by Lisa Jervis
For generations, feminism has given shape and structure to individual women’s obstacles—it turns one woman’s lament into a collective yell. Riot grrrl not only gave a new generation of young women a voice and encouraged them to wield it in service of feminism, it also galvanized them into group action. Girl power slaps them on the back and says, “You go, girl,” even if it’s not at all clear where or why they should be going, and it certainly doesn’t say that they might face significant obstacles along the way. Watered-down feminism may be enough to sell baby Ts and thigh-high fishnets; it may even be enough to celebrate the baby-step accomplishments of a few lucky women. But it won’t give girls what they need to demand real power.
4
Desire
LOVE, SEX, AND MARKETING
FOR A MAGAZINE THAT ADDRESSES THE INTERSECTION OF feminism and pop culture, could there be a more obvious topic than desire? After all, feminism has been engaged with what women want—sexually and otherwise—since the beginning of the modern movement, and pop culture, of course, is built on carnality and powered by desire’s corollary, consumption. Our struggle is to free our desires from the bonds of old-fashioned sexism and double standards as well as unreasonable post—sexual revolution expectations—plus the stirring up of our insecurities to make us buy things that will render us more attractive.
Questions of desire are also a way into feminism for many of us. My own discovery of feminism was a gradual one, powered by several things. The most obvious was an emerging awareness of the gender dynamics in the classrooms in which I was growing up, where boys of privilege whined about being made to read Adrienne Rich (“Can’t we read something everyone can relate to—like Dostoyevsky?”) and having to share the glory of calculus with girls (“Okay, so some of you may be getting A’s—but do you really understand?”). Another, luckily more positive, was the subtle training I got from my parents: that my sister and I were entitled to our smarts and could do whatever we wanted with them, and that since my mother cooked all of our meals, it was only fair that my father be in charge of kitchen cleanup. And then there was the vague, early-adolescent unease I had about my budding sexuality. Instinctively I knew that what I was feeling was perfectly natural—but I still had to wonder: Am I a deviant because I want to have sex, and I don’t particularly care if I’m in love? Because my crushes are powered by lust rather than affection? I knew—from Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, from the matter-of-fact way we’d learned about wet dreams in sex ed, from Porky’s—that boys were supposed to feel that way, popping boners at the slightest provocation. But girls, I’d been led to understand, were different. Desire was supposed to be about something deeper. It was years before I even began to pick apart the tangle of cultural pressures, physiology, and my own unique threads of confidence and insecurity in order to craft some kind of analysis of what was going on. Furthermore, I’m still working on it: Is it ever possible to separate real feelings from cultural pressures or the effects of struggling against them?
These questions haunt people of all genders, and pop culture’s reliance on sex to sell, along with today’s increasing encroachment of advertising into every last square inch of public space, combine to make them more confusing than ever. The fact that advertisers use women’s bodies to hawk everything from beer to bathroom tile is so well known that it hardly bears mentioning—but it is worth noting that the habit shows no sign of breaking. (In a stark demonstration of how entrenched the boobs = sales formula is, a July 2005 ad for the industry-promotion event Advertising Week featured a cleavage shot above the words “Advertising: We All Do It.” Though a majority of respondents to an online Advertising Age poll found the ad to be sexist and insulting, many industry pros shrugged off the criticism. One of the event’s sponsors said, “I don’t think it’s that big a deal,” and his colleague opined, “Let’s face it, women have always been portrayed as sexual entities in advertising, primarily for the sake of titillating men, and they always will be … Just as boob jokes in advertising are tiresome to many, so are mistakenly outdated, lame attempts to engage today’s strains of feminists and conscious consumers.”)
