Loose Women, Lecherous Men (13 page)

Read Loose Women, Lecherous Men Online

Authors: Linda Lemoncheck

Tags: #Social Science, #Feminism & Feminist Theory, #test

BOOK: Loose Women, Lecherous Men
9.48Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
Page 48
"less-than-love or daily agony." For all of these reasons, Firestone condemns contemporary romance while applauding what would be fulfilling sex for both partners
under different social conditions
.
49
Therefore, I believe that it is a mistake to charge, as Robert Solomon does, that Firestone represents the feminist position that
requires
heterosexual love to be unfulfilling for women.
50
Solomon's claim is that only by regarding sexual roles as "fundamentally sex-neutral" and by presupposing "a significant degree of equality" between the sexes can we keep from condemning romantic love and restore its moral virtue. Solomon is convinced that if we use gender politics to describe the nature of romance, we will necessarily limit love to gender stereotypes. True romance for Solomon requires the kind of autonomous choice between sexual partners that is unavailable to women in Firestone's patriarchy, where sex is, according to Solomon, "often used to reinforce submissive and subservient female roles.''
51
Solomon perceptively describes the insidious nature of gender hierarchy under patriarchy only to dismiss such a hierarchy as having no bearing on "romantic love as such."
52
According to Solomon, a romantic consciousness simply does not make a political issue out of social differences. Romeo's and Juliet's love for one another would not have been romantic, for example, if they had been preoccupied with the political consequences of their union. However, suppose Romeo's idea of romance is regular sex, and Juliet's version is much less physical, more a function of loving intimacy and affection. Furthermore, suppose Juliet is feeling some pressure from Romeo to "put out," since he has been paying for their clandestine rendezvous at the cafe outside of town. In such a case, to view the couple's romance as a relationship between autonomous equals is to ignore the sexual and gender politics of their relationship and to misrepresent each partner's very different conceptions of romantic love. If, according to Solomon, "[o]ur roles in romance are in every case personally determined,"
53
then the "view from somewhere different," not the "view from nowhere," is vital to understanding the very political nature of "personally determined" romance in gendered, hierarchical contexts. By defining such contexts as deterministic and monolithic instead of viewing a gendered perspective as offering a more representative picture of sexual relationships, Solomon rejects the point of view from which he could identify the complex social location of each couple's romance.
Even if Romeo's and Juliet's conceptions of romance are the same, their romance need not be dissipated by an appreciation of social politics. Romeo could fully recognize the devastating political consequences of his pursuit of Juliet and make a "romantic" effort to accompany her to a more egalitarian society where family name or position is of no consequence to personal relationships. In such an environment, Solomon's romantic "sex-neutral" relationships might indeed be possible in virtue of the enlightened political context in which such relationships would take place; indeed, the elimination of gender and class hierarchies is the ideal context that Firestone believes is necessary for constructing positive human relationships. However, I have argued that within a patriarchal context, we cannot ignore social location without misrepresenting the sexual experiences, preferences, and desires of individual women.
Solomon's belief that romance must be defined as a relation among equals, despite the political context in which such romance exists, reflects the perspective of
 
