms. liberalism.”

…

“One article, which provoked a brief but intense controversy in the ‘feminist community’, and eventually led Gloria Steinem to threaten a libel suit, contained a detailed account of Ms’s corporate connections and Steinem’s past work with the Independent Research Service, an outfit that had received CIA funds, with Steinem’s knowledge, to send students to European Youth festivals.”

…

“Accordingly, most radical feminists equated women’s sexual oppression with male domination and rejected the idea of sexual liberation for men as at least redundant, at worst a euphemism for licence to exploit women with impunity. Within this framework there was no way to discuss the common elements in women’s and men’s (particularly gay men’s) subjection to sexual repression; or to explore the extent to which sexual guilt, fear, frustration contribute to their sexism (and specifically to sexual violence);…and anxieties shared by both sexes about the body, pleasure, emotional vulnerability and loss of control.””