Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (14 page)

This new celebration of promiscuity in our culture exists alongside a continuing attachment to monogamy; we live in a society that still celebrates the big wedding, and the stable family as the place to bring up children. But for women who are not married, having many sexual partners without much emotional commitment is often seen as the most authentic way to behave. What’s more, women who celebrate promiscuity are often seen as the true feminists. As one journalist wrote about Zoe Margolis’s work: ‘Sleeping with whoever you fancy and objectifying men, not just waiting to be objectified…. I think she is the voice of third-wave feminism.’
¹⁰

It is wonderful to know that many women, just like many men, do feel that they can now choose their sexual partners and their sexual behaviour with such confidence, and to know that they will not be shamed by old ideas about appropriate feminine
behaviour. You only have to look at societies in which traditional views of honour still operate to know how essential this change is for women’s freedom; it is vital that women who do not choose monogamy are not made to feel shame. But I do think it is worth looking again at the equation that is now so frequently made between liberation and promiscuity.

This connection that is often made between the liberated and the promiscuous lifestyle tells us not only that women can choose to have uncommitted sex in which both individuals refuse to invest in emotional closeness, but that they actually should choose to have sex in this way. Once upon a time many feminists enunciated the opposite idea; they talked of the idea that women and men should meet equally in the bedroom, but rather than seeing this as an equality founded on lack of feeling, they idealised freely chosen sex characterised by intimacy and emotional connection. Unemotional sex has not been seen by feminists as a source of power and liberation for very long.

Western feminism was originally produced by the encounter of two cultural movements. The first was the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, whose leading voices argued that progress relied above all on reason and science. The second was Romanticism, whose leading voices at the start of the nineteenth century emphasised the primacy of emotions and intuition, and put their faith in the authenticity of an individual’s passions and desires. Mary Wollstonecraft, the founder of modern feminism, wrote her seminal works as the eighteenth century ended and the nineteenth century began, and she crystallised both the reason of the Enlightenment and the passion of Romanticism in her life and work. She produced the influential polemic
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, which argued that it was by reason that women would progress. Women required the same education as men, she argued, and should use their rational faculties to become equal members of society. In that
work Wollstonecraft was scathing about the way that many women saw their lives defined by love. But in her own life Wollstonecraft invested a huge amount of energy and idealism in her romantic relationships. This nearly destroyed her when her first lover left her, and she tried to commit suicide, but she went on to find her soulmate, William Godwin, and to put her faith in her relationship with him. She was condemned during and after her life for choosing to live with men outside marriage, but she did so because she believed in the romantic ideal of total intimacy. She told Godwin that with him she felt that ‘the senses are exactly tuned by the rising tenderness of the heart’.
¹¹
She was hardly alone in wanting to move forward women’s rights while looking for an authentic, intimate relationship with a man.

At the very beginning of the twentieth century the anarchist Emma Goldman, who at one point went to prison for defending women’s rights to contraception, was defiantly in favour of free love even though her position put her beyond the pale of respectable society. She left her husband, and had relationships with a number of men without wanting to be married. But it was free love, not free sex, that she was seeking. As she wrote in her autobiography: ‘I have propagated freedom in sex. I have had many men myself. But I loved them; I have never been able to go indiscriminately with men.’
¹²

It is even a travesty of much second-wave feminism to suggest that women were then seeking uncommitted promiscuity. Michèle Roberts, the novelist, was a committed feminist from an early age and recently wrote a memoir,
Paper Houses
. In it she discusses what she and her peers were seeking in their emotional lives. ‘We believed in passionate sexual love between men and women, as equals,’ she wrote nostalgically.
¹³
Her memoirs detail how difficult that was to achieve, but you never get the sense, as you do with the memoirs of sexually free women today, that it is a journey in which emotional engagement is marginal. When she
fell in love with her partner for seventeen years, Jim, she wrote, ‘Jim and I were in love. I always compare starting writing a new novel to leaping off the cliff and hoping the angel will swoop down and bear me up on his strong wings, and I think falling in love is similar. You leap into the unknown. And yet you leap at the same time into the known. Your lover knows you, satisfies that deep desire you have to be truly known, and you do the same for him. You discover you are cut out of the same stuff … Our minds flowed out and touched. We chose each other. I felt that very deep down we were kin. We were alike. We were soul-mates. We belonged together.’
¹⁴
As she said in the same memoir: ‘Our belief in free love entailed valuing sex in a way that nowadays, when sex is more commodified and pornogrified than ever, seems perhaps hopelessly romantic.’
¹⁵

