As for your second paragraph, you give (through satire) the example of gangs of men “pressuring” women to tongue kiss each other on the beach. But do you know that this is pressure? I don`t know if this has been established clearly. It could be that you are looking at young women choosing to use their freedom to express themselves in a really stupid way, and assuming they must be being forced. But if feminism has succeeded this is not necesarily the case is it?

For example, we could have a situation where feminism has succeeded so women feel safe and empowered doing whatever they want; but women are inherently different (as you suggest), and the way in which they are inherently different means that their sexuality will always be more publicised and on display; so obviously in this case they will be safely engaging in public displays of sexual activity.

(I`m not saying I believe this, just trying to create an example).

Its also possible that these women are trail-blazing, just as previously women trail-blazed by getting jobs (and being abused by the men they worked with); joining the army (and being abused) and so on. In this case they are being publicly shameless as men have always been able to do, and in the process of trail-blazing this frontier of feminism they are copping some abuse. Sure that`s bad, but that`s not the fault of feminism.

But it seems to me that you are saying you expect women to be inherently more vulnerable than men, and that shamelessness by women is inherently worse in some sense than shamelessness by men. I don`t care to dispute the former because I thought all forms of feminism said that this is irrelevant, and men should change their behaviour in accordance with any such vulnerabilities; but the latter just seems to me to be a straight out double standard. If a man can show his arse out the window of the sports team bus and it is just stupid and silly, then a woman showing her arse (and I would argue her tits too) should also be just stupid and silly. And as women do this more and more, we should take it as evidence that they feel safer in public, and we should applaud it as an achievement of feminism. The same goes for group sex with the football team, in my view.

By way of responding to the fact that straight men enjoy watching submissive women engage in sexual activity, I suggested that women still engage in sex, but be assertive/domme-ish rather than submissive. #83 countered by saying that straight men would STILL enjoy watching it just as much. Touche.

I guess I should have clarified that I was talking about ALL sex, not just sex-on-film, be it GGW or otherwise… but anyway, here we are: regardless of whether a woman is submissive or assertive (whether the sex is man-centric, woman-centric, totally symbiotic, etc.), the sexual act is always something that straight men would enjoy watching (assuming that the woman is decently attractive); hence it is always “potential porn,” even when it is not actually being filmed.

Okay, fine. The logical next question would be, is it also something that straight women would enjoy watching, provided that the man is decently attractive—i.e. the same old “would women like porn as much as men, if the men in porn were ever good-looking?” question. The only answer I’ve ever found that satisfies anyone is “some would and some wouldn’t.”

To reestablish the relevance here: #88 seemed to be saying that sex is always a “performance” for the woman, regardless of how she acts, ergo the submissive/assertive distinction is an illusion.

I disagree, because I wasn’t talking about “Art for Art’s Sake,” here; I was talking about actions designed to lead to results—i.e. the woman getting off vs. not getting off.

In a back-and-forth about the same subject on my site, a woman reader objected to my defense of hookupism on the grounds that most men are bad at pleasing women. But this is not a problem about sex, it is a problem with men. So, my point is, if the problem with casual sex is that men are bad at it, then isn’t the obvious solution “women should make men be good at it,” rather than “women shouldn’t have sex?”

My site, for those who are interested: http://www.the1585.com

LOL! I guess I can’t blame you too much for that; I couldn’t avoid “appropriate,” “ideology” or “subjectivity” in my own comment. Makes me glad I’m out of grad school, though.

Take a look at this NYT review of the Pussycat Dolls television show; it’s a good example of what I’ve been suggesting (which, again, is NOT a conflation of the sexual revolution and feminism—-but that sex-positive nineties feminism, some years after the advent of the sexual revolution, provided the vocabulary for the mainstream entree of a promiscuous female sexuality.)

Where are these young girls located and how can I get there?

Hi! We’re back live.

The thing is, this is America. Empowerment and liberation are our bread and butter, or vice versa, and choice is the cream in our Coffee of Autonomy. The feminist movement didn’t invent such discourses; it just reframed and redeployed them for its political purposes, like many other political movements. And holding the feminist movement in any way responsible for advertisers’ and marketers’ exploitation of such discourses seems to me like holding St. Augustine responsible for Valmont’s use of soul-saving language in his seduction of Mme. de Tourvel in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. It not only ignores the unscrupulousness of seducers in choosing their tools, it comes close to blaming the victim for the behavior of the seducer. (If we’re looking for an ism to blame for GGW, I think capitalism is a much more likely candidate. And yes, some feminists are not as anticapitalist as I would like them to be, but at the level of abstraction we’re speaking at here, so what?)

I’m all for complex historiographies of cultural phenomena, but I still have a near-antiquarian respect for timelines: the sexual revolution began roughly a generation before the launching of anything we would now recognize as “the feminist movement.” Maybe there’s some other definition of “sexual revolution” that doesn’t incorporate, e.g., Kinsey, Hefner, and the pill; we could talk about that. But until I see such a definition, I’m going to keep insisting that “feminism was an important cause of the sexual revolution” is bad social history, and not because of implicit prudery, but because it fails a basic test of historical explanation: sequence.

