Sarah Jaffe, of Season of the Bitch but currently guest-posting at Feministe talks about life on the receiving end of what I call the dominant male “no-sex” class paradigm and the way it pressures women not just to feel guilty not just about having desire but for even wanting to desire in the first place.

I want no guilt in desire. Sometimes the things we want, for various reasons, are not things we should actually have/do (see above promises and commitments, etc), but there’s nothing wrong in the wanting.

The last time I took on this subject at my blog, I wrote:

Sexual desire isn’t the only thing that women have been limited on. We’re expected to be restrained about food, about power, about love, about friendships, about everything. Even I worry constantly that I’ve crossed a line, that I’m bothering someone if I call too much or email too much, and I think that stems from the same place: feeling that I’ve made the fact that I want something too clear, too obvious.

One of the things that bothers me especially is the “He’s just not that into you” framing for women, particularly heterosexual women: we are supposed to worry about whether we are desirable, not what we want. The “No means no” model works the same way: we are consenting to something, not desiring it. The “she wanted it” rape excuse: our wants are not our own to define.

She said it here.

As it happens, 100 years ago most western, “civilized” men would have still felt the same guilt and anxiety about desiring sex since it was supposed back then that ejaculation (even “as many as 10 a year!”) destroyed men’s health and shortened their lives. Even more weirdly by today’s standards there was actually a little more tolerance for women’s desire… as long as that desire was couched in the acceptable framing of desiring children.

But even in those ostensibly halcyon days the paradigm’s bogus Rules of Desire #1 made it inconceivable and intolerable for a woman to express sexual desire. And even today it’s astonishingly difficult to discuss women’s sexuality without overtones (at least) or overt expressions of anxiety, guilt, and shame.

And as Jaffe points out earlier in her post the paradigm’s grip persists even in feminist debates about oral sex or fetishes or other sexual activities which, regardless of how individual women might feel about them, shouldn’t be enjoyed, let alone desired, but should instead be abstained from for everyone else’s benefit. The presumptions there being first that women have discretion over the behaviors they enjoy and that, furthermore, they can be obliged to alienate themselves from their enjoyment in service of someone else’s wishes. Problem being that those are effectively identical to the sacrifices demanded by anti-feminist institutions from the church to Cosmopolitan. (The irony is probably not lost on ultra-separatist blogger Jill, a.k.a. Twisty Faster, who argues passionately that the dominant paradigm is inescapable even as she insists all women should participate in a sex strike until her demands are met.)

My point here isn’t how women “really” experience their sexuality (which I couldn’t speak to authoritatively anyway.) Instead it’s how society — men in it and sometimes women — have constructed things such that we may easily converse only about a portion of that experience. The bad half.