Description
[n a few double-spaced paragraphs, answer the following reading response questions based on our readings.Yuu should use specific examples from the readings to support your analysis and cite those examples according to your discipline’s guidelines. When in doubt, use MLA. There are 6 readings and one film to look at. I will provide readings, but for the film please check online sources. And be sure do the extra point.
De Beauvoir, Radicalesbians and Wittig all sought in their own ways to expand the definition of
“woman” from a biologically innate category which confers certain physical and social characteristics to one that was historically situated and socially constructed. How did Radicalesbians and Wittig build on the definition of womanhood that de Beauvoir theorized in her 1949 book The Second Sex?
Rubin’s essay lists “six ideologies of sexuality in the West that maintain a punitive social framework”.
Choose one of these ideologies and explain it, providing an example from outside Rubin’s essay. For an extra point, choose your example from Cohen’s piece on expanding queer political coalitions.
Briefly summarize why Butler uses drag as an example of her concept of gender performativity. Then give an example from Paris is Burning that you believe accords with Butler’s theory.
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CHAPTER 9
Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the
Politics of Sexuality
Gayle S. Rubin
The Sex Wars
‘Asked his advice, Dr. J. Guerin affirmed that, after all other treatments had failed, he had
succeeded in curing young girls affected by the vice of onanism by burning the clitoris with
a hot iron . . . I apply the hot point three times to each of the large labia and another on the
clitoris . . . After the first operation, from forty to fifty times a day, the number of voluptuous
spasms was reduced to three or four . . . We believe, then, that in cases similar to those
submitted to your consideration, one should not hesitate to resort to the hot iron, and at an
early hour, in order to combat clitoral and vaginal onanism in the little girls.’
(Zambaco, 1981, pp. 31, 36)
The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a
frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or
nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of
unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality.
Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the
religious disputes of earlier centuries. They acquire immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual
behaviour often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant
emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great
social stress.
The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. As
with other aspects of human behaviour, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given
time and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest and
political maneuver, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are
also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In
such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.
In England and the United States, the late nineteenth century was one such era. During that
time, powerful social movements focused on ‘vices’ of all sorts. There were educational and political
campaigns to encourage chastity, to eliminate prostitution, and to discourage masturbation, especially
among the young. Morality crusaders attacked obscene literature, nude paintings, music halls,
abortion, birth control information, and public dancing (see Gordon and Dubois, 1983; Marcus,
1974; Ryan, 1979; Walkowitz, 1980, 1982; Weeks, 1981). The consolidation of Victorian morality,
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and its apparatus of social, medical, and legal enforcement, was the outcome of a long period of
struggle whose results have been bitterly contested ever since.
The consequences of these great nineteenth-century moral paroxysms are still with us. They have
left a deep imprint on attitudes about sex, medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police
conduct, and sex law.
The idea that masturbation is an unhealthy practice is part of that heritage. During the nineteenth
century, it was commonly thought that ‘premature’ interest in sex, sexual excitement, and, above all,
sexual release, would impair the health and maturation of a child. Theorists differed on the actual
consequences of sexual precocity. Some thought it led to insanity, while others merely predicted
stunted growth. To protect the young from premature arousal, parents tied children down at night so
they would not touch themselves; doctors excised the clitorises of onanistic little girls (see
BarkerBenfield, 1976; Marcus, 1974; Weeks, 1981; Zambaco, 1981). Although the more gruesome
techniques have been abandoned, the attitudes that produced them persist. The notion that sex per se
is harmful to the young has been chiselled into extensive social and legal structures designed to
insulate minors from sexual knowledge and experience.
Much of the sex law currently on the books also dates from the nineteenth-century morality
crusades. The first federal anti-obscenity law in the United States was passed in 1873. The Comstock
Act named for Anthony Comstock, an ancestral anti-porn activist and the founder of the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice – made it a federal crime to make, advertise, sell, possess, send
through the mails, or import books or pictures deemed obscene. The law also banned contraceptive
or abortifacient drugs and devices and information about them (Beserra, Franklin, and Clevenger,
1977). In the wake of the federal statute, most states passed their own anti-obscenity laws.
