Whose sexual agendas?


This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 36, Winter 1997/98.

Pontificating about sex and sexuality is something of a growth industry in the academic world; but a lot of recent academic writing on this subject has only the most tenuous relationship to feminist politics or the realities of women’s lives. Here Stevi Jackson takes a critical look at the latest tome to land on her desk, Lynne Segal’s New Sexual Agendas. She warns that from a radical feminist perspective, the ‘agendas’ pursued in this collection of articles are neither ‘new’ nor illuminating.

New Sexual Agendas, edited by Lynne Segal, is a collection of papers from a conference of the same title held in London in 1995. The contri­butors are mostly well-known academics, including feminists, gay men and theorists of masculinity. Neither the conference nor the book were framed by specifically feminist interests, but feminists are among the constituencies addressed and invoked by the contributors, and women are among those deemed to benefit from the new agendas under discussion. Given its own terms of reference, it would be unfair to criticise this anthology for being insufficiently feminist, but it is fair to say that the represen­tation of feminism within it is decidedly partial. Lynne Segal’s preface draws attention to the way in which sexuality has become contested terrain among feminist and gay activist and theorists and gives the impression that the book will engage will all shades of opinion, but it does not. Only some feminist voices are heard; others, notably those of radical feminists, remain silent.

Affirming diversity and excusing men

The new agendas of the title are set against old agendas which privilege heterosexual men and which it is clearly in feminists’ interests to oppose. But feminism is not the only opposi­tional stance and feminists, as we are all well aware, are often divided on issues of sexuality — hence the necessary plurality of any new sexual agendas which arise out of the varied political interests of those currently challenging the status quo. However, the pluralising of the term ‘agendas’ entails more: the editor’s commitment to pluralism, ‘the acceptance of plural sexualities’ (p. xviii). This endorsement of diversity produces all those other currently fashionable plural terms such as sexualities and feminisms. Yet, for all its emphasis on diversity, pluralism can produce its own singular agenda — an agenda based on liberal individualism.

Lynne Segal sets up this perspective in her preface. Despite its brevity, it still gives her the oppor­tunity to wheel on her usual hobbyhorses. There are the predictable sideswipes at radical feminism although, thankfully, this time Lynne Segal refrains from some of the grosser forms of misrepresentation she has been guilty of in the past. Instead radical feminists are gently chided for tying ‘women’s sexual engagement with men ineluctably to women’s subordination’ (p.xiii). She concedes that ‘dominant sexual discourses and iconography’ have linked female sexuality with ‘submission’, but not as ‘seamlessly’ as feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon and Sheila Jeffreys suggest (p.xiii).

There is something interesting in the way this is put. Even while appearing to give some ground, Lynne Segal represents the radical feminist position with an emphasis on women’s subordi­nation and submission. Male dominance is curiously absent, as if women are subordi­nated by or submit to nothing or no-one in particular. While voicing, as she always does, a routine condemnation of sexual coercion and violence, it seems that she wants to absolve men of any blame. The following passage is illustra­tive of this tendency.

The fact that many men don’t feel individually powerful in relation to women, despite institutional arrangements and cultural discourses which continue to subordinate women, serves only to fuel the tensions between women and men which are apparent in much sexual fantasy and practice and spill over, all too often, into men’s use of sexual harassment, coercion or even violence against women. (p.xii)

Even Lynne Segal would not be so crass as to suggest that men are violent simply because they feel powerless, but she is suggesting that men’s sense of powerlessness increases the likelihood of violence. There is little evidence to support this contention. Empirical studies of men who commit crimes of sexual violence against women, such as Diana Scully’s study of convicted rapists in the US, do not paint a picture of men whose feelings of impotence spill over into violence, but rather of men who are all too aware of the power of terror used against women. Many instances of sexual violence, from harassment in the workplace to child abuse are perpetrated by men whose power over their victims is institutionalised and sometimes virtually unassailable.

There is another strategy for excusing men at play here, evident in the language Lynne Segal uses. It is institutional arrangements and cultural discourses which keep women sub­ordinate — yes of course, but whose interests do they serve? To whom are women subordinate if not men? And what part do men play in maintaining their power? Yes there are ‘ten­sions’ between women and men, but ‘tensions’ can exist between social equals. What of the inequalities between women and men? Lynne Segal’s words seem carefully chosen to distance real, material, embodied men from being implicated in the maintenance of women’s subordination. Having admitted a connection between heterosexuality and subordination, this is then brushed aside.

