Sex-positive feminism

“Orgasm is the body’s natural call to feminist politics” – Naomi Wolf (*).

Many feminists take a dim view of the use made of images of women in advertising and in pornography. They argue that such images almost invariably involve an objectification of women, a reduction of them to little more than a collection of sexual attributes, devoid of personhood and without agency, confined in a role dictated to them by patriarchal society and arrayed for consumption by the male sexual appetite.

This argument is partly tautological (in the sense that images are necessarily objects), and often modified in practice by free speech considerations as well as the argument by some that consensual fantasy, even if it depicts scenarios which draw on patriarchy for their erotic value, does not necessarily reinforce patriarchal values themselves (even if it leaves them unchallenged) and should be embraced as a safer outlet for fantasies which it would be more prejudicial to pursue in the real world. Nevertheless, feminist objections to female iconography betray an underlying preference on the part of many women, unsure as to what a “depatriarchalized” female sexuality actually would look like, to choose to behave in such a way as to avoid being branded a slut, which is perceived as, and indeed is, effectively a form of social ostracization. This choice is understandable, but it is not neutral or necessarily pro-feminist.

The desire to be taken seriously has historically often required women in different walks of life to forego visual strategies of seduction and those women who pursue a different track – including so-called “sex-positive feminists” – are often suspect outsiders in the feminist community. At best, they may be viewed as serving up a form of feminism designed to appeal to men’s nature or patriarchally conditioned preferences, and thereby denatured ipso facto.

There is no denying that employing those visual elements most often associated with the objectification of women, whether as part of a feminist counteroffensive, or simply because that is what one wants to do, is a tactic fraught with danger and not the best choice for everyone. But in choosing their strategies of resistance, women need to be lucidly conscious of the fact that they are caught in the type of double-bind which typically characterizes symbolic oppression. Either they claim positions in society entirely analogous to those occupied by men, thereby ratifying the patriarchal order, or they align themselves with a socially despised underclass, attracting opprobrium from men and women alike: that is, from all members of that multitude, regardless of their gender, who continue to think, whether or not despite themselves, in patriarchal categories.

For patriarchy, sex is a male drive, and some women are assigned the role of gratifying that drive. This assignment is not willy-nilly of course; it follows a very structured course which allows the drive to be adequately gratified while at the same time ensuring the reproduction of a social system in which all males have a sufficient stake in the status quo to defend it by political and military means. Patriarchy thus has always used the lever of access to women’s bodies in order to achieve its prime historical purpose, which is to control men (although the control of women per se has also become important over the last century and a half as women have gained in societal power). The conditions of expression of sexuality by men are a major theme of patriarchy, but male sexuality itself is not problematized; women’s sexuality on the other hand is assumed either not to exist or, in complete contrast, to be insatiable and dangerous.

Patriarchy, in other words, is neutral towards male sexual expression; but it is not neutral towards love. For the (male) guests at Plato’s Symposium, the idea that one could love a woman with comparable passion to how one might love a man was simply unthinkable. Loving a woman was socially subversive in classical Greece, the stuff perhaps of Gods and heroes in times past but not of free, land owning men today. For them, free women were objects of symbolic trade (and slave women of monetized trade); sentiment could not be allowed to disrupt that economy.

For us moderns, many of whom probably believe we have experienced something which we feel to be biologically innate and which we call “falling in love” (but which may be merely limerence), Plato’s conception of eros seems a surprising drive diversion. And evolutionary considerations would suggest it is. Nevertheless, the strangeness of the Greek romantic imagination should not allow us naively to imagine that our own conception is purely a biological restoration. On the contrary, the conditions under which we are allowed to fall in love are tightly controlled by society. Absent these conditions, it is not simply that we are condemned to fail in our amorous endeavors; in fact we are little more likely than the ancients to notice or acknowledge our feelings at all. For this reason, we have little idea what the experience we call “falling in love” would have looked or felt like in the ancestral environment, even if I would not exclude that a phenomenological or anthropological enquiry might tell us something (of which I might be ignorant).

