Sungold of Kittywampus has written an awesome analysis of the relationship of feminism and the “sexual revolution.” It’s part of a larger post trying to explain this persistent and knuckleheaded notion that “casual sex” and the entire hook-up culture is a direct result of feminism. Here’s the key part of her “Feminism, Sexual Revolution, and ‘Getting the Milk for Free’”
Where Amy and other anti-feminists blame feminism for bringing on the sexual revolution and leading directly to the shattering of young female psyches, the history is much more complicated, and most of it has little to do with feminism. Heartbreak goes back at least as far as Sir Lancelot and Lady Guinevere. The sexual revolution on the 1960s had its roots in youth culture, drugs, and rock and roll. The advent of the birth control pill in 1961 enabled young women to try out sex – whether in hippie communes, bars or with a committed boyfriend – without fear of pregnancy paralyzing their pleasure.
Second-wave feminism was generally chilly toward the sexual revolution, at least as most young heterosexuals were experiencing it in the 1960s and 1970s. Nowhere in The Feminist Mystique did Betty Friedan suggest that the path to women’s liberation required shagging anything that moves. By 1970, Anne Koedt was assailing men’s sexual incompetence in “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.“ The Redstockings saw men as well-nigh irredeemable; why would you want to sleep with the enemy? While the Redstockings Manifesto (1969) didn’t go so far as to repudiate all relations with men, within a few years political lesbianism and separatism became a major current within feminism. Needless to say, none of these women were advocating casual sex with men, either. Third-wave feminism has generally repudiated separatism and criticized slut-shaming, but that’s not the same as positively advocating hookups and casual sex for all women.
Where feminism made a difference was, of course, in opening up historically new educational and economic opportunities for women. These made it possible for women to defer marriage and to enjoy sex without bartering it for economic security. This, to my mind, was the real sexual revolution. It’s just not the one people mean when they blame feminism for the failings of the hookup scene.
So yes, in a materialist sense, feminism enabled casual sex. But more importantly in the long run, feminism has opened the possibility of for us (men and women alike) to have sex only when we want to, not under duress, and not for economic security or survival. In a perfectly feminist world, no one would stay married against their will, for example, or submit to a spouse’s unwanted advances. We don’t live in that world yet. Plenty of people stay married for economic reasons. (Some of them are men.)
For those of us who aren’t trapped by economics, feminism allows us to say no to the sex we don’t want, and an enthusiastic, lusty, happy yes to the sex we do want. That’s revolutionary, all right. It’s just not identical with “the sexual revolution.” It’s also antithetical to the idea that anyone needs to participate in hooking up.
It’s totally fine to stop right here. One of the peculiarities of reading text is that my reaction, which follows, can seem like an immediate reaction to what Sungold wrote. It’s not. I’ve been thinking about it, a lot, for several days. Nor is the following text likely to be my final reaction. If you want to read the rest of this post feel free to read it as a snapshot. And not necessarily any more relevant than a pundit’s color commentary on an original work.
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For the record, by all accounts “hook-up” culture predates the 1960. I’m sure people can chase the beginning as far back as they like.** Suffice to say, though, that since sociologists estimated that one in three first pregnancies in the decidedly non-feminist 1950s were conceived in the backs of cars I’m going to say the only “revolution” part of the sexual revolution was that men didn’t have to worry as much about getting their hook-ups pregnant. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there.
Sungold didn’t mention Andrea Dworkin but, yeah, from roughly 1968 (the Redstocking Manifesto) to 1986 (Dworkin and MacKinnon’s testimony before Ed Meese’s Attorney General’s Report on Pornography taskforce) mainstream feminism was more interested in curtailing men’s sense of innate entitlement to sex with women than encouraging hookups. So nope, no particular feminism=casual-sex hookup connection there either. (Yes, there was dissent in feminism let by 70s stalwarts like Erica Jong and 3rd-wave vanguards like Susie Bright, but note the implication of the standard definitions of “mainstream” and “dissent.”)
And through all that the (frustratingly slow, multi-generational) accumulation of social, political, economic, and legal power led to an alteration of expectation of equal power in feminism (even if not yet exactly or always reality of equal power) resulted in members of newer generations feeling… well… entitled to make their own damn decisions about who, what, when, where, how, why and if they have sex. Or work, go to school, walk, worship, eat, drink, play, think, make mistakes or fail, vote, reproduce, spend, date, marry, volunteer, read…
Of course there really are people who think that entitlement make decisions a big mistake. And there are plenty of people who would dearly, dearly like to roll that back — either out of fear or cultural fundamentalism. And for them, surprise, women having Teh Sex would seem like the biggest affront…
But here’s the trick with that: the actual “sexual revolution” was about only one thing and that was, basically, attempting to eliminate as many obstacles to women granting “consent” as possible. And while it might have had some interesting and productive side effects that’s about it.*** So I’m going to say that contemporary anti-feminist objections to the “sexual revolution” are actually part and parcel of the culture that produced it.
Meanwhile feminism has indeed produced a revolution. But as Sungold so elegantly lays out, sexual activity is something closer to a side effect… and “as well,” rather than the main event. And for all the residual sexual-revolution echos about “obtaining consent,” or even “obtaining enthusiastic consent,” the real revolution of feminism is about being able to decide. Where the decision can include sex but isn’t limited to it.
Oh, another thing? As Sungold says, unlike the “sexual revolution” the feminist revolution is not limited to creating more consent… to sex initiated by men. Including “casual sex” and “hookups.” The feminist revolution is about women’s power to decide to participate. Or (the big threat to anti-feminists and an even bigger threat to the “sexual revolution”) not to.
Failure to distinguish the difference between the “sexual revolution” and the feminist revolution is not limited, by the way, to anti-feminists.
[** My vote for the beginning of the sexual revolution has always been the introduction not of the pill in the 1950s or 1960s but of penicillin in the 1940s. Remember that until herpes and then HIV reached critical mass in the 1980s antibiotics handily cured all significant STDs, reducing them from serious chronic and often life-threatening illnesses to minor nuisance. —fl]
[** Consider that “but you’re not going to get pregnant now that you’ve got the pill” happens to be a very good excuse to grant consent. And the benefits of being able to manage one’s fertility beyond one’s ability to more safely consent to sex are manifold. But if you read most of the popular literature about the pill in the 1950s and 1960s anything that wasn’t about “regulating periods” or “controlling acne” was about enabling sex. Now why would this seem more women-centric? One clue would be that men (at least, and even women) didn’t start “discovering” things like “foreplay” and women’s orgasms till nearly a decade into the “revolution.” And I’d like to argue that that even that wasn’t as much about feminism as that the next factor limiting consent after pregnancy fear of pregnancy was women beginning to ask “so what’s in this for me anyway?” And even then, soon after that, in men’s eyes anyway, conversation about one’s ability to “give” orgasms became another metric of male prowess. Rather than, say, women’s opportunity, or affirmative, self-motivated interest in enjoying it more. (And people wonder why I call myself a prudish libertine!) —fl]
