SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF FEMINISM

Cartoons by Cath Jackson

. Male and female sexual desires should be seen as the creation of social processes, and therefore open to change: not given by biology.

. Women have the right to control their own fertility and to bave as many or as few children as they wish.

. Women have the right to refuse or to initiate sex inside or outside marriage, on the same basis as men.

. Both men and women should strive to eliminate the social conditions which currently make it necessary that a woman barters her sexual freedom for economic or other reasons - in marriage or in prostitution.

Another kind of loving
Mariette Clare looks at sex education books for children,
and sex books for adults and decides that they are often
saying the same thing. And she doesn’t like it.

RECENTLY my middle son. aged ten. ame home from school with a booklet: How we grow op. It tells children about puberty and about having babies and therefore, inevitably, about sexuality. I turned to the pages that describe making love. consciously seeking - and finding - the absences and inclusions that feminism leads me to expect.

I don’t only object because heterosexuality is defined in clinical terms - so making lesbianism and gay men’s sexuality invisible. It is also the assumptions found in such seemingly neutral and ‘objective’ biological descriptions that I wish to challenge.

I could have asked my sons why the booklet exhorts girls to make sure they are clean during menstruation, but has no such interfering advice to boys about wet dreams. Should I have pointed out to them that a boy’s genitals were fully illustrated, showing ‘penis and scrotum, but a girl’s labia and clitoris were not so much as mentioned, let alone visually represented? Why these differences? Why are girls denied of such information, and why are only their bodies seen as potentially dirty?

But most of all, what could I have said to them that would make them understand my objection to this description of sexual intercourse in the book: When too people make love they have great feelings of love, tenderness and pleasure towards one another. They lie close together and kiss. The man’s penis becomes erect and firm so that he can slide it slowly into the woman’s soft vagina. He moves his penis backwards and forwards several times and then the sperm in a small quantity of fluid comes out of the hole in the end. What, you may ask, is wrong with that?

Briefly. I’m tempted to answer: most of it.

First of all, and in true patriarchal fashion, the man is in control - ‘he can slide it (the penis) slowly into the woman’s soft vagina.’ It is not just chance that the woman is made the mere receptacle for the man’s activity. To be active and in charge is not just the way men behave, in bed and out of it: it actually defines being a man. The woman is rendered physiological signs of sexual arousal: the vagina may be called soft, but why not mention - at the very least - that it is also wet?

In this book sex is defined - as it is almost everywhere - as heterosexual penetration and ejaculation. This meaning is so dominant and so well-established that it is hard to remember that it is not dictated by biological fact, but by a society where men are in charge. In a feminist culture, on the other hand, the same description might run more like this: ‘When two people make love they have great feelings of love, tenderness and pleasure toward one another. They lie close together and kiss. Hey touch and stroke each other all over, but particularly in the place that feel especially nice. When they are both ready, the woman will take the man’s firm penis into her wet vagina. They take turns to move, each feeling the other’s body, enjoying the pleasure the reach a special sort of climax, so that the sperm in a small quantity of fluid comes out of the hole in the end. But his does not happen everytime, and this is, in any case, only one of the may ways in which people make each other happy.’

There are no good reasons why sexuality - even heterosexuality - has to be equated with the sex act itself; or why sex has to carry the association of male penetration: or why its goal should be thought of as orgasm; or why the male orgasm should be identified with ejaculation. Patriarchal culture may try to insist that such connections are natural. normal and unavoidable. But that is only one of the many lies it tells in order to make those who dissent think that they must be slightly deranged, so silencing their voices and excluding their ideas from public circulation.

But these meanings have been formed within a culture where sex has been linked to certain types of self-expression. In other non-Western cultures even patriarchy knows better. As the Tao of love and sex says, and in the male voice, too: ‘. . . sex without ejaculation is also a release of tension but without the explosion. It is a pleasure of peace not of violence, a sensuous and lasting satisfying melting into something larger amid more transcendent than oneself It is a feeling of wholeness, not of separation, a merging and a sharing not one exclusive, private and lonely spasm.

Yet as my sons grow older even this is not what they will learn about their own sexual capacities. Indeed, it is in direct conflict with how, as boys, they are already choosing to shape their identities in order to become real men. Already they are learning to deny their vulnerability, and so seeking the approval of their masculinity from other boys and men.

But as a feminist my concerns cannot be just with my sons. Analysing my own sexual experiences has taught me that the politics of the bedroom are - to coin a phrase - intimately tied up with the politics of the outside world. From fairy tales onwards, we learn in stories and romances that men and boys have exciting adventures, while virtuous women and girls have to wait patiently for their hero to come and find them.

True, romance carries with it the values of intimacy and caring. And I endorse these. But I also know that love is the pivot of women’s oppression. It delivers woman’s physical and emotional nurturing to a man who is unconscious of his inability to re-pay in kind. It eroticises power, and teaches women to luxuriate in the doubtful pleasures of passivity.

She felt suddenly weak, and had no strength either to struggle, or to brace herself against him, amid stood limp amid unresisting, finally aware of the futility of lighting him. A little whimper, half of pain, haIf of protest, escaped her, and immediately lie relaxed the tight grip his fingers had on her arms, his mouth softening on hers and his kiss becoming a seductive caress. A warmth began to steal slowly through her, she seemed unable to control her senses and her will was not her own. This quotation, from a Mills and Boon romance, could be repeated ad nauseum. She accepts, surrenders, is acted upon: he enforces, knows, controls. It is the form of sadomasochism, a form fed to women in the substance of romance, fed to men in the substance of pornography.

My sons can scarcely fail to encounter pornography. Porn is not a minor aberration, refuge to the inadequate. Nor is it a sacred and inalienable human right. It is central to the organisation of a patriarchal society. In the USA the porn industry’s annual turnover exceeds that of the straight entertainment industry.

Porn invites its users to equate sexual pleasure with their power. It puts the consumer in the position of being able to gaze at, arrange or dispose of the woman’s body at will, without any demand being made on him to be reciprocally recognised or personally vulnerable. In this sense, advertisements can use women’s bodies according to the same set of conventions. To indicate how pervasive is the idea that adult women are essentially available to all adult men, one boys’ comic offers a weekly prize of six dollars for a photograph of ‘your prettiest teacher’.

Sexuality is about all these things: from romantic novels and films to pornography, from sex education and therapy to great literature, from advice columns to casual conversations. And it is part of the task of heterosexual feminists to follow the example set by lesbian feminists and to create new ways of expressing sexuality - that do not subordinate women. This is not easily done. Our efforts could only too easily be reformed as just interesting variants of the usual games that revolve around male-defined sexual pleasure. Real reciprocity between women and men demands more than a few changes in bed-manners for male lovers. The sadomasochistic forms of sexuality which unconsciously inform even the school booklet that my son brought home, are intimately connected with the economic and emotional exploitation of women by men.

Fundamental change would involve an acknowledgement of the emotional and social dynamics of power that operate at the most intimate levels. Only through such recognition could they be mutually changed. If men can follow women in re-defining desire, then perhaps more men will discover. as one man did, that: ‘it’s very pleasurable to be desired as though you were a woman. It’s very pleasurable to try to look after a woman as though you were her mother, as well as her lover. It’s very pleasurable to be touched in places and ways that men more usually touch women.’

Mariette Clare is a writer who is currently researching images of food.