There is a further issue here. Whereas radical feminists are concerned with the collective subordination of women, Lynne Segal’s emphasis is on individual agency and freedom. This is evident in the ways in which she implicitly defines her own position as one which seeks to ‘replace the old sexual agendas maintaining the heterosexual male as the uniquely empowered sexual agent by asserting new affirmations of sexual diversity, mutuality and respect’ (p. xviii). It is not clear here whether mutuality and respect are to be sought within sexual relationships or whether they are prescriptions for the way we should treat those whose sexuality differs from our own. In either case, both the problems (intolerance or men’s monopoly on sexual agency) and the solution (being nicer to each other) are located within indivi­duals. If she means the former she implies that the male monopoly on sexual agency should be challenged (presumably by women as sexual agents) in the name of ‘mutuality and respect’. Again the issues are individualised. Of course ‘mutuality and respect’ are desirable goals within sexual relations, but we need to consider the structural inequalities which prevent these ideals from being realised. The problem is not merely that men are ‘empowered’ as sexual agents, but that this represents institutionalised power over women. Moreover, if we do not pay attention to the social origins of power we have no means of setting limits on ‘affirmations of diversity’. The usual solution — everything sexual is fine as long as it is consensual — produces a naive one-dimensional view of power (it does not exist unless there is observ­able coercion present) and inhibits critique of sexual pleasures and practices.

I have a strong suspicion that what under­pins many arguments of this kind (not just Lynne Segal’s) is the idea that sex in itself is a good thing. It is intrinsically positive and only happens to become perverted to coercive or oppressive ends by social and cultural condi­tions external to it. This is a form of essential­ism that places ‘sex’ outside the social. If we seriously consider sexuality to be socially constructed, then there is no essential sexuality, good or bad. This also means, of course, that violence and coercion are not intrinsic to sex per se (since there is no such thing), but they are fundamental to the construction of sexuality within a patriarchally and heterosexually ordered society.

A woman’s right to fuck?

There are only two chapters with the words ‘feminist’ or ‘feminism’ in the title, and these are the most problematic in the book: Lynne Segal’s own chapter and that of Mandy Merck. Both of these are primarily directed towards critiques of feminist perspectives.

Lynne Segal’s own contribution is in keeping with the argument she presents in her book Straight Sex: a defence of the pursuit of heterosexual pleasure. As a heterosexual feminist I have interests in common with her. I, too, want to believe that heterosexual pleasure is not intrinsically maso­chistic, that equality and mutuality in sexual relations between women and men might be possible. Where I part company with her is that I do not think these hopes can be realised in the absence of a thoroughgoing critique of hetero­sexuality.

Lynne Segal seems to assume that sexual violence and exploitation have nothing to do with heterosexuality itself, that women’s powerless­ness in heterosexual relations is the result of cultural assumptions now being rendered redundant by new, more assertive styles of female sexuality. My own view, which I have argued elsewhere (see T&S 32) is that hetero­sexuality is not about anatomical males having sex with anatomical females, but is an institu­tion­alised sexual practice which could not exist in any meaningful sense in the absence of the hierarchical division between men and women. Coercion and inequality are not accidental features of heterosexuality, but are constitutive of it. Heterosexuality as we know it is heavily institutionalised as part of wider social struc­tures and processes which maintain male dominance. Lynne Segal recognises that the institution­alisation of heterosexuality is integral to the oppression of lesbians and gays, but seems unwilling to recognise that this involves more that its being a privileged norm. It is not just the normativity of heterosexuality that is the problem, but the subordination of women which is integral to it.

These fundamental inequalities will not magically disappear with the march of progress. True, changes are occurring, in part as a result of feminist struggle, but is a mistake to over-estimate these. Lynne Segal draws on large scale, quantitative studies, such as the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, to demon­strate that feminism (and particularly radical feminism) is ‘out of step with many women’s dreams and desires’ (p. 80, her emphasis). These studies demonstrate that more women are engaging in heterosexual activities outside the bounds of marriage and monogamy, that there has been some erosion of double standards of morality and that women are actively seeking sexual pleasure with men. I would not have thought this was news to most feminists, since these are trends that were already observable way back in the 1970s. Indeed the critique of the sexual revolution arose out of precisely these conditions. More­over, some of these surveys — particularly Lillian Rubin’s US study — reveal persistent inequalities between women and men and the continued pervasiveness of coercive sex. Lynne Segal admits this — which somewhat undercuts her critique of other feminists. There are limits to quantitative surveys. They cannot tell us in any depth about how women make sense of their sexual experiences. Qualitative research (including some presented in this volume) demonstrates, time and again, the difficulties women, especially younger women, face in trying to establish intimacy with men.