Even more important is the incomplete transformation of the unwritten cultural rules governing female desire. Feminism has struggled to transform those rules, but it has also been riven by internal debate, judgments, and assumptions about good desires vs. bad ones, healthy desires vs. “male-identified” ones—and about sexuality’s importance in the first place. Our culture at large is also of many minds on the topic. As a result, girls’ pleasure, though no longer forbidden or denied, is still primarily about display rather than subjectivity. Though the wildly popular American Pie franchise was certainly no one-note Porky’s—its female cast included the requisite on-display sexy exchange student, but also a band geek who knew how to get herself off and a wholesome girl next door who benefited from her boyfriend’s newfound oral expertise—1999’s Coming Soon, a chronicle of three teen girls in pursuit of their own orgasms, was initially tagged with an NC-17 rating even though no flesh at all was bared in the film. It eventually got an R but, unlike its characters, achieved only a limited release. Tween fashion, Britney-style pop tartage, Sex and the City, slutty-blonde jokes, and the documentary Inside Deep Throat round out the landscape.
Forthright assertions of our own desires are tricky, especially when they’re so easily misinterpreted by mainstream culture: For instance, so-called do-me feminism—an instant cliché introduced to the world by Esquire in February 1994—recast the thoughtful, nuanced, and far from uncritical work of women like Susie Bright and Lisa Palac as mere invitations to frolic. In its trademark “I’m sophisticated … but horny” wishful-thinking, beyond-oversimplified way, the magazine played off feminism’s long-standing antisex reputation and said, essentially, Here are some feminists you don’t have to be scared of, because they’d like you to fuck them. Many intelligent commentators instantly recognized it as a crock, but those who didn’t know any better picked right up on the “trend”—and paved the way for retrofitted romance plots like Amy Sohn’s Run Catch Kiss to be. branded as empowering.
Fact is, it’s a hard line to walk: All the talk of porno reclamation by Palac, Bright, and others; books like Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire; women-owned sex-toy stores; and, yes, articles in Bitch can come off like prescriptive new guidelines for modern sexuality rather than attempts to build a culture in which we can all be in charge of our own desire. Here’s a little something that graced our pages in the fall of 1996: “Repeat after us, boys: The male-female detachment-commitment dichotomy is culturally overdetermined. This fallacy is the spawn of an outdated, moralistic double standard from its rutting under a rock with self-help authors and glossy magazine editors. Now say it again. Again. Good. Now fuck us and get the hell out of our apartments.” In my own writing life, I’ve felt a responsibility to be open about my experiences in the hopes that my sharing might ease other folks’ acceptance of their culturally unapproved behavior, and maybe help shift the stereotypes of gender and sex just a little bit. But it doesn’t always work that way.
It’s our very own feminist version of the virgin/whore complex. Anything we say risks reaffirming one of the many stereotypes out there: Feminism leads to [fill in the blank with promiscuity, frigidity, lesbianism, abortion]. Women’s sexuality [doesn’t exist, is out of control, depends on emotion, is about being looked at, is the polar opposite of some stereotypical visually driven male sexuality]. And with pop culture’s ad-driven, shopping-happy nature seeking to channel every person’s every last desire into the most profitable avenues possible, well, that just makes it all the more difficult to sort through.
Throughout its history, Bitch has consistently strived to examine how pop culture constructs our desires and their ramifications—and the “our” here refers to people of all genders. The results, far broader than sexuality or romance, document the struggle for self-definition in arenas that are at once the most personal and
the most influenced by—and influential over—our cultural landscape.—L.J.
In Re-Mission
Why Does Redbook Want to Keep Us on Our Backs?
Amy Harter / SPRING 1997
REDBOOK IS NOT THE HIPPEST MAGAZINE AROUND. IT CATERS to a married-with-children lifestyle, tackling such cutting-edge topics as entrepreneurial housewives and marital relationships. The representation of the ’90s woman as a ’50s retrofit is what Redbook thrives on. But last February, Redbook took a step beyond that in a seeming attempt to bring our liberal-leaning American women back to the ’50s wholesome in a big way. Lynn Peters’s “The Best Position for Making Love (hint: you don’t have to be on top)” encourages women to stick with the missionary position.