The Supreme Court began to whittle down both federal and state Comstock laws during the 1950s.
By 1975, the prohibition of materials used for, and information about, contraception and abortion had
been ruled unconstitutional. However, although the obscenity provisions have been modified, their
fundamental constitutionality has been upheld. Thus it remains a crime to make, sell, mail, or import
material which has no purpose other than sexual arousal (Beserra, Franklin and Clevenger, 1977).
Although sodomy statutes date from older strata of the law, when elements of canon law were adopted
into civil codes, most of the laws used to arrest homosexuals and prostitutes come out of the Victorian
campaigns against ‘white slavery’. These campaigns produced the myriad prohibitions against solicitation,
lewd behaviour, loitering for immoral purposes, age offenses, and brothels and bawdy houses.
In her discussion of the British ‘white slave’ scare, historian Judith Walkowitz observes that:
‘Recent research delineates the vast discrepancy between lurid journalistic accounts and the reality
of prostitution. Evidence of widespread entrapment of British girls in London and abroad is slim’
(Walkowitz, 1980, p. 83).1 However, public furor over this ostensible problem
forced the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, a particularly nasty and
pernicious piece of omnibus legislation. The 1885 Act raised the age of consent for girls
from 13 to 16, but it also gave police far greater summary jurisdiction over poor workingclass women and children . . . it contained a clause making indecent acts between
consenting male adults a crime, thus forming the basis of legal prosecution of male
homosexuals in Britain until 1967 . . . the clauses of the new bill were mainly enforced
against working-class women, and regulated adult rather than youthful sexual behaviour.
(Walkowitz, 1982, p. 85)
In the United States, the Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, was passed in 1910.
Subsequently, every state in the union passed anti-prostitution legislation (Beserra, Franklin and
Clevenger, 1977).
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In the 1950s, in the United States, major shifts in the organization of sexuality took place. Instead
of focusing on prostitution or masturbation, the anxieties of the 1950s condensed most specifically
around the image of the ‘homosexual menace’ and the dubious spectre of the ‘sex offender’. Just
before and after World War II, the ‘sex offender’ became an object of public fear and scrutiny. Many
states and cities, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York State, New York
City, and Michigan, launched investigations to gather information about this menace to public safety
(Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1947; State of New Hampshire, 1949; City of New York, 1939;
State of New York, 1950; Hartwell, 1950; State of Michigan, 1951). The term ‘sex offender’ sometimes
applied to rapists, sometimes to ‘child molesters’, and eventually functioned as a code for homosexuals.
In its bureaucratic, medical, and popular versions, the sex offender discourse tended to blur distinctions
between violent sexual assault and illegal but consensual acts such as sodomy. The criminal justice
system incorporated these concepts when an epidemic of sexual psychopath laws swept through
state legislatures (Freedman, 1983). These laws gave the psychological professions increased police
powers over homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’.
From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, erotic communities whose activities did not fit the
postwar American dream drew intense persecution. Homosexuals were, along with communists, the
objects of federal witch hunts and purges. Congressional investigations, executive orders, and
sensational exposes in the media aimed to root out homosexuals employed by the government.
Thousands lost their jobs, and restrictions on federal employment of homosexuals persist to this day
(Bérubé, 1981a, 1981b; D’Emilio, 1983; Katz, 1976). The FBI began systematic surveillance and
harassment of homosexuals which lasted at least into the 1970s (D’Emilio, 1983; Bérubé, personal
communication).
Many states and large cities conducted their own investigations, and the federal witch hunts were
reflected in a variety of local crackdowns. In Boise, Idaho, in 1955, a schoolteacher sat down to
breakfast with his morning paper and read that the vice-president of the Idaho First National Bank
had been arrested on felony sodomy charges; the local prosecutor said that he intended to eliminate
all homosexuality from the community. The teacher never finished his breakfast. ‘He jumped up
from his seat, pulled out his suitcases, packed as fast as he could, got into his car, and drove straight
to San Francisco. . . The cold eggs, coffee, and toast remained on his table for two days before
someone from his school came by to see what had happened’ (Gerassi, 1968, p. 14).2
In San Francisco, police and media waged war on homosexuals throughout the 1950s. Police
raided bars, patrolled cruising areas, conducted street sweeps, and trumpeted their intention of
driving the queers out of San Francisco (Bérubé, personal communication; D’Emilio, 1981, 1983).
