Bad Sex by Nona Willis Aronowitz

Author:Nona Willis Aronowitz [Willis Aronowitz, Nona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

This passage makes me cringe every time. It’s a reminder that anyone assuming they know more about your desires than you do is ultimately not going to help along your liberation, a fact well-known to the women being pressured by hippie dudes to “put out” at the height of the sexual revolution. And because this seduction scene is designed not only to make a political point but to titillate its presumably female readers, it obliterates the theory of women’s “true” fantasies as devoid of aggression.

In other words, Rubyfruit Jungle is an illustration of lesbian pleasure rooted not in an idealized fantasy of harmony but in a flawed, messy, lusty, uniquely human reality—one that’s at times adversarial and contradictory. When I dug further into lesbian texts of the era as I wrote this book, I found more and more examples of lesbianism that were unapologetically sexual and pleasure-centered and multilayered, not born out of grudging necessity or the moral purity of sacrifice.

These women made compelling cases for lesbianism as a way not just to escape misogyny but to more fully appreciate women’s humanity in a way that men have been systematically taught not to. They didn’t shy away from the reality of homophobia yet made it clear that lesbianism was worth the trouble. They described relationships that were expansive, full of possibilities, with uncertainty built in. Sometimes, the pleasure these writers described came from the thrill of a scriptless future, a chance to shape a life that doesn’t get reduced to the drudgery of the nuclear family. Other times, sex itself—not sensuality—took center stage. In an erotic poem by Cheryl Clarke, she describes “a lesbian adventure one splendid night / of furtive, fixed stars and fully intend- / ing to have you suck my breasts and fuck me / til dawn.” The way Cherríe Moraga describes an older lover in her prose poem “The Slow Dance” is striking for both its sexual tension based in power dynamics and its eroticizing of older women: “I want age, knowledge. / Your body that still, after years, withholds and surrenders—keeps me / there, waiting wishing . . . / Willing. Willing to feel this time what disrupts in me.” In another poem, she craves the “animal hunger” of her lover, watches her “leave and enter me / my eyes, liquid / prey before her hunter.”

What they all had in common was the sense of sexual agency, that lesbianism wasn’t a purely political default setting but something one explores largely because, well, it feels good. Anybody who declares themselves anything but straight has by definition gone out of their way to think about, accept, and affirm their own desires—and to stop bullying themselves into a life that feels wrong for them. I started thinking of this as an expansion of the “yes means yes” theory of enthusiastic consent; much like a yes should be the bare minimum for having good sex, an emphatic yes should be required for declaring any sexuality, whether queer or heterosexual.

In

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