Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) (11 page)

6
TALKING SEX

Beyond the patriarchal phallic imaginary

Women who grew to womanhood at the peak of contemporary feminist movement know that at that moment in time, sexual liberation was on the feminist agenda. The right to make decisions about our bodies was primary, as were reproductive rights, particularly the right to abort an unplanned for unwanted fetus, and yet it was also important to claim the body as a site of pleasure. The feminist movement I embraced as a young coed at Stanford University highlighted the body. Refusing to shave, we let hair grow on our legs and under our armpits. We chose whether or not to wear panties. We gave up bras, girdles, and slips. We had all-girl parties, grown-up sleepovers. We slept together. We had sex. We did it with girls and boys. We did it across race, class, nationality. We did it in groups. We watched each other doing it. We did it with the men in our lives differently. We let them celebrate with us the discovery of female
sexual agency. We let them know the joys and ecstasy of mutual sexual choice. We embraced nakedness. We reclaimed the female body as a site of power and possibility.

We were the generation of the birth-control pill. We saw female freedom as intimately and always tied to the issue of body rights. We believed that women would never be free if we did not have the right to recover our bodies from sexual slavery, from the prison of patriarchy. We were not taking back the night; we were claiming it, claiming the dark in resistance to the bourgeois sexist world of repression, order, boredom, and fixed social roles. In the dark, we were finding new ways to see ourselves as women. We were charting a journey from slavery to freedom. We were making revolution. Our bodies were the occupied countries we liberated.

It was this vision of contemporary feminist movement I shared with Esquire magazine when interviewed by Tad Friend. Consistently, I shared with him the reality that many feminists have always been and are into sex. I emphatically stated that I repudiated the notion of a “new feminism” and saw it being created in the mass media mainly as a marketing ploy to advance the opportunistic concerns of individual women while simultaneously acting as an agent of antifeminist backlash by undermining feminism’s radical/revolutionary gains. “New feminism” is being brought to us as a product that works effectively to set women against one another, to engage us in competition wars over which brand of feminism is more effective. Large numbers of feminist thinkers and activists oppose the exploitative, hedonistic consumerism that is repackaging feminism as a commodity and selling it to us full of toxic components (a little bit of poisonous, patriarchal thinking sprinkled here and there), but we feel powerless to change this trend. Many of us feel we have never had a voice in the mainstream media, and that our counterhegemonic standpoints rarely gain a wider public hearing. For years, I was among those
feminist thinkers who felt reluctant to engage the mass media (by appearing on radio programs, television shows, or speaking with journalists) for fear of cooptation by editing processes which can be used to slant any message in the direction desired by the producers. That turning away from the mass media (to the degree that the mainstream media showed any interest in presenting our views) has been a gap that made it easier for reformists and liberal advocates for gender equality to assume the public spotlight and shape public opinion about feminist thinking.

The patriarchal-dominated mass media is far more interested in promoting the views of women who want both to claim feminism and repudiate it at the same time. Hence, the success of Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe, and to some extent Naomi Wolf. Seen as the more liberal feminist voices countering those taken to embody strident, narrow anti-sex standpoints (e.g., Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin), these women are offered up by the white male-dominated mass media as the hope of feminism. And they are the individuals that the mass media most often turns to when it desires to hear the feminist voice speak. These women are all white. For the most part, they come from privileged class backgrounds, were educated at elite institutions, and take conservative positions on most gender issues. They in no way represent radical or revolutionary feminist standpoints. And these standpoints are the ones the mass media rarely wants to call attention to. Feminist women of color must still struggle to break through the barriers of racism and white supremacy to make our voices heard. Some of us have been willing to engage the mass media, out of fear that this “new feminism” will erase our voices and our concerns by attempting to universalize the category “woman” while simultaneously deflecting attention away from the ways differences created by race and class hierarchies disrupt an unrealistic vision of commonality.