Crackdowns against gay individuals, bars, and social areas occurred throughout the country. Although
anti-homosexual crusades are the best-documented examples of erotic repression in the 1950s,
future research should reveal similar patterns of increased harassment against pornographic materials,
prostitutes, and erotic deviants of all sorts. Research is needed to determine the full scope of both
police persecution and regulatory reform.3
The current period bears some uncomfortable similarities to the 1880s and the 1950s. The 1977
campaign to repeal the Dade County, Florida, gay rights ordinance inaugurated a new wave of
violence, state persecution, and legal initiatives directed against minority sexual populations and the
commercial sex industry. For the last six years, the United States and Canada have undergone an
extensive sexual repression in the political, not the psychological, sense. In the spring of 1977, a few
weeks before the Dade County vote, the news media were suddenly full of reports of raids on gay
cruising areas, arrests for prostitution, and investigations into the manufacture and distribution of
pornographic materials. Since then, police activity against the gay community has increased
exponentially. The gay press has documented hundreds of arrests, from the libraries of Boston to the
streets of Houston and the beaches of San Francisco. Even the large, organized, and relatively
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powerful urban gay communities have been unable to stop these depredations. Gay bars and bath
houses have been busted with alarming frequency, and police have gotten bolder. In one especially
dramatic incident, police in Toronto raided all four of the city’s gay baths. They broke into cubicles
with crowbars and hauled almost 300 men out into the winter streets, clad in their bath towels. Even
‘liberated’ San Francisco has not been immune. There have been proceedings against several bars,
countless arrests in the parks, and, in the fall of 1981, police arrested over 400 people in a series of
sweeps of Polk Street, one of the thoroughfares of local gay nightlife. Queerbashing has become a
significant recreational activity for young urban males. They come into gay neighbourhoods armed
with baseball bats and looking for trouble, knowing that the adults in their lives either secretly
approve or will look the other way.
The police crackdown has not been limited to homosexuals. Since 1977, enforcement of existing
laws against prostitution and obscenity has been stepped up. Moreover, states and municipalities
have been passing new and tighter regulations on commercial sex. Restrictive ordinances have been
passed, zoning laws altered, licensing and safety codes amended, sentences increased, and evidentiary
requirements relaxed. This subtle legal codification of more stringent controls over adult sexual
behaviour has gone largely unnoticed outside of the gay press.
For over a century, no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to
protect children. The current wave of erotic terror has reached deepest into those areas bordered in
some way, if only symbolically, by the sexuality of the young. The motto of the Dade County repeal
campaign was ‘Save Our Children’ from alleged homosexual recruitment. In February 1977, shortly
before the Dade County vote, a sudden concern with ‘child pornography’ swept the national media.
In May, the Chicago Tribune ran a lurid four-day series with three-inch headlines, which claimed to
expose a national vice ring organized to lure young boys into prostitution and pornography.4
Newspapers across the country ran similar stories, most of them worthy of the National Enquirer. By
the end of May, a congressional investigation was underway. Within weeks, the federal government
had enacted a sweeping bill against ‘child pornography’ and many of the states followed with bills
of their own. These laws have reestablished restrictions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by
some of the important Supreme Court decisions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor
sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depiction
of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. This means that photographs of naked
children in anthropology textbooks and many of the ethnographic movies shown in college classes
are technically illegal in several states. In fact, the instructors are liable to an additional felony charge
for showing such images to each student under the age of 18. Although the Supreme Court has also
ruled that it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child pornography
laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors.
The laws produced by the child porn panic are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent farreaching alterations in the regulation of sexual behaviour and abrogate important sexual civil liberties.
But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the exception
of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and American Civil Liberties Union, no one raised
a peep of protest.5
A new and even tougher federal child pornography bill has just reached House-Senate conference.
