The Sex Wars

Posted: Tue, Oct 1, 2024

Context

The women’s liberation movement fell apart in the 1980s through a series of bitter, intense frictions around sexuality (“the Sex Wars”)—pornography, BDSM, sex work, butch/femme, trans lesbians, and more.

  • So far, we have focused on feminist efforts to reform abortion and rape laws in the late 1960s to 70s. These project were more critical than constructive in the sense that they were first and foremost responses to women’s material realities.
  • But the bigger-picture question of positive political vision remains: what would it mean/take for women to be free? what does feminism want to build?

Two key realizations at this time:

  • Patriarchy/male domination is a real thing: there can’t be liberation unless and until the relationship between the sexes (for feminists back then, the relationship between women and men) is thoroughly transformed.
  • “The personal is political”: This relationship encompasses our personal and sexual lives; questions about how to divide household labor, who gets to be the breadwinner/take the lead, etc. are not just questions of preferences but they raise questions of justice.
    • A worry in particular is that heterosexual romance and sex replicate male domination by eroticizing it: a man’s relationship to a woman in the bedroom mirrors his relationship to her outside of it.

This radical project was soon co-opted by liberal feminism (which led even radical feminists to turn to the law to fight pornography), lesbian separatism (which construed being a lesbian as a political identity), and anti-trans feminism.

  • This led to pushback that culminated in the 1982 Barnard Conference, shifting the battle line to pro-sex/porn/sex work/BDSM/etc. vs. anti-sex/porn/sex work/BDSM/etc. feminism.
    • We will focus on pornography and lesbian BDSM.
  • It also gave us the contemporary public understanding of sexual liberation/revolution: to have more sex, to express previously repressed/stigmatized sexuality.
    • But does having more sex make women free?

Pornography

MacKinnon’s view of pornography: pornography does not merely depict women’s submission to men; it enacts/enforces it.

  • Pornography teaches us what sex is like, and it’s not a kind of sex that’s good for women.
  • Pornography also teaches us how women should be treated and what women are for—men’s pleasure. This legitimizes rape, battery, harassment, objectification, etc.
  • Pornography silences women: literally (e.g., revenge porn) and illocutionarily (e.g., the ‘no’ that fails to be heard as refusal).
  • Feminist porn? erotica? Discuss.
  • Davis/Greene-style critique (Jaila)? Does pornography not also enact racism?

Playboy: we are a feminist magazine now—we empower women, give women freedom.

  • MacKinnon thinks there is a telling reason why this even sounds superficially plausible: women’s sexuality is “entertainment for men” -> to free women’s sexuality is to free men’s access to women’s sexuality -> Playboy frees free men’s access to women’s sexuality by selling women’s sexuality to men for their entertainment, and this is freedom for women.
  • When women can have sex only on men’s terms, having more sex is not freedom (recall our distinction between heterosexual sex vs. straight sex).