Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Susan Frelich Appleton of Washington University School of Law has an interesting paper in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law and Justice called Toward a ‘Culturally Cliterate’ Family Law?. Amazingly (for an academic paper) you can download and read the whole thing. Here’s the abstract.

Toward a ‘Culturally Cliterate’ Family Law?

Susan Frelich Appleton
Washington University School of Law

Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice, Vol. 23, 2008
Washington U. School of Law Working Paper No. 09-05-02

Abstract:
Sexual desire and sexual activity long have played central roles in family law, rationalizing its rules, informing its policies, and animating any number of calls for reform. Since the 1970s, gender equality has also become a salient value in family law – purporting to correct legally imposed double standards of the past. Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men’s orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women’s interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.

This paper attempts to begin to fill the gap and to explore the incongruities. It builds on Susan E. Stiritz’s Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women’s Not Coming (published as a companion piece) and examines the relevance of Stiritz’s analysis for family law. According to Stiritz, “’[c]ultural cliteracy’ denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris, which is that it is a culturally despised body part because it is an obdurate reminder of women’s independence and power and supports women’s liberation.” Stiritz tracks the role of the clitoris and women’s sexual pleasure through history, compares past and contemporary anatomical understandings of the clitoris, and then demonstrates through empirical studies, based on courses she has taught, how cultural cliteracy can empower women and bring new insights to the reading of women’s texts. She calls for the integration of “adequate understandings of the clitoris” into a variety of different discourses, including law.

In response, this paper focuses on family law as a promising site for integrating cultural cliteracy into legal discourse. Part I introduces the project and its challenges. Part II explores the central role of sex in family law, with emphasis on how family law seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriage and how this effort to manage sexual activity plays out, given the pervasive silence about women’s sexual pleasure. This analysis, in turn, exposes significant inconsistencies, challenging the coherence of family law’s own stated policies, including its simultaneous preference for monogamous marriage, acceptance of no-fault divorce, and commitment to gender equality. Part III turns to contrasting ways to make family law more culturally cliterate, specifically, allowing individuals to learn what they can from popular culture versus undertaking affirmative government efforts to promote such knowledge, through educational programs. Part III next looks beyond educational programs to suggest how respect for women’s sexual pleasure might prompt rethinking several specific aspects of family law, including divorce grounds; civil actions for sexual harm; and the legal treatment of various supports, interventions, and protections that facilitate sexual pleasure, from sex toys to reproductive autonomy. Part IV concludes with a deeper look at the prospect of a culturally cliterate family law, including the fundamental paradoxes that it might pose.

Keywords: clitoris, sexual pleasure, women, orgasm, marriage, channeling, monogamy, family law, gender equality, feminist theory, sex education, divorce, torts, sex toys, reproductive autonomy, contraception, abortion

Source: Social Science Research Network. Follow the link to download the full document here.

Yes it’s hard-core academic feminism. No I haven’t had time to read it all (I’ve got to finish cooking supper.) Yes it gets off to a very nice start

[T]his project, which began as a modest and largely conservative attempt to accept family law largely on its own terms while making the case for attention to women’s sexual pleasure, ultimately exposes profound paradoxes that merit analysis.

...if family law were to rescue women’s sexual pleasure from popular culture, our understanding of such pleasure would no doubt change. Would such “legitimating” efforts impose confining regulation, in turn defeating the individuality, diversity, and spontaneity necessary for the sexual pleasure that animates the enterprise? Can cultural cliteracy survive family law?

Finally, and again paradoxically, if we take modern family law on its own terms (in the sense of conceding, purely for purposes of analysis, its central objectives and ideals), then we must come to the conclusion that this field— which has sex as its conceptual core, which seeks to channel sexual desire into monogamous marriages, and which proclaims commitment to gender equality— would be far more coherent if it could achieve what Cultural Cliteracy establishes that women should be entitled to expect: sexual self-efficacy and sexual pleasure. Yet, this effort to make modern family law more coherent and more successful might well prove to be family law’s own undoing, subverting the stated objectives that provided the starting poCan family law survive cultural cliteracy?

I’ll be interested to see if she gets into some of the assumptions about gender and desire that Bob & Susan-Yager-Berkowitz confront He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It. Because as Appleton points out, quite a bit of family law is based on the premise that not only do men want sex in heterosexual relationships, only men want it. To a point, she also reminds us, that on occasion we both figuratively and, occasionally, literally remove women’s clitorises in order to curtail their enjoyment of sex. One way or another, though, it seems clear family law is designed — covertly and overtly — to buttress gender stereotypes rather than address the underlying reality: when you factor out acculturation then on average, over time, we all turn out to be very much alike.

Via Bridget Crawford of Feminist Law Professors