Email: rachelkramerbussel at gmail.com



 

Lusty Lady

BLOG OF RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
Watch my first and favorite book trailer for Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Get Spanked in print and ebook

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Lynne Segal talks sense about Female Chauvinist Pigs

Once again, we have to go overseas (to The Guardian in this case) for some decent coverage of this book:

Levy calls for "sexual lives that are genuinely liberated, responsible and pleasurable": Yes please! Who on earth would say no? (Well, I'll leave that to your imagination.). But try unpacking those terms seriously and you're in very messy waters, a fact this book fails to even remotely acknowledge. Here, good sex is somehow "doing what comes naturally (or perhaps, just a little, socio-culturally); expressing your own true self".

Let me share a little secret with you, something that hampers any attempt to rectify sexual behaviour: sex is all about wanting to be objectified, wanting to be the object of another's desire, another's gaze (even if, like a traditional straight man, we pretend that this is not the case). However, it is about wanting to gain this attention in ways that are reasonably safe from risk, harm or hurt - except, perhaps, for when these are the very things that turn us on.

Responsible sexual behaviour is difficult enough, at times, to practice, if easier to try to specify and talk about. But "liberated sexuality"? What have we here? There is a very short step, as so many have noticed before, between talking of liberated sex and coercively prescribing one's own norms and tastes.

Repeatedly labelling teenage girls "bimbos" and "trashy" for baring midriffs, thighs and knickers, or for trying out a spot of pole dancing, is hardly a good start for avoiding smug, class-ridden, self-satisfaction.


Also, Ariel Levy wrote the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse. and apparently tackles the question that I Blame The Patriarchy et al. were just lookiing at. Personally, I think that debate should be left in the 80's, but that's just me. Once again, I'm gonna be all myopic and focus on my book and the hopefully narrowed-down scope of it, otherwise I'll be 80 or dead without having written a word except on this stupid blog.

From Amazon:

In her introduction to this twentieth-anniversary edition of Intercourse, Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, discusses the circumstances of Dworkin's untimely death in the spring of 2005, and the enormous impact of her life and work. Dworkin's argument, she points out, is the stickiest question of feminism: Can a woman fight the power when he shares her bed?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home