Strategic engagement with subversive politics of representation makes it necessary for us to intervene by actively participating in mainstream public dialogues about feminist movement. It was this standpoint that informed my decision to talk with Esquire. Even though the sexist perspectives commonly conveyed by articles in this magazine made me reluctant to speak with them, I had been assured by a feminist comrade—a black female—that the white male reporter could be trusted to represent our views fairly, that his intention was not to distort, pervert or mock. When I spoke with Tad Friend, I was told that he was doing a piece on different attitudes among feminists towards sexuality. It was my understanding that this was the primary focus of his discussion. When the article appeared in the February 1994 issue of Esquire, I found my comments had been distorted, perverted—that indeed the article intentionally mocks those presumably “old feminists” who are not “down” with the pro-sex “new feminists.” Not having heard Friend use the phrase “do-me” (a bit of eating-the-other white cultural appropriation of funky black R&B I would have “dissed,” had it been shared by Tad when he spoke with me), I could not object to his use of these phrases. During our phone interview he showed no knowledge of the contributions black women had made to feminist theory, even though he positively presented himself as striving to be inclusive, a stance I welcomed. Not being in any way a manhater or a believer in racial separatism, I was pleased to engage in a discussion about feminism and sexuality with a young white male from a privileged class background who seemed genuinely interested in learning. These dialogues across difference are important for education for critical consciousness. They are necessary if we are ever to change the structures of racism, sexism, and class elitism which exclude and do not promote solidarity across difference. With generosity and warmth, I engaged in a lively discussion with Friend about feminism and sexuality.

Over and over again in our conversation, I passionately addressed the dangers of a conservative politics of representation that eagerly exploits the idea of a “new feminism” that is more pro-sex and pro-male. My repudiation of the idea of “new feminism,” as well as most of the ideas I discussed with Friend, were in no way conveyed in his article (which he never showed me before publishing). Reading the Esquire piece, I found myself and my ideas exploited in the conventional ways white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy consistently deploys to perpetuate the devaluation of feminism and black womanhood. Friend violated my confidence by doing exactly what I requested he not do, which is exploit my comments to reinforce the vision of “new feminism that is being pushed by privileged white girls.” Acting in a similar manner to that of racist white women in feminist movement, he exploited my presence and my words to appear more inclusive and therefore more politically correct even as he discounted the meaning and substance of both. Although all the white women whose words and images are highlighted used sexually explicit street vernacular in their quotes, only mine are extracted and used to “represent” my major points—even though they were actually witty asides I made to explain a point Friend claimed not to understand, to want “broken down” to a more basic level.

By highlighting this quote, making the black female’s voice and body exemplify rough, raw, vernacular speech, he continues the racist/sexist representation of black women as the oversexed “hot pussies” I critique in Black Looks, juxtaposing it, by way of contrast, with the racist/sexist image of white women as being less sexually raw, more repressed. Of course, all the white women quoted in the body of the article, speak in a graphic heterosexist vernacular. At this white male-dominated magazine, some individuals decided that it was acceptable to highlight a black female using sexually explicit speech while downplaying white women doing the same, a strategy that helps keep in place
neat little racist/sexist stereotypes about the differences between white and black women. My point here is not to suggest that women should not use sexually explicit street vernacular (that was certainly one of the freedoms feminists fought for at the onset of the movement), but to interrogate the way my use of this language was distorted by a process of decontextualization.

Friend attributes to me a quote which reads: “If all we have to choose from is the limp dick or the super hard dick we’re in trouble. We need a versatile dick who admits that intercourse isn’t all there is to sexuality, who can negotiate rough sex on Monday, eating pussy on Tuesday, and cuddling on Wednesday.” Rewritten by Friend, my use of black street vernacular is turned into white parody. Never having thought that I myself “need a versatile dick,” I shared with Friend my sense that heterosexual women want a man who can be versatile. To use the phrase “a versatile man” is to evoke a vision of action and agency, of male willingness to change and alter behavior. The phrase a “versatile dick” dehumanizes. Friend changed my words to make it appear that I support female objectification of men, denying their full personhood and reducing them to their anatomy. I am hard-pressed to understand how “dicks” negotiate anything, since the very word “negotiate” emphasizes communication and consent. Friend distorts this statement so as to make my words affirm identification with a phallic mindset, thereby evoking tired racist/sexist stereotypes of emasculating and castrating pseudo-masculine—and ultimately undesirable—hard, black females.

