"This ideology [the Libertarian 'Sex as Play'] – descending from Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, via, in debasd form, Friedrich Nietzsche – argues that sensation, even extreme sensation, is good for its own sake alone. This sexual "will to power," adorned with a dollop of Freud's argument that the individual gets a "pass" for whatever the subconscious comes up with – since one can have no responsibility for, and hence no guilt about, subconscious desires – fit perfectly with the heady, consumerist postwar economy in the West. It prepared a fertile ground for the entrenchment of the pornographic experience of sex and of the vagina in particular.. It came to be how we thought "sex was" – rather than letting us understand that this way of thinking about sex is just one of many possible sexual ideologies. And it cleared the way in the minds of both women and men for the rise in the next few decades of wider and wider acceptance and then internalization of the moral flatness, distractedness, and fixatedness of pornography.
But is what one does in bed with someone else – with all the hopes, intimacies, and possibilities for grief involved – really just "a dream you are in"? The next three decades would call the worldview's vision of consequence-free sex and fantasy into question."
Naomi Wolf, Vagina
More links:
Inga Muscio
Joani Blank
Andrea Dworkin
Steven Seidman
Germaine Greer
Judy Chicago
Shere Hite
Eve Ensler
Feministing.com
Vulvavelvet.com
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| The Dinner Party - Judy Chicago |
Shere Hite press conference (1985)
"Not biologically based but culturally encouraged" – Shere Hite