Lynne Segal is not simply defending heterosexual sex as it exists today — she does want to find new, transformative ways of engaging in heterosexual activity. As in Straight Sex, she sees signs of hope in the feelings of vulnera­bility and loss of control which, she argues, are experienced by both women and men when in the throes of sexual passion. In my view it is a mistake to conflate these emotional responses with the social relations within which sexual activities take place or to assume that these emotions are unaffected by wider social relations. Hence I am highly sceptical of her view that sex ‘easily threatens rather than confirms gender polarity’ (p. 86, her emphasis). For all her commitment to trans­forming heterosexuality, she sometimes writes as if it had already been transformed:

In consensual sex, when bodies meet, the epiphany of that meeting — its threat and excitement — is surely that they great dichotomies (activity/passivity, heterosexual/homosexual) slide away. (p. 86)

Could it be that it is Lynne Segal, rather than the feminists she criticises, who is out of step with many women’s experiences? Sex can be consensual yet still involve the re-enactment of highly gendered practices. Most of the available research suggests that fluidity she describes may not even be imaginable by many women — and much of the evidence she herself cites suggests that this depiction of consensual sex is far from typical of the average hetero­sexual encounter.

Lynne Segal’s punch line is similar to that used in Straight Sex, and gives rise to the same prob­lems. ‘Straight women, like gay men and lesbians, have everything to gain from asserting our desire to fuck if (and only if), when and as we choose.’ (p.89). Quite apart from the semantic peculiarity of this sentence (can one assert a desire?) it has the tone of demanding a basic right. Who, exactly, is threatening this desire, denying this right? You’ve guessed — it’s those moralistic, guilt-tripping, killjoy radical feminists again. But are they doing so? Of course not. No lesbian feminist has ever challenged my right to sleep with men — at least not since the height of the political lesbianism debate in the late 1970s and early 1980s — and that was a long time ago. I have no doubt that many of my friends think I’m misguided in my desires and are concerned that having sexual relationships with men is doing me no good but they are not preventing me from having those relationships, nor making me feel guilty about them. Engaging in critique of heterosexuality is not the same as criticising individual women for being heterosexual. I would have thought that this simple distinction had long since been established

Lynne Segal’s assertion covers for lack of critique, in particular her failure to take on board the extent to which sexual desires and the choices that follow from them are constructed — and that the choices we make are constrained in a variety of ways other than by our desires. Sexual experiences, practices and relationships are social, and hence governed by social convention and cultural meanings. They are conducted in the context of institutionalised inequalities and power structures. In treating desires, choices and practices as given, Lynne Segal is guilty of essentialist assumptions that run far deeper than those she habitually attributes to radical feminists.

The masculinisation of MacKinnon

Mandy Merck’s bizarre little contribution, only five pages long, is offensively entitled ‘Death Camps: Feminism vs. Queer Theory’. It begins with the usual complaints against radical feminists who, according to Mandy Merck are part of a feminist legacy ‘ascribing women’s social inferiority to their sexuality’ (p.232). (Strange, I always thought radical feminists saw male sexuality as the main problem.) This legacy according to Mandy Merck, places feminism and fucking at odds. It is from this premise that she launches into the main argument of her chapter, a discussion of a much cited paper by one Leo Bersani entitled ‘Is the Rectum a Grave’. Leo Bersani’s celebration of sex as ‘self abolition’, his explorations of the convergence between sex and death, would hold little interest for most feminists. However, what makes him extremely unusual among male queer theorists is that he engages seriously (within his own logic) with the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon — and this strikes Mandy Merck as highly amusing and provides an occasion for having her own dig at them.

What concerns me here is that Mandy Merck is one of those engaged in a critique of Catharine MacKinnon which is rather different from the one we know so well. Tired of simply castigating her as an anti-sex moralist in cahoots with the moral Right, many social theorists have recently discovered a new line of attack: Catharine MacKinnon, apparently, wants to be like a man. This idea originated with an essay in Drusilla Cornell’s book, Beyond Accommo­dation, but is now being recirculated in other academic papers. Mandy Merck cites Drusilla Cornell as an authority for maintaining that Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘identification of sexual pene­tration with personal violation’ reflects a specifically masculine fear (p.236). Drusilla Cornell asks ‘What is the worst imaginable disaster to the masculine self? To be fucked.’ This may be so, but why? Precisely because to be fucked is, within the patriarchal imagination, to be subordinated, made like a woman. The existence of this fear in men does not undermine Catharine MacKinnon’s arguments, but reinforces them. To say that any woman who resists subordination is trying to be like a man is simply to echo a tired old anti-feminist put-down. (This impression is heightened by the fact that Mandy Merck uses Drusilla Cornell’s arguments without reference to their theoretical context.)