As for Belle’s peroration, I think you’re confusing a question with an answer. Belle is (oh God, here I go) trying to problematize traditional notions of the nature of male and female desire by pointing out that all the desire with which we have experience and on which we base our ideas of tradition and nature comes to existence under a regime of male privilege and heteronormativity (whew). Unless you want to argue that those two conditions are “natural” in some way that is synonymous with “immutable,” then Belle’s question is perfectly appropriate: in the absence of those constraints, what would female desire, or even female social behavior, look like? The point is, we don’t know. And the answer “it would look like young women flashing their boobs at Joe Francis’s camera” is sillier and more unimaginative than most.

The idea that women only engage in sex to aquire other goods is obviously an important meme for people who use women and their children as mechanisms for distributing property, but that’s only been a vanishing fraction of the population until sometime in the last few centuries. Can we trace the point where the notion of women as earthy types who would have (at least) as much sex as men when they could get away with it went completely out of fashion? Did it happen at the same time as pink for boys?

Hogan, to my assertion of weak causality (of feminism on “The Next Pussycat Doll”, that is), you responded that weak causality is no causality at all, to which I respond: Sure it is! It’s what attorneys call cause-in-fact or “but-for” cause: but for sex-positive feminism’s handy phrasebook of “empowerment” and “liberation,” “The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll” would not have have the cultural purchase to appear on network television. But-for cause is relatively easy to establish, and it does not assign culpability: I’m not saying that feminists or feminism are at fault for producing the Dolls. But I’m saying that it, among several other cultural and structural factors, was a relevant antecedent.

Now you may very well be right that some other cultural coattail would have been caught to pull soft-core images of young women onto primetime, had feminism never happened or had it strenuously resisted the appropriation of its vocabulary. In truth, I’m very sympathetic to a complex historiography in which many different factors—-cultural, structural, technological, demographic—-interact unpredictably, and from which clear causality is difficult to extract. Indeed, I think it’s plausible that the etiologies of, say, hookup culture and GGW are entirely distinct: hookup culture may be less ideological than demographic, responding to the higher proportion of women on college campuses. The permissive sex-positive culture for which GGW has been standing as synecdoche is in fact a massive and only-very-loosely organized social phenomenon, and I doubt a single master-narrative can account for (or change) it.

Of course, if one begins questioning classic social constructionism—-that is, if one begins to doubt the straightforward corespondence between ideology and subjectivity/behavior (for instance, between consuming representations of promiscuous behavior and actually behaving promiscuously), if one begins to allow a greater role for structural, demographic, and biological factors—-then one must also question Belle’s fundamental (and fundamentalist) presumption, which she shares with most feminism, that the bad parts of our current sex culture are an expression of residual bad old patriarchal ideology, and that if we just get the ideology right then everything else will fall into place in our brave new sexual utopia. This I doubt very highly.

Oh foo, I didn’t mean to do that. I’m hardly the one to tell anyone that they’re off topic, in many ways (as a non-owner of this blog, as someone who goes off-topic all the time, as someone who thinks off-topic things can be more interesting). “The topic of the thread” hardly seems to refer uniquely.

What I might say is that, given the way the thread started, I can be a bit oversensitive about concern about whether you should encourage your daughters to participate in the hook-up culture (descriptions of which I suspect are slightly exaggerated, but I wouldn’t know) seeming to lend support to sacralism.

dsquared, I think Mary Catherine Moran isn’t too unclear here—if I may project, her question is “Is Feminism Reponsible for Girls Gone Wild?” And I think (he says, piling on in a cowardly fashion) she’s right to be pissed off at you for saying “pricktease.” I think the answer is “probably not in any meaningful sense”; as Russell Carter says it’s debauchery, not feminism. Or I might say, the sexual liberation associated with feminism created the conditions necessary for Girls Gone Wild, which was created by people extremely hostile to feminism; but then the Jewish population of Germany was necessary for the Holocaust, which was perpetrated by people hostile to the Jews, and that doesn’t make the Jewish population of Germany responsible for the Holocaust.

I’ve Godwinned the thread! Does that mean I win?

To reflect what is often the ugly reality behind this statement, I would change the above to:

“it’s rather difficult to work up the enthusiasm to court a girl when she’s been raped or exploited by everyone you know without such courtship (why should I be the one who has to get her consent?),”

To talk about how fully-consensual sex damages young women while avoiding talking about how non-consensual sex damages young women shows incompetence at best.

Sexual exploiters turn, “women have the right to say yes” into “women who can say yes don’t have the right to say no.” Then they turn around and say, “Feminism made me do it.”

Uh-huh.

Yeah, it’s amazing how the range of choices available to women in contemporary society corresponds to the range of choices available to African-Americans in the antebellum south.