Page 49
the "view from nowhere" described in chapter 1, since he maintains that "[t]he equality that is the precondition for love only consists in the demand that social differences do not matter."
54
No wonder he is convinced of Firestone's universal condemnation of romance, since her analysis is based on the fact that social differences
always
matter under hierarchical social conditions; what Firestone advocates is a rejection of the sex/class system that drives such hierarchies, so that the oppressive nature of romantic love under such a system will collapse. Solomon goes so far as to suggest that a "quasi-political self-consciousness . . . undermines the intimacy of love"; yet without such a consciousness, "the intimacy of love'' for many heterosexual women will be nothing over and above acquiescing to domination and control. Solomon's feminism consists of such things as equal pay for equal work and equal access to jobs and careers; according to him, to drag a personal and private affair like romance into the public arena of gender politics might undermine "the very different strategies that are required to encounter each of them."
55
I argued in chapter 1 that this type of liberal feminism advocates a kind of gender blindness that is typical of the "view from nowhere." Solomon's insistence that we discover the true nature of romance divorced from its social location is consistent with a liberal feminism whose /files/04/43/34/f044334/public/private dualism offers sanctuary from the politics of sexuality. Indeed, only by making feminism into liberal feminism can Solomon hope to argue that current gender roles are generally unfavorable to women
and
that gender equality requires gender blindness. Feminists of a more radical perspective would argue that gender blindness fails to recognize that romantic love sterilized of its gender politics entices women to enter into personal relationships that may be oppressive to them.
Both Solomon and Robert Nozick argue in favor of the sexual exclusivity of romantic lovers, because they believe romance requires the partners to share an identity designed to create what Solomon calls a kind of "ontological dependency" by which the lover is always present or "in mind" of the beloved.
56
This premise, however, ignores Beauvoir's insight that many women's perceived inferiority to and high valuation of men, combined with men's desire to assert their superiority, will compel women to submerge rather than share their identities with men, leaving women anonymous and invisible (the proverbial "woman
behind
the man"). As I argued earlier in this chapter concerning prostitution, to imply that all women are in a position to make autonomous choices with regard to their sexuality or that they value the "affective individualism" upon which Solomon's autonomy is based is to ignore the very real social subordination of many women that Solomon himself describes. In order to remain true to a feminist vision of sex equality yet advance an agenda for the intrinsic virtue of romance, Solomon dismisses the radical feminist agenda out of hand by dismissing the dialectic between gender and sexuality. Indeed, one of Beauvoir's paradoxes of romantic love reflects what I have contended is the dialectical complexity and contradiction in women's sexuality: Women who are able to assert their own needs in heterosexual relationships may remain dissatisfied, questioning whether their more agreeable partners are "real men," while women who feel incapable of asserting their own needs in their heterosexual relationships must confront their own powerlessness.
57
Solomon admits that romance is "sometimes ontologically vicious" and by definition a struggle "for control over shared and reciprocal self-images."
58
If this is part
 
Page 50
of the intrinsic nature of romance, then Firestone is right that romance is no place for women in a society where such struggles are biased in favor of men. A cultural feminist would not want the romantic love Firestone describes, with only its pretense of care respect. I have quoted Firestone and others to suggest that the sexual exclusivity required by romance is circumscribed by a historical possessiveness and subjugation of women that makes its adoption as a feminist value extremely suspect. I have also argued that sexual exclusivity is no guarantee either of serious sexual commitment or of the warmth and affection cultural feminists value.
My intention is not to confirm cultural feminism's sexual values for women by detailing the intimate and affectionate landscape of at least some forms of promiscuity. Because human beings are socially situated, any attempt to determine an intrinsic female nature faces the postmodern challenge of nonarbitrarily differentiating those aspects of our sexuality that are nurtured from those that are natural. Furthermore, recent sociological evidence suggests that women and men have as many similar sexual needs as dissimilar ones, however they are to be accounted for.
59
My claim is that
even if
good sex for women amounts to intimate, sensitive, and affectionate sex, promiscuous "cruising" sex is as likely a candidate in the prevailing Western social climate as sexual exclusivity. Therefore, promiscuous sex can satisfy a sex radical feminist's desire for sexual exploration, while providing a cultural feminist with the sexual care and respect she demands for good sex. In the following section, I examine some of the arguments in favor of promiscuity that do not rely on its compatibility with intimacy.
Sexual Satisfaction, Sexual Growth, and Sexual Empowerment
The foregoing arguments in favor of promiscuity serve those who value personal and loving sex. A sex radical feminist, however, argues that the sexual exploration promised by promiscuity is not, and should not be, limited to intimate sex alone. I will investigate the anonymity of commercial sex work in chapter 4. Are there any reasons to recommend noncommercial promiscuous, casual, or recreational sex that divorces eros from romance?
I suggested in my discussion of sexual privacy that sexual exclusivity places a tremendous burden on one person alone to satisfy the diverse sexual needs of another, in all times and places, throughout the course of a single life. One of the arguments frequently offered in favor of promiscuity regarded as either the repetitious pursuit of different sexual partners or as adultery is that promiscuity eases the pressure on any one person to provide for all of a partner's sexual needs. The pursuit of a number of different partners can drastically reduce the sexual dissatisfaction and sexual frustration that can result from the failure to fulfill the diverse sexual demands of any one person.
60
A sex radical feminist would argue that our expectation that one person should carry such profound weight in our sexual lives results from a belief that the social construct of monogamy is, in reality, a natural fact. The documented sexual habits and customs of diverse cultures, however, reveal otherwise.
61
A sex radical would add that the sexual apathy and emotional distance from one's sexual partner that often accompany the sexual frustration of monogamy would be minimized
 