So, the kind of feminism I would like to see might better be termed “love-positive” than “sex-positive”; that women adopt a positive attitude towards the biological capacity for physical pleasure with which they are born seems like something that should be able to be taken for granted. It would be good if feminism were to insist on our capacity as a species to love and nurture, including, but not limited to, heart-based, non-exclusive sexuality. Nevertheless, I fear that a “love-positive feminism” would quickly be assimilated to a desexualized one because of the sublimination of sexuality we are all conditioned to operate.

The conversion of the female body into an object of consumption is indeed an artefact of patriarchy. Nevertheless, the role of female iconography in contemporary society also differs vastly from that in Antiquity. Although clothing has a longer history, techniques of mass visual reproduction are very recent. Even the depiction of the female nude in painting only really took off with the Renaissance, and it was a radical break with earlier Byzantine norms (even if, it seems, rapidly embraced by the Papacy…).

Of course, this Renaissance artistic movement was no resurrection of Hellenistic esthetics, but a creation which drew on Greek and Roman archetypes for its own purposes. Representation of men was far more common than that of women in Hellenistic art, and female representations are essentially unknown in the classical period; in Renaissance art this proportion was completely reversed, with the female body, and erotic scenes featuring it, clear themes of predilection. The purpose of this can scarcely have been anything other than male titillation, but the bringing of the female form out of the whorehouse and into courtly palaces represents a concession to its erotic power which must have been profoundly disturbing to indentured wives, daughters and maidservants, and probably to many men within courtly families also. This development, I believe, can hardly be seen as a further reinforcement of patriarchy, hypothetically confident enough to bring into the light those practices which previously had been reserved for the shadows; rather, these inanimate forms, fantasy women created by men for men, represent to my mind the first stages of the crumbling of patriarchy under the weight of its biological, and increasingly social, contradictions: a process which continues to this day and is, of course, still far from complete.

Over the course of history, patriarchy has effected a constitutive bifurcation of women into two antagonistic groups, imposing monoandry on, and denying sexual agency to, the one (essentially those women engendered within patriarchal clans), whilst making the second (slaves and outcasts) available for the use of the males of the society as a whole. Almost all of the portrayal of women in art from the Renaissance onwards has been of courtesans and concubines, or of figures adopting their attributes. The allegedly higher status, but desexualised, class of women qualifying as wives is absent from the collective imagination. This bifurcation, which doubtless stretches back into remote antiquity, gave rise to what Freud called the Madonna-Whore complex. This is certainly a hypocritical double standard. But it is also inherent to the intersection of male sexual drives and patriarchy.

What is new with the Renaissance is that the courtesan is celebrated in art rather than despised. It is important, indeed, to note that these two archetypes are not equal alternatives. The Madonna archetype enjoys superior (if still limited) social status and is unmarked; the whore archetype is stigmatized, including by the madonna herself, and is marked. The subordination by patriarchy of the whore to the madonna has fundamental consequences for thinking through strategies of symbolic resistance.

The patriarchally assigned bifurcation of the female, in fact, has been subject to constant erosion over the last ten centuries of Western history as properties of the courtesan have been transferred to the sought object of legitimate romantic passion, bringing love into the matchmaking paradigm and subverting more strictly patriarchal norms of arranged marriage. Courtly love was the first manifestation of this slow cultural earthquake, in which for the first time romantic passion was admitted into the public arena, provided that it did not interfere with matrimonial arrangements and was sublimated. The right of women – or men – to marry for love, however, took a long time to be established, at least in courtly and developing bourgeois circles, and is not, indeed, even fully acquired in Europe today (never mind, of course, the rest of the world). Its acceptance has been at the price of the assimilation of marriage-for-love to marriage-by-arrangement, with which, however, it shares little in common (and compared to which it is notoriously less stable).