In like manner, I shared with him that “women can’t just ask men to give up sexist objectification if we want a hard dick and a tight butt—and many of us do. We must change the way we desire. We must not objectify.” Dropping the last two sentences without using punctuation to indicate that he has left something out, as well as changing my words and including his own, Friend toys with my ideas, reshaping them so that I am made to appear supportive of patriarchal notions of sexual pleasure and
sexist/heterosexist thinking that I in no way condone. Yet, despite Friend’s deliberate distortion of my highlighted quote, its radical intentionality remains intact. It makes clear that sexist men must undergo a process of feminist revolution if they want to be capable of satisfying the needs of feminist women who experience our most intense sexual pleasure in an oppositional space outside the patriarchal phallic imaginary. It is this feminist vision of liberatory heterosexuality that seems to terrify men.

No wonder, then, that women who want to be sexual with men are perversely reinventing feminism so that it will satisfy patriarchal desires, so that it can be incorporated into a sexist phallic imaginary in such a way that male sexual agency as we now know it will never need to change. Representing a larger structure of white male power, Tad Friend, in conjunction with those who edited and published this piece, show contempt for any radical or revolutionary feminist practice that upholds dialogue and engagement with men, that sees men as comrades in struggle. Contrary to what this magazine and the mass media in general project in complicity with opportunistic white female allies (e.g., Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf), older feminists like myself were supporting the inclusion of men in feminist movement (actually writing and publishing articles to push this point) years ago. Contrary to Esquire’s suggestion that there is “a new generation of women, who are embracing sex (and men!),” we are witnessing a new generation of women who, like their sexist male counterparts, are aggressively ahistorical and unaware of the long tradition of radical/revolutionary feminist thought that celebrates inclusiveness and liberatory sexuality. Both these groups prefer to seek out the most conservative, narrow-minded feminist thought on sex and men, then arrogantly use these images to represent the movement.

Their refusal even to acknowledge the existence of progressive
feminist thought about sex and sexuality allows them to sensationalize these issues even as they effectively use the image of the “do-me” feminists to assault the many women who stand against patriarchy and phallocentrism. Esquire magazine goes to great lengths to place me in the “do-me” category precisely because many sexist men remain unable to accept that women (and our male allies) who repudiate patriarchy assert sexual agency in new and exciting ways that are mutually humanizing and satisfying. It has always served the interest of the patriarchal status quo for men to represent the feminist woman as antisex and antimale. Even though the real lives of women active in feminist movement never conformed to this representation, it continues to prevail in the popular imagination because the subjugated knowledge that embracing feminism intensifies sexual pleasure for men and women in this society, no matter our sexual practice, is dangerous information. Too many folks might want to convert to feminist thought if they knew firsthand the powerful and passionate positive transformation it would create in every area of their sexual lives. It is better for patriarchy to try and make us believe that the only real sex available to feminist women who like men must be negotiated using the same old patriarchal modes of seduction that are perpetually unsatisfying to all women.

Patriarchal publications can successfully push this propagandistic message, as the Esquire issue does, precisely because powerful discussions of feminism and sexuality are not taking place continually, everywhere. Talking sex in meta-language and theoretical prose does not capture the imagination of masses of folks who are working daily to understand how their lives have been affected by shifting gender roles and expectations and how sexism fucks us all up, folks who just want to know what feminism is really all about and whether or not it can rescue us from the abyss of loneliness and sexual death. Living as we do in an anti-sex culture, with patriarchy as the most well organized and institutionalized
attack on our sexual agency and imaginations, it is downright perverse and frightening that the mass media can convince anyone that feminism is the cause of women turning away from men or from heterosexual sex. Heterosexual women turned on by feminist movement learn how to move away from sexually dead encounters with patriarchal men who eroticize exploitative power and domination scenarios that in no way embrace female sexual agency, but these women do so not to give up sex but to make sex new, different, liberatory, and fun. Lack of critical vigilance within feminist movement made everyone unmindful of the ongoing need to document this shift positively. Were many more of us documenting our sex lives in art, literature, film and other media, there would be an abundance of counter-hegemonic evidence to disprove the popular sexist stereotype that women in feminist movement are antisex and antimen. By conceding the turf of sexuality to the phallocentric sexist media, feminists—whether liberal or radical—become complicit with conservative repression of public discourse of sexuality. If nothing else, articles such as the Esquire piece should serve as pointed reminders that radical/revolutionary feminists must always keep alive a dynamic public discussion of sexuality.