Via Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors, The U.K.‘s Times Online: “Are women sexually liberated, or just confused?” demonstrates the confusion between what in the 1960s were called, respectively, women’s liberation and the “sexual revolution.”
Fifty years ago, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir described womanhood as a socially constructed activity; today, after several waves of feminism, and a recognised right to contraception, sexual pleasure and all that, we still find our sexuality defined by pop music, glossy magazines, advertising and pornography.
Dr Petra Boynton, a sex psychologist, sees the very commercialisation that makes us seem so free as the reason we’re not satisfied. “The scented candles, the lingerie, the stuff  it doesn’t explain how anything works, it just presents a dream,” she says. “Sex has become mandatory, competitive and commercialised. Vested commercial interests suggest it could be great, if only you had their product.”
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Boynton was invited to go on GMTV recently. “They wanted to do something about empowering women [sexually]. I said: ‘Let’s talk about the clitoris.’” They didn’t like that, “but they were having a pole-dancer on”. No wonder we’re paranoid…
Yesterday I expanded on Sungold’s point about the separation between feminism and the “sexual revolution” that began in the 1960s to clarify that while they came into public consciousness around the same time the former, feminism, was about increasing women’s opportunities in all dimensions while the latter was almost entirely oriented around increasing women’s opportunities to… consent** to sex when men initiated it. (Or, as more conservative factions inside and outside feminism might put it, to decrease opportunities to decline it.)
What I didn’t get much into was that Sungold was prompted to write her history in response to a young woman who says feminism is bad because she thinks men are icky aliens and wants no part of the casual sex and hook-up culture she blames feminism for! (Blaming feminism for hook-up culture? Um… Amy009 meet Twisty Faster. And seriously, even though she’s currently still in the “I just want a no-strings-attached marriage” stage I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks Amy is thiiiis close to crossing over to radfem-ism.)
Dr. Boynton’s experience makes it pretty clear why Amy, or Twisty for that matter, might make a distinction between empowerment and what Twisty mockingly calls “empowerfulment.” It also illustrates pretty nicely Sungold’s distinction between the feminist revolution and the almost exclusively male-oriented “sexual revolution.”
That’s not (obviously) to say it’s particularly bad if GMTV’s programmers wanted to do a piece on pole-dancing as empowerment. But great mother of pearl it’s bad — really bad — that they were ready to do a piece on pole dancing but ran like bunnies from doing a piece on “the, uh, nether-type zone“ empowerment at all.
[** I actually make with the little joke here. Actual sexual consent didn’t really come into use as a legal concept until the 1980s. —fl]
