The Beloved is me

"The Dodson model of the empowered female did a great deal of good, but also caused some harm. The good is that feminism of that era had to break the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. The harm is that the feminism of this era successfully broke the association of heterosexual female sexual awakening with dependency on a man. "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle," as one seventies-era feminist bumper sticker insisted. The feminist model of heterosexuality – that straight women can fuck like men, or get by with a great vibrator and no other attention to self-love, and be simply instrumentalist about their pleasure – turned out to have created a new set of impossible ideals, foisted, if through the best of intentions, upon "liberated" women. Feminism has evaded the far more difficult question of how to be a liberated heterosexual woman and how to acknowledge deep physical needs for connection with men. As nature organized things, we ideally have a partner in the dance. If we don't have a partner, there is attention we should give to self-love as self-care. It does not solve straight women's existential dilemma, the tension between our dependency needs and our needs for independence, simply to declare that the dance has changed.

The harm of this model of female sexuality is that it reaffirms a fractured, commercialized culture's tendency to see people, including "sexually liberated women," as isolated, self-absorbed units, and to see pleasure as something one needs to acquire the way one acquires designer shoes, rather than as a medium of profound intimacy with another, or with one's self, or as a gateway to a higher, more imaginative, fully realized dimension that includes and affects all aspects of one's life.

[...] I think it is very possible, judging from tremendous amount of data we have seen about what women need psychologically, which they are generally not getting, that they are saying they are dissatisfied because the "available models of sexuality" – the post-Dodson, post-Hefner, post-porn, married two-career, hurried, or young and single drunk-with-a-stranger-in-a-bar-or-dorm-room models – are, long term, just plain physically untenable. These models of female sexuality – left to us by a combination of pressures ranging from an incomplete development of feminism in the 1970's, to a marketplace that likes us overemployed and undersexed, to the speeding up of sexual pacing set by pornography – doom women eventually to emotional strain caused by physiological strain. These models of female sexuality are simply extremely physically, emotionally, and existentially unsatisfying. (This model of sex may well doom Western heterosexual men in other ways, deserving of their own book.)"

Naomi Wolf, Vagina