fandomnumbergenerator | (no subject) (Reply)

"The dregs of the sexual revolution were what remained, and it was really sort of a counterrevolution (guys arguing that since sex was beautiful and everyone should have lots everything goes and they could go at anyone; young women and girls with no way to say no and no one to help them stay out of harmful dudes’ way). The culture was sort of snickeringly approving of the pursuit of underage girls (and the illegal argument doesn’t carry that much weight; smoking pot is also illegal; it’s about the immorality of power imbalance and rape culture). It was completely normalized. Like child marriage in some times and places. Which doesn’t make it okay, but means that, unlike a man engaged in the pursuit of a minor today, there was virtually no discourse about why this might be wrong. It’s also the context for what’s widely regarded as the anti-sex feminism of the 1980s: those women were finally formulating a post-sexual-revolution ideology of sex as another arena of power and power as liable to be abused; we owe them so much."

—

Rebecca Solnit, quoted in “What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox?” by Jia Tolentino. jezebel.com 2/16/2016

The period between the sexual revolution and the women’s movement sounds unbearably bad. And I think a lot of the problems have been repeated in the most toxic aspects of sex-positivity.

But I can’t let 80s anti-sex feminism off the hook, because sex radicals like Pat Califia and Gayle Rubin didn’t come out of nowhere. You can argue that part of third wave feminism was an effort to be more accommodating towards men, but there was also a lot of frustration at the ways that, by the late 80s, second wave feminism was being used to police women’s bodies.

Things that were still super contested when I was a pup:

dildos, representational or not
BDSM (even between women)
butch/femme
femme in general
trans men and especially trans women
bisexuality
penetration as a pleasurable activity for women
women’s sexual pleasure in general
lesbian desire as a form of desire, as opposed to a political statement
sex work as a labor issue (instead of seeing sex workers as collaborators with the patriarchy)
any kind of porn, but only because of its cultural effects, and not because of the labor conditions

(Ellen Willis’s No More Nice Girls is actually a really good source for an insider’s view on sex and second wave feminism.)