So ARE you sex-positive or sex-negative?
Seriously, (a) I am a sex-positive “dyke.” Where do I fit unto Uncle Hugh’s grand scheme? And (b) sexual repression is not inevitable, comrade, nor is it necessary to the Revolution.
They do, but the nature of their “benefit” depends on the class to which they belong
Debatable even under capitalism (See Wendy McElroy’s book
XXX: AWoman’s Right to Pornography,St Martin’s Press, 1995). A socialist society would refrain from regulating any sexual behaviour predicated on the effective consent of all parties (and yes, this
will require prolonged ideological struggle).
I fail to grasp your syntax — are you implying that Ms Lovelace was lying for some other reason? Or should “just” come after “lying.” If the latter is the case, I have no debate with you — Linda’s work was a product of what you rightly call a capitalist industry.
Once again, definitely no argument. The horrific exploitation of many women and men in the sex industry (including beatings, rape and even murder) goes hand-in-glove with capitalism’s hypocritical “family values.” A socialist government would decriminalize prostitution and treat it as any other profession, giving the term “sex
worker” real content.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Are you simply stating that sexuality is “born not made”? (I would only partially agree here — I have said in many posts that I am not
entirely a biological determinist) Are you implying that sexuality is not “political”? (In which case, your “second-wave feminists” would be the first to disagree with you). Or are you saying that, because heterosexuality is normative in capitalist society, few women ever get the chance to find out if they might, in fact, be gay? (
This I totally agree with!)
Please do!
“Second-wave” (radical) feminism was never a homogenous “movement” — it was a whole flurry of diverse currents, akin to Trotskyism, though even more diffuse.
Still, I can give you several reasons why the many feminists turned to “Victorian prudery” at the time. The primary one is that the men of the “New Left” were arrogant bastards who felt that the “sexual revolution” gave them the opportunity to act like pigs in shite and get “it” on their own terms, whenever, wherever and as often as they wanted with no thought for their partners. After several thousand years of misogynistic repression, it took a while for women to learn to feel comfortable doing the same to their male counterparts.
However, a deeper reason lay precisely in that repression. Second-wave feminists, like gays at the same period, were seeking liberation, not merely equality. Rejecting both traditional Marxism and Freudian psychology, but searching for a “materialist” explanation of their oppression, they came to the conclusion that its basis was biological — women had always been oppressed and would always be oppressed as long as they remained women; men had always been oppressors and would always be oppressors as long as they remained men. This was later elaborated into a “Marxist-like” schema of base and superstructure, but, since the base was biological, “it could never be changed” — men, and by extension the system which served men’s interests (“the patriarchy”) were the eternal enemy, to be resisted at all costs. Men and their interests were always opposed to women and theirs.
It is this line of thought that leads to the analogy of heterosexual relationships as colonization and “imperialism” and restricting sexual expression as part of the struggle for liberation. Unlike the repression of the Victorian period, this repression was self-imposed, and therefore “revolutionary” (a similar argument is used by muslims and islamophile “socialists” to argue that the hijab/burqa is a tool of “liberation”).
In a pattern common to the oppressed, the radical feminists (who initially were mainly white, middle-class, tertiary-educated Americans) took all the “negatives” that were stacked against them in Western culture — women were “irrational,” “passive,” “asexual/non-sexual/anti-sexual” etc etc —and turned them into positives. This was even applied to the biological “base” — instead of “the Curse of God,” for example, menstruation became “the Gift of the Goddess.”
Second-wave feminism was idealist and static rather than materialist and historical. Moreover, it attempted to unite women ACROSS classes rather than split them along class lines. It was thus wrongheaded, but not wrong — the insights it provided into the nature and causes of women’s oppression were inestimably valuable, even if its solutions were less useful.
I’m a Marxist, not a Freudian. I prefer to seek explanations in society, not by mucking about in the heads of individuals.
One may as well blame the sexual repression of Stalinism on the time Iosef Jugashvili spent studying for the priesthood, or the Holocaust on Hitler’s overprotective but psychologically damaged mother and his mental abuse at the hands of his father.