The way that absolutely uncommitted sexual encounters are spoken about now suggests that in order to become liberated, a rather cold promiscuity is the order of the day. Some women do not necessarily see this shift as a positive one. Carly Whiteley, the 17-year-old whose words were quoted at length in
Chapter Three
, is angry that she is growing up in this milieu. ‘It’s all casual sex now, nobody talks about love,’ she said to me. ‘I wish I could have a real connection with a man. But there’s no courtship any more. That’s all dead. It’s just immediate. There’s no getting to know someone, you’re expected just to look someone up and down and make the decision just like that, are you going to have sex or not. There’s no time to build up a connection. The idea is that you have sex first, but how are you meant to create the kind of excitement, the emotional connection, after that? I want to have an emotional connection with a man. I want it to be there with the feeling that I am equal to him. I do think I’m as good as a man. But I don’t want just this no-strings sex stuff.’

I have heard this kind of sad judgement from many young feminists recently. A woman I’ll call Esther, who is twenty-four
years old and works in sex education, also feels it is time to challenge this culture in which sex is all performance and no emotional connection. Her desire for something different makes her feel very isolated. ‘The group of girls I was friends with at school were all sexually active from a very young age,’ she said to me. ‘I remember when a friend of mine lost her virginity. It was on a park bench. She was fourteen. There was huge pressure on me to join in with that kind of behaviour, but I didn’t. That wasn’t what I wanted from sex. That kind of casual relationship isn’t right for me, but I was made to feel like a freak right through school and university because of that.’ With the young women that Esther works with now, she feels that: ‘There is a total detachment from emotion when they talk about sex. I remember one young girl I was working with who told me about how she had lost her virginity in the school field at lunchtime one day. She said she had thought, “The bell’s about to go, I may as well do it now or I’ll not do it.” There was this complete detachment from the act itself and what it means. This isn’t rape or sexual abuse, but it isn’t a positive experience. In some ways I find it quite disturbing. But people have so normalised this kind of sexual activity – it’s totally emotionless. The act itself is no longer about intimacy, it’s no longer about communication.’

Esther feels that the culture she sees around her is not a true fulfilment of what feminists fought for in the 1960s. ‘People say that this kind of behaviour began in the 1960s, but I’m not sure. I get the feeling that the ideal of liberated sex in the 1960s was about really loving and valuing your body and being proud of it. Now there is a toxic mix, for young girls, of feeling they have to be sexually active but also feeling very critical of their bodies. So they will have lots of sex, but without pleasure or pride.’

Esther herself is not in a relationship and believes that this is partly because of the disjunction between what she is looking for and what the culture around her encourages. ‘I just don’t want to have a relationship based on this kind of devalued sexual
exchange. I know that some of my friends actually think I’m quite extreme in my views, simply because I won’t buy into that culture. I’m made to feel isolated. When I read writers from previous times, I feel rather jealous of them. I mean female writers who could explore their sexuality without having to downgrade it. Look at a writer like Anaïs Nin – for the times, she was quite promiscuous, but every sexual encounter was also about emotional communication. When she was with someone she really embraced what they were like physically and emotionally and they did the same to her. I think that’s what I’m looking for. It’s not because I’m a prude that I don’t want casual sex, but I want emotional experience with the sex. I feel that people around me come from a totally different world.’