The clincher for Mandy Merck, what apparently ‘proves’ Catharine MacKinnon’s masculinist aspirations, is even more dubious. Drawing on an article by Wendy Brown, she refers to Catharine MacKinnon’s ‘phallic’ prose, quoting (as Wendy Brown does) from a passage of polemic in which Catharine Mac­Kinnon uses the words ‘I’m getting hard on this and am about to get harder’. Mandy Merck finds Catharine MacKinnon’s words ‘hilarious’. The hilarity is that of the small child who hears someone inadvertently uttering a ‘dirty word’ — and she pursues this line of argument with to the end with school-girlish glee. That the crudest of crude Freudianism can be used in this way would itself be risible were it not widely regarded as a serious academic argument.

Gender and power

I would not want to give the impression that none of this book is worth reading. The contri­butions I found most interesting were those based on empirical research or which discussed everyday social practices. Shirley Prendergast and Simon Forrest base their chapter on observations of group conflict between boys and girls in secondary schools. They observe that heterosexual desire and excitement arise out of this context, rendering heterosexual relation­ships highly problematic. The difficulties of overcoming this conflict within relationships is exacerbated by the very limited ways in which it is possible to discuss sexual feelings and practices within heterosexual relations — a problem highlighted in Jill Lewis’ chapter on everyday sex talk.

The only chapter which deals explicitly with power in heterosexual relations is Ine Van­wesenbeek’s discussion of her work with prostitutes and with and other young hetero­sexual women in Holland. What emerged from her data on the latter group was very similar to the findings of the Women Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) in Britain: lack of sexual pleasure, sex being used for instrumental purposes, women taking responsibility for men’s feelings and a lack of ability to negotiate what they wanted from sex beyond ‘yes or no’ or ‘whether or not’. Sex was still being defined and negotiated in male terms. This is a far cry from the mutual blending of bodies and pleasures which Lynne Segal seems to think happens in consensual heterosex. However, Ine Vanwesenbeek shares Lynne Segal’s optimism and her concern with promoting female sexual agency. Like the WRAP team, she found a small minority of young women who were more confident in asserting their desires and sees in them hope for the future.

At first glance I had assumed that there was nothing in this volume on pornography, but I found it discussed in Jane Ussher’s chapter on ‘the lesbian phallus’ (a concept much in vogue in certain academic circles at the moment). This chapter does raise some interesting ideas on the relationship between material and discursive analysis of sexuality in the context of hard-core pornographic videos. Her emphasis is on the construction of phallic mastery in pornography, which she sees as central to the affirmation of masculinity and to many men’s fantasies and desires (even if their own penises can’t match those of the porn stars). It is when she moves on to use of the phallic dildo in lesbian erotica and sexual practices that most T&S readers would part company with her. Here, she believes, the disjunction between phallic power and the material reality of penises is exposed, with the result that lesbians using the phallus disrupt our usual assumptions on the natural­ness of gender and sexuality.

Off the agenda

While many, indeed most, contributors pay attention to gender, often more emphasis is placed on difference than on hierarchy. Radical feminism is alluded to (in the preface) only in order to be dismissed and there are no recog­nisably radical feminist contributions. Hence the debate this book intended to foster excludes certain participants. It thus compares unfavour­ably with some other recent collections, such as Diane Richardson’s Theorising Heterosexuality which is genuinely inclusive of a wide range of feminist opinion. What is not on the agenda is illuminating. The lack of serious discussion of sexual violence or coercion, and the little on the power relations underpinning heterosexuality indicates that the politics underpinning much of this volume may be problematic for feminists.

The new sexual agendas of the title are largely defined in terms of freedom from sexual oppression. Now this is an admirable goal and one which most feminists would endorse in principle. The problem is that not everyone agrees about what is oppressive and which freedoms should be pursued. Certainly freedom from oppression cannot be equated with freedom of expression. In a hierarchical society one person’s right to do their own thing (sexually or otherwise) can very easily end up as someone else’s subordination. The main barrier to women’s freedom from sexual oppression is male violence and coercion, in all its many forms. Any sexual agenda which excludes or marginalises the problem of violence has little to offer women.

References

Drucilla Cornell Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law (Routledge, 1991)

Diane Richardson Theorising Heterosexuality: Telling it Straight (Open University Press)

Diana Scully  Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted Rapists (Unwin Hyman, 1990)

Lynne Segal Straight Sex (Virago, 1995)

Lynne Segal New Sexual Agendas (Macmillan, 1997)

Wendy Brown ‘The mirror of pornography’ in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. (Princeton University Press, 1995)