Even if we ignore—as we must, given Redbook’s relentlessly heterosexual, mostly married demographic—the persistent equation of “sexual partner” with “husband,” Peters’s paean to the missionary position is disturbing. With a bizarre blend of modern ideas and outdated stereotypes (women like sex and seek pleasure, but they’re generally passive, romantically motivated, and overwhelmingly concerned with their looks during the act), she’s oddly insistent that sex in the missionary position is best for all women, all the time. And why is that? Because the missionary position is “feminine” and “alluring.”
This is supposed to be a good thing?
Familiarity Breeds … Ecstasy?
Peters calls the missionary position “a Quarter Pounder with cheese,” saying, “you know how it’s going to look, how it’s going to taste and how long it will take to eat.” Her picture of an ideal sexual experience is one of familiarity and passivity to the point of boredom: “Lying on your back with nothing on your mind other than, say, how that stain got on the ceiling, you’re in the ideal position to unwind and enjoy yourself.”
Perhaps I’m biased against articles that compare sex to a greasy fastfood offering in the first paragraph, but the antiquated implication that women are bored by sex sticks in my craw. Granted, most of us have zoned out on those fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror at least once, but we can attribute our disinterest to bad sex. Ideally, shouldn’t your own and your partner’s pleasure be on your mind instead of the ceiling stain?
All You Have Going for You Is Your Looks. Don’t Blow It.
Peters also praises the missionary position because a woman supposedly appears more attractive when she’s “reclining with … face turned up, lips parted expectantly [and her] hair arranged over a bank of snowy white pillows [than] leaning over [her] husband with … stretch marks glistening and everything drooping and jiggling.”
True, it’s hard to concentrate on pleasure at all if you’re worried about jiggling body parts. But why offer the solution of disguise instead of celebration? Instead of encouraging women to increase their fun by not worrying about what their bods look like to their hubbies, Peters validates and even promotes insecurity by scrutinizing and persecuting the postchildbirth female body. By encouraging women to feel ashamed of their sweat, shape, and size—all natural, and as far as sweat and jiggle go, often signs of a good time in bed—Peters plays into the interminable cycle of body hatred that all too often reflects women’s experience.
Sex = Romance
Not only does Peters consistently refer to sex as “making love” (which, okay, it sometimes is—but let’s face it, that’s not always what it is), she writes longingly of pre—sexual revolution television portrayals of “the man on the top, the woman looking up at him adoringly.” This adoration or awe during sex is caused by what, his oh-so-breadwinning worldly masculinity above her? Hmm. Experiencing awe during sex should probably derive from a different source, don’t you think? She elaborates on this romantic theme by declaring that missionary sex is the most “loving and affectionate, and close to your partner” kind of sex, and it’s “the most comforting to finish in—you’re cuddling already, for heaven’s sake.” (Peters likes to plan ahead. But how is man-lying-on-top-of-woman any more cuddle-ready than woman-lying-on-top-of-man? Just a question of physics, really.)
Missionary Sex Really Is Cool!
Peters argues that most women abandoned missionary-style sex in the ’70s because it was hip to explore other positions. She depicts a trend for women to be “cool and empowered” by being on top and notes that “overnight, being on the bottom was OUT.” She argues that as women gained power and esteem in the ’70s, climbing on top became “compulsory,” and suggests that women who choose to travel down the path of sexual exploration do so not of their own volition but because it’s fashionable or “in.” With one comment, she’s discounting women’s desires and disparaging the gains of ’70s feminism—so all we got was the experience of sex on top, which we’re ready to give up now anyway? I don’t think so. And she’s justifying the very logic she’s trying to criticize—’cause after all, what she’s really trying to do is convince us that the missionary position is cool again.
Mission Accomplished?
Why does Redbook care so much about salvaging the missionary position and selling it to its readers? What does it have invested in the piece? A few thoughts: With Peters’s article, Redbook encourages its readