Feminism: A Brief Introduction to the Ideas, Debates, and Politics of the Movement by Deborah Cameron

Author:Deborah Cameron
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Women's Studies, History, Women
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

5

Sex

The publishing sensation of 2012 was E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by a previously unknown author that chronicled the relationship between Christian Grey, a billionaire “dom” (the sexually dominant partner in bondage and discipline and sadomasochism, or BDSM), and Anastasia Steele, a young college graduate who is still a virgin when the two first meet.1 The book was the first volume in a trilogy, by the end of which the couple are married with a child. Despite the trappings of “kink” (chains, whips, spanking), it is in essence a conventional heterosexual romance. However, it was the kink aspect that made Fifty Shades a cultural phenomenon, prompting pundits of all kinds to ask what its extraordinary appeal to women readers said about the condition of women in the twenty-first century. Did it say, for instance, that feminism has not changed the eternal truth that girls just wanna be dominated by older, richer, more powerful men? Or do today’s women get pleasure from fantasies of female powerlessness precisely because they are now, in reality, so powerful? Was the popularity of these books (which spawned a whole genre, dubbed “mommy porn” by the media) a sign that women have been liberated to explore their own desires without shame, or was it worrisome evidence of their continued susceptibility to representations that make violence against women sexy?

These questions divided feminist commentators, though they were more or less united in hating the books. Whereas some argued that relationships based on male dominance and female submission are inherently problematic, others, while agreeing that Fifty Shades was problematic, maintained that the trouble was its misrepresentation of BDSM, which is based on a contract between equal partners, whereas Ana in the book is not Christian’s equal. One commenter who took this view declared herself “fully in support of anyone doing whatever (safe, consensual) thing they want to do to get themselves off. Feminists for Orgasms!” But others criticized this kind of “orgasm politics” for taking no account of the way sexual desires are shaped by the social and political context. “Women cope with male violence and oppression,” wrote one, “by eroticizing male dominance.”2

The debate about Fifty Shades is one recent instance of a larger debate about sex that has gone on, in some form or other, throughout the history of feminism. As Carole Vance wrote in 1984, sex for women is “simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression and danger, as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure and agency.”3 If feminists focus only on the “pleasure” side, they risk ignoring the reality of male violence and oppression, but if they focus only on the “danger” side, they risk ignoring women’s experience of sex as something actively desired and enjoyed. Few feminists would dispute that these two dimensions exist, and that feminism must address them both. But feminists have not agreed on what the balance between the two should be, and on some issues there are deep divisions between those who describe their position as

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