It removes any requirement that prosecutors must prove that alleged child pornography was distributed
for commercial sale. Once this bill becomes law, a person merely possessing a nude snapshot of a
17-year-old lover or friend may go to jail for fifteen years, and be fined $100,000. This bill passed the
House 400 to 1.6
The experiences of art photographer Jacqueline Livingston exemplify the climate created by the
child porn panic. An assistant professor of photography at Cornell University, Livingston was fired in
1978 after exhibiting pictures of male nudes which included photographs of her seven-year-old son
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masturbating. Ms. Magazine, Chrysalis, and Art News all refused to run ads for Livingston’s posters
of male nudes. At one point, Kodak confiscated some of her film, and for several months, Livingston
lived with the threat of prosecution under the child pornography laws. The Tompkins Country
Department of Social Services investigated her fitness as a parent. Livingston’s posters have been
collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and other major museums. But she has
paid a high cost in harassment and anxiety for her efforts to capture on film the uncensored male
body at different ages (Stambolian, 1980, 1983).
It is easy to see someone like Livingston as a victim of the child porn wars. It is harder for most
people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boylovers
are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic
orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog
postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community
of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it
will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch
hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be
too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison.
While the misery of boy-lovers affects very few, the other long-term legacy of the Dade County
repeal affects almost everyone. The success of the anti-gay campaign ignited long-simmering passions
of the American right, and sparked an extensive movement to compress the boundaries of acceptable
sexual behaviour.
Right-wing ideology linking non-familial sex with communism and political weakness is nothing
new. During the McCarthy period, Alfred Kinsey and his Institute for Sex Research were attacked for
weakening the moral fibre of Americans and rendering them more vulnerable to communist influence.
After congressional investigations and bad publicity, Kinsey’s Rockefeller grant was terminated in
1954 (Gebhard, 1976).
Around 1969, the extreme right discovered the Sex Information and Education Council of the
United States (SIECUS). In books and pamphlets, such as The Sex Education Racket: Pornography in
the Schools and SIECUS: Corrupter of Youth, the right attacked SIECUS and sex education as communist
plots to destroy the family and sap the national will (Courtney, 1969; Drake, 1969). Another pamphlet,
Pavlov’s Children (They May Be Yours) (n.a., 1969), claims that the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is in cahoots with SIECUS to undermine religious
taboos, to promote the acceptance of abnormal sexual relations, to downgrade absolute moral
standards, and to ‘destroy racial cohesion’, by exposing white people (especially white women) to
the alleged ‘lower’ sexual standards of black people.
New Right and neo-conservative ideology has updated these themes, and leans heavily on linking
‘immoral’ sexual behaviour to putative declines in American power. In 1977, Norman Podhoretz
wrote an essay blaming homosexuals for the alleged inability of the United States to stand up to the
Russians (Podhoretz, 1977). He thus neatly linked ‘the anti-gay fight in the domestic arena and the
anti-Communist battles in foreign policy’ (Wolfe and Sanders, 1979).
Right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and pre-marital sex
moved from the extreme fringes to the political centre stage after 1977, when right-wing strategists and
fundamentalist religious crusaders discovered that these issues had mass appeal. Sexual reaction played
a significant role in the right’s electoral success in 1980 (Breslin, 1981; Gordon and Hunter, 1977–8;
Gregory-Lewis, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c; Kopkind, 1977; Petchesky, 1981). Organizations like the Moral
Majority and Citizens for Decency have acquired mass followings, immense financial resources, and
unanticipated clout. The Equal Rights Amendment has been defeated, legislation has been passed that
mandates new restrictions on abortion, and funding for programs like Planned Parenthood and sex
education has been slashed. Laws and regulations making it more difficult for teenage girls to obtain
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contraceptives or abortions have been promulgated. Sexual backlash was exploited in successful
attacks on the Women’s Studies Program at California State University at Long Beach.
The most ambitious right-wing legislative initiative has been the Family Protection Act (FPA),
introduced in Congress in 1979. The Family Protection Act is a broad assault on feminism, homosexuals,
non-traditional families, and teenage sexual privacy (Brown, 1981). The Family Protection Act has
not and probably will not pass, but conservative members of Congress continue to pursue its agenda
in a more piecemeal fashion. Perhaps the most glaring sign of the times is the Adolescent Family Life
Program. Also known as the Teen Chastity Program, it gets some 15 million federal dollars to
encourage teenagers to refrain from sexual intercourse, and to discourage them from using
contraceptives if they do have sex, and from having abortions if they get pregnant. In the last few
years, there have been countless local confrontations over gay rights, sex education, abortion rights,
adult bookstores, and public school curricula. It is unlikely that the anti-sex backlash is over, or that
it has even peaked. Unless something changes dramatically, it is likely that the next few years will
bring more of the same.