Esther’s point interested me; you may not choose the self-conscious Anaïs Nin, who endlessly dissected her sexual experiences in her detailed journals from the 1930s onwards, as your own heroine, but nevertheless there is something memorable about her emotional engagement in her erotic life. Look at the way that Anaïs Nin insists that every encounter with her lover, Henry Miller, is unique: ‘I seize upon the wonder that is brushing by, the wonder, oh, the wonder of my lying under you and I bring it to you, I breathe it around you. Take it. I feel prodigal with my feelings when you love me, feelings so unblunted, so new, Henry, not lost in resemblance to other moments, so much ours, yours, mine, you and I together, not any man or any woman together.’
¹⁶
That ease with words such as ecstasy and wonder seems excessive to us now, when set beside the cool, unemotional descriptions of our modern memoirists. In contrast, look at the way that Zoe Margolis explains to men how to approach a one-night stand: ‘It’s just sex … If you want a “Girlfriend Experience”, go hire a prostitute.’
¹⁷
While for Margolis sexual partners are interchangeable, for Nin her lover is irreplaceable: ‘you and I together, not any man or any woman together.’ To be sure, in previous generations many
women writers had to repress their physical needs and experiences in order to fall in with social conventions, and feminism was needed to release women from that repression. This meant that women clearly needed to break the cage of chastity, but what I heard from some women is that they feel there is now a new cage holding them back from the liberation they sought, a cage in which repression of emotions takes the place of repression of physical needs.

Many young women I spoke to seem to feel that their lives have been impoverished by the devaluation of sex into exchange and performance rather than mutual intimacy. For a long time our culture sustained the ideal that it is not a lowering of the self but a full flowering of the self to become entirely attuned to another’s desires and feelings, and that there is a great power, even sanctity, in sex between two individuals who have a deep emotional connection. This new culture of shags and threesomes, orgies and stranger fucks, seems to be replacing the culture in which sex was associated with the flowering of intimacy. Although this is so often associated with liberation, I am not convinced that this is what all feminists were seeking, then or now. I kept hearing a frustration from the young women I interviewed, all the sadder because it is often hidden. As Esther put it, ‘I want to be with a man who sees sex as an intense experience, a unity, and people just don’t now – sex has become completely devalued.’ Or as Rachel Gardner, the youth worker who was quoted in
Chapter Three
, said to me, ‘Feminism is now seen as sexual promiscuity, which is such a narrow view of empowerment. Liberation isn’t just about promiscuity. For some women liberation may be about having a new sexual partner every week, but for a lot of women it will be about finding someone to be with for your whole life, growing together over the years, and you never hear about that any more. What liberation means to me is that in any sexual relationship you are cherished, and you cherish.’

5: Pornography

Almost everything that has been discussed here so far is connected, in one way or another, to the new accessibility and expansion of pornography. The huge growth of pornography through the internet is what makes so much of the soft pornography in magazines, newspapers, music and cinema possible; it’s hard to object to any of the mainstream aspects of the hypersexual culture, from
Nuts
to lap-dancing clubs, given the great leviathan of obscenity that anyone can access at any time with a couple of clicks of a mouse at a computer. Anyone who wants to put magazines with naked women on the covers back onto the top shelf of newsagents, or to push strip clubs out of town centres, runs up against the fatalism created by the knowledge that the internet has brought all those images and far, far more to everyone’s desk.

Many women who would call themselves feminists have come to accept that they are growing up in a world where pornography is ubiquitous and will be part of almost everyone’s sexual experiences. Anna Span is the most famous and prolific female porn director in the UK, and she believes that positive effects
have arisen for women in the way that pornography has now moved into the mainstream. In her view, this development has encouraged women to be more honest about their own sexuality. When I visited her in her Tunbridge Wells office, I found a matter-of-fact woman in her thirties, who was keen to convince me of the liberating possibilities of pornography. ‘Women are exploring their bodies more,’ she told me confidently. ‘They are learning to orgasm more. Sex shops are now much more female friendly; women can find toys and books and videos that relate to their sexuality.’ Span herself decided to start working in pornography when a trip to Soho as a young woman showed her how much there was catering for men’s sexuality, and how little for women. She calls herself a ‘Nietzschean feminist’ for refusing to see herself as a victim of this culture, and instead deciding to join men in producing pornography.