The whorehouse was an accepted and inevitable institution within the social economy of arranged marriage. The position of the whore-as-archetype, became, however, problematic for proponents of marriage for love. By this I mean (though here I may be speculating) that well-born women, having experienced sexual passion in the context of romantic love, came to view it as their birthright, but were nevertheless still constrained by the patriarchal order of marriage – as Flaubert’s Emma Bovary found to her cost. To this we should add, as Michel Foucault has pointed out in La Volonté de Savoir, the increasing importance placed upon sexual exclusivity within marriage within the developing bourgeois ambitions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, essentially in order to safeguard the blood line and the accumulation of family wealth.

These social developments, which here I can only evoke briefly, resulted in what has become, today, almost a fusion, and frequently an unbearable one, of the expectations associated with the Madonna and Whore archetypes. Women are asked, in the first instance by women’s media themselves, to be both – even though the combination is well-nigh impossible and in any case unlikely to procure any durable advantage. This continuing demand for both archetypes is certainly an indication of the malleability of patriarchy to changed social circumstances to which Bourdieu refers in Masculine Domination. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily indicative of its perennity; it seems to me that patriarchy is really underpinned by militarism and plutocracy and it is shifts in these social variables which will undermine (or are needed to undermine) its ongoing vitality. What feminism needs to do is to unleash the inherent contradictions in patriarchy which have been visible throughout history and harness other forces in our psyche.

By rejecting sexual empowerment, women reject only one side of the bifurcated patriarchal feminine in favor of the only other of the binary choice of options socially prepared for them. It is very difficult to bring into existence alternative archetypal paradigms, and almost impossible as long as the existing paradigms retain their force and serve their purpose. Choice ratifies and strengthens the bifurcation itself, whilst having no effect on the net exploitation of women, as the patriarchal economic order is left untouched by it, and this order can always create the supply of “whores” which it desires. The only subversive choice – the one made, in his way, by Michel Foucault – is not to choose. But this choice is only subjectively available: not choosing will result in social assignation to women of the “whore” label anyway – because sexual shame structures the entire patriarchal system. In the same way as Foucault was socially assigned to the marked category of gay, though he never made that identification.

It is clearly unfair – in fact it is an oppressive manoeuver – simply to dismiss women as their own worst enemies. Society cannot indoctrinate women with patriarchal views and then complain that they exhibit patriarchal attitudes. By far the most likely reason women engage in slut-shaming is to convince patriarchal males of their own chastity and to reinforce the Madonna-norm to which they have chosen to submit since, having made that choice, they are invested in it. We all know, and feminists better than anyone, that women are in part the vehicles of their own oppression, but that is because the odds are stacked against them by the system within which they are constrained to operate.

There is no Archimedean point outside of the structures of symbolic domination which can be used to bring the whole thing crashing down – we are condemned to work within it and this is what makes the whole enterprise so painstaking slow. Nevertheless, so-called sex-positive feminism, while there is plenty to debate and criticize within it, is not a watered down version of the real thing, designed to avoid the latter’s full social consequences: it is in fact the most subversive form of feminism yet devised precisely because it appeals to men on an instinctual level which bypasses, however temporarily, some part of their patriarchal conditioning. It is a power which merely needs to be self-aware.

“Sex-positive feminists” and “slutwalkers” may be vilified for allowing themselves to be objectified but in fact they do not “allow” this at all, they are merely subject to it because of attitudes embedded in patriarchy – attitudes which need to be challenged and changed. As long as patriarchy prevails, women are likely to be oppressed by one or other of the symbolic categories of oppression, madonna or whore, which constitute the two poles, both socially constructed, of the patriarchal bifurcation of the female. There is no choice which renders neither calumny applicable. The core patriarchal oppression, however, is embodied in the figure of the madonna, not in that of the whore. The whore archetype is a secondary manifestation, structurally dependent for its existence and its power on the primary strategy of denying female agency – of denying, in fact, female humanity. Given this, slut-shaming is a counterproductive response by women, and one which is moreover inoperant since the supply of whores and that of madonnas will always attain a patriarchal equilibrium as long as madonnas themselves continue to exist. If an individual is not sexually empowered, the whole system remains in place; but if all women chose the whore over the madonna, neither would be any more.

Notes

(*) “Feminist Fatale: a reply to Camille Paglia”, The New Republic, March 16, 1992