Periods such as the 1880s in England, and the 1950s in the United States, recodify the relations of
sexuality. The struggles that were fought leave a residue in the form of laws, social practices, and
ideologies which then affect the way in which sexuality is experienced long after the immediate
conflicts have faded. All the signs indicate that the present era is another of those watersheds in the
politics of sex. The settlements that emerge from the 1980s will have an impact far into the future. It
is therefore imperative to understand what is going on and what is at stake in order to make
informed decisions about what policies to support and oppose.
It is difficult to make such decisions in the absence of a coherent and intelligent body of radical
thought about sex. Unfortunately, progressive political analysis of sexuality is relatively
underdeveloped. Much of what is available from the feminist movement has simply added to the
mystification that shrouds the subject. There is an urgent need to develop radical perspectives on
sexuality.
Paradoxically, an explosion of exciting scholarship and political writing about sex has been
generated in these bleak years. In the 1950s, the early gay rights movement began and prospered
while the bars were being raided and anti-gay laws were being passed. In the last six years, new
erotic communities, political alliances, and analyses have been developed in the midst of the repression.
In this essay, I will propose elements of a descriptive and conceptual framework for thinking about
sex and its politics. I hope to contribute to the pressing task of creating an accurate, humane, and
genuinely liberatory body of thought about sexuality.
Sexual Thoughts
‘You see, Tim’, Phillip said suddenly, ‘your argument isn’t reasonable. Suppose I granted
your first point that homosexuality is justifiable in certain instances and under certain
controls. Then there is the catch: where does justification end and degeneracy begin?
Society must condemn to protect. Permit even the intellectual homosexual a place of
respect and the first bar is down. Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the
flagellist, the criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist. So I ask
again: where is the line drawn? Where does degeneracy begin if not at the beginning of
individual freedom in such matters?’
[Fragment from a discussion between two gay men trying to
decide if they may love each other (Barr, 1950, p. 310)]
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A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual
oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in
view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a
convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.
Several persistent features of thought about sex inhibit the development of such a theory. These
assumptions are so pervasive in Western culture that they are rarely questioned. Thus, they tend to
reappear in different political contexts, acquiring new rhetorical expressions but reproducing
fundamental axioms.
One such axiom is sexual essentialism – the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to
social life and shapes institutions. Sexual essentialism is embedded in the folk wisdoms of Western
societies, which consider sex to be eternally unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical. Dominated for
over a century by medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, the academic study of sex has reproduced
essentialism. These fields classify sex as a property of individuals. It may reside in their hormones or
their psyches. It may be construed as physiological or psychological. But within these ethnoscientific
categories, sexuality has no history and no significant social determinants.
During the last five years, a sophisticated historical and theoretical scholarship has challenged
sexual essentialism both explicitly and implicitly. Gay history, particularly the work of Jeffrey Weeks,
has led this assault by showing that homosexuality as we know it is a relatively modern institutional
complex.7 Many historians have come to see the contemporary institutional forms of heterosexuality
as an even more recent development (Hansen, 1979). An important contributor to the new scholarship
is Judith Walkowitz, whose research has demonstrated the extent to which prostitution was transformed
around the turn of the century. She provides meticulous descriptions of how the interplay of social
forces such as ideology, fear, political agitation, legal reform, and medical practice can change the
structure of sexual behaviour and alter its consequences (Walkowitz, 1980, 1982).
Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) has been the most influential and emblematic
text of the new scholarship on sex. Foucault criticizes the traditional understanding of sexuality as a
natural libido yearning to break free of social constraint. He argues that desires are not pre-existing
biological entities, but rather that they are constituted in the course of historically specific social
practices. He emphasizes the generative aspects of the social organization of sex rather than its
repressive elements by pointing out that new sexualities are constantly produced. And he points to
a major discontinuity between kinship-based systems of sexuality and more modern forms.