Page 51
if one had many different sexual partners. Furthermore, sex radical feminists claim that any sexual harassment of women and the violence committed against them that can be attributed to monogamous, unfulfilled heterosexual desire would be eliminated by lifting the sanctions against promiscuity.
Freudians would respond that the price we pay for civilization is a fairly large dose of sexual frustration. The more sex is repressed into the narrow range offered by heterosexual monogamy, the more human energies will redirect themselves to the pursuit of business, science, and the arts.
62
Moreover, sexual frustration is tremendously profitable for businesses who convince consumers to purchase their wares with the promise of otherwise scarce sexual satisfaction. Sexually provocative advertising whose success depends on sexual scarcity offers much less temptation to the person afforded socially sanctioned access to sex in the open market.
Furthermore, it could be argued that even promiscuity is no
guarantee
of sexual satisfaction. This is precisely the complaint of many women whose "liberated" sex life has made them feel shallow, objectified, and alone. Sexual satisfaction for many people would seem to require the time and emotional energy spent with just one person in order to discover and pursue their own sexual needs. Promiscuous teenage girls are especially vulnerable to the epithet of "slut," censure that makes otherwise pleasurable sex a blow to their self-image.
In addition, some feminists might contend that violence against women is a product of misogyny, not sexual frustration. Promiscuity will only make life more difficult and dangerous for women as we seek out partners who may wish to do no more than abuse or dominate women in bed. From this view, if we really want to rid our society of its sexual subordination of women, then we need to change men's attitudes toward women, not give them sexual license to reinforce patriarchal behavior.
A sex radical feminist challenges the sexual psychologism that says a free libido would mean chaos, monstrosity, or debility. As Gayle Rubin points out, "[S]exuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology."
63
An alternative way of understanding promiscuity would be to imagine how creative, productive, and supportive we would be
in the absence
of the sexual repression bound up in sexual exclusivity. According to this view, regarding sex as an evil to be repressed instead of a blessing to be celebrated is a culturally loaded, medieval prejudice that contemporary Western society has made into debilitating neuroses for men as well as women.
For sex radicals, the belief held by some feminists that freedom from women's heterosexual subordination requires the dissociation of women from sex is yet another sign of the Western presumption that sex is bad. A sex radical feminist points out that once we situate sex in a Judeo-Christian context, sex is something to be repressed because sex is something evil. Therefore, women become repressed, marginalized, and dissipated by their association with sex. Rather than dissociate women from sex, the sex radical challenges us to celebrate women's association with sex
by liberating sex from evil
specifically, from the evils implicit in nonmonogamous, nonprocreative, nonintimate sex acts that run contrary to the prescribed Western norm.
64
Promiscuous sex then becomes a source for sexual satisfaction for women free of the fear of social stigma.
Furthermore, sex radical feminists point out that women's complaints against het-

Other books

Freudian Slip by Erica Orloff
Turn Towards the Sun by Jennifer Domenico
Three Wishes by Jenny Schwartz
The Iron Duke by Meljean Brook
Playing for Julia by Carroll, Annie
Greatest Short Stories by Mulk Raj Anand
Double Talk by Patrick Warner
Two Little Lies by Liz Carlyle