Two recent books by young women do a laudable job of questioning some of the apparent orthodoxies of the current heterosexual dating and relationship cultures: the Washington Post columnist Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex and the New Statesman’s Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution both came out this year to solid acclaim from both traditional and alternative media. However, both have huge blind spots and take the predicaments and predilections of a very narrow age demographic as representative of the entire humanity.
Emba’s is more journalistic and relies on interviews with people in cafes and in parties in addition to written sources; Perry builds up a theoretical system and has a more specific plan of action how to address the situation. Emba has a bit more understanding for human foibles; the younger Perry (who wrote the book before turning 30 and is a married mother of one) has surprisingly little patience left. Both would like us to rethink, as Emba writes early in the book, the assumptions beneath the dominant approach to sex, eg “Sex is a purely physical act”, “The absence of rules will make me happier”, “My sex life is nobody’s business” and “Women and men are basically the same”. Desire should not be exempt from critique, there is nothing inherently liberatory or praise-worthy about any desire, sexual or other, they posit. So far, so reasonable.
The sixties and the “il est interdit à interdire” are not necessarily the decade to celebrate, because it’s when the age of permissiveness, the hyper phase of which we are living, kicks off. Perry has often said in interviews that the invention of the birth control pill on balance wasn’t great for women, so I was curious to read her argument. Emba too circles this topic. One downside of the pill, says Emba, is that it made women almost exclusively responsible for contraception. Perry points out that the pill era actually increased unwanted pregnancies because the pill helped destigmatize casual sex. It became, she argues, harder for women to say no. The pill not 100 per cent reliable and has unwanted physical effects on women’s body. In her chapter on the necessity of marriage, she writes that it was the women who benefited the most from the mores that discouraged pre-marital sex: men had the obligation to provide and stick around. There are more deadbeat dads now than in the stricter patriarchal eras, she writes. That in some parts of the world the pill helped women build freer, more autonomous and less pregnancy-focused lives doesn’t register on the radar. (That it perhaps, in certain circumstances, made female sexuality freer to safely express itself wouldn’t be a good in itself for Perry. Pitfalls tip the scale.)
Let me spend some time with Emba first, and highlight what I thought was unique about her approach. Unlike the members of the now quite mediatized variant of “reactionary feminists” in Britain, Emba does not urge women to get married, but nor is she shy about her religiousness – a child from an evangelist household, Emba is a converted Catholic, her acknowledgements page in the book containing the words Deo Gratias. This means that her worldview is gently underpinned by Aquinas and Aristotle, who come out of the closet, so to speak, in the chapter on ethical sex. Good sex, writes Emba, is not only consensual and not only pleasurable. Good sex is also ethically good. Pages in which she explains what that means are some of the best in the book. “Willing the good of the other” was Aquinas’ definition of love, which has its origins in Aristotle. “And in his understanding, love wasn’t necessarily romantic, or even a feeling. Rather, it was an intention to bear goodwill toward another for the sake of that person and not oneself.” (The reference section here takes us to the 2008 article by David Konstan, “Aristotle on Love and Friendship”.) So consent is not enough; a sex-specific edition of the Golden Rule is required here, she writes as she discusses what this would look like with some of her interlocutors. What does it mean to have your sexual partner’s good in mind?
While Perry largely chooses to ignore or dismisses the contributions of the so-called pro-sex faction of the Second Wave to the issue at hand (and the Second Wave produced enormous amount of brilliant thought about it), Emba does read the odd grandmother. Ellen Willis gets a read or two in Emba’s book and gets some credit for understanding that women don’t choose in a vacuum. However we approach the matters of sexual liberation, Willis wrote, the question remains, “Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?”
I should mention the short shrift that Perry in particular gives to her feminist predecessors. Neither woman has looked at one of the best collections to come out the Second Wave on the topic that they’re dealing with, Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson (eds.) This collection is chock-full of essays that go deeper (pardon) into the many issues of the female sex and liberation dialectics, each aptly intro’d and summarized by the editors. For ex,
“What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism”, by Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga.
From the intro:
[…] “Feminists have often seen an improved sexual technique and a more assertive sexuality as the essential ingredients in women’s fulfillment. This is the line of thinking that, at its baldest, underlay the mechanistic injunctions of The Hite Report, which posited masturbation as the most efficient and possibly most pleasurable mode of female satisfaction. In contrast, Hollibaugh and Moraga suggest that arousal depends not so much on technique as on emotional dynamics: one can deeply excite a lover, Hollibaugh notes, without “doing” anything. In “openly” acknowledging the psychological play that can touch upon the “hurt places” in all of us, this colloquial conversation underscores in its own way Jessica Benjamin’s highly theoretical analysis of similar themes.”
Then you flip back to Benjamin’s chapter, and discover it’s “The Fantasy of Erotic Domination” (a very old topic which each generation of feminists seems to be rediscovering).
“The nature of sexuality itself makes the question [of the limits of consent] even more vexing since we—especially women—so often experience erotic passion as engulfing and overwhelming, rather than as a relationship in which we agree to take part. […] Despite a Freudian pessimism which runs through her work, Benjamin continues to hold out the utopian possibility of a passion that could ignite the whole self” and not keep it split along the domination-submission duality and the gendering of the same. From Benjamin (p. 296): “Beneath the sensationalism of power and powerlessness, the yearning to know and be known lies numbed. Real transcendence, I have argued, implies that persons are able to achieve a wholeness in which the opposing impulses for recognition and differentiation are combined. The psychological origins of erotic domination can be traced to one-sided differentiation, that is, to the splitting of these impulses and their assignment, respectively, to women and men.”
Or have a look at the last essay in the collection “The Fear That Feminism Will Free Men First”, by Deirdre English, which does exactly what Perry gets into many decades later.
[…] “Since, so far, sexual freedom has usually meant a man’s right to love and leave a pregnant woman or economically dependent woman, it has been hard for women on many points of the political spectrum to imagine an ideal of female sexual autonomy.”
But back to Emba and Perry.