The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist
alternative to sexual essentialism. Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is
constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained.8 This does not mean the biological capacities
are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in
purely biological terms. Human organisms with human brains are necessary for human cultures, but
no examination of the body or its parts can explain the nature and variety of human social systems.
The belly’s hunger gives no clues as to the complexities of cuisine. The body, the brain, the genitalia,
and the capacity for language are necessary for human sexuality. But they do not determine its
content, its experiences, or its institutional forms. Moreover, we never encounter the body unmediated
by the meanings that cultures give to it. To paraphrase Lévi-Strauss, my position on the relationship
between biology and sexuality is a ‘Kantianism without a transcendental libido’.9
It is impossible to think with any clarity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are
thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs. Similarly, sexuality is impervious to
political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual
psychology. Sexuality is as much a human product as are diets, methods of transportation, systems of
etiquette, forms of labour, types of entertainment, processes of production, and modes of oppression.
Once sex is understood in terms of social analysis and historical understanding, a more realistic politics
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of sex becomes possible. One may then think of sexual politics in terms of such phenomena as populations,
neighbourhoods, settlement patterns, migration, urban conflict, epidemiology, and police technology.
These are more fruitful categories of thought than the more traditional ones of sin, disease, neurosis,
pathology, decadence, pollution, or the decline and fall of empires.
By detailing the relationships between stigmatized erotic populations and the social forces
which regulate them, work such as that of Allan Bérubé, John D’Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, and Judith
Walkowitz contains implicit categories of political analysis and criticism. Nevertheless, the
constructivist perspective has displayed some political weaknesses. This has been most evident in
misconstructions of Foucault’s position.
Because of his emphasis on the ways that sexuality is produced, Foucault has been vulnerable to
interpretations that deny or minimize the reality of sexual repression in the more political sense.
Foucault makes it abundantly clear that he is not denying the existence of sexual repression so much
as inscribing it within a large dynamic (Foucault, 1978, p. 11). Sexuality in western societies has
been structured within an extremely punitive social framework, and has been subjected to very real
formal and informal controls. It is necessary to recognize repressive phenomena without resorting to
the essentialist assumptions of the language of libido. It is important to hold repressive sexual
practices in focus, even while situating them within a different totality and a more refined terminology
(Weeks, 1981, p. 9).
Most radical thought about sex has been embedded within a model of the instincts and their
restraints. Concepts of sexual oppression have been lodged within that more biological understanding
of sexuality. It is often easier to fall back on the notion of a natural libido subjected to inhumane
repression than to reformulate concepts of sexual injustice within a more constructivist framework.
But it is essential that we do so. We need a radical critique of sexual arrangements that has the
conceptual elegance of Foucault and the evocative passion of Reich.
The new scholarship on sex has brought a welcome insistence that sexual terms be restricted to
their proper historical and social contexts, and a cautionary scepticism towards sweeping
generalizations. But it is important to be able to indicate groupings of erotic behaviour and general
trends within erotic discourse. In addition to sexual essentialism, there are at least five other ideological
formations whose grip on sexual thought is so strong that to fail to discuss them is to remain
enmeshed within them. These are sex negativity, the fallacy of misplaced scale, the hierarchical
valuation of sex acts, the domino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of a concept of benign sexual
variation.
Of these five, the most important is sex negativity. Western cultures generally consider sex
to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force (Weeks, 1981, p. 22). Most Christian tradition,
following Paul, holds that sex is inherently sinful. It may be redeemed if performed within
marriage for procreative purposes and if the pleasurable aspects are not enjoyed too much. In
turn, this idea rests on the assumption that the genitalia are an intrinsically inferior part of the
body, much lower and less holy than the mind, the ‘soul’, the ‘heart’, or even the upper part
of the digestive system (the status of the excretory organs is close to that of the genitalia). 10
Such notions have by now acquired a life of their own and no longer depend solely on
religion for their perseverance.
This culture always treats sex with suspicion. It construes and judges almost any sexual practice
in terms of its worst possible expression. Sex is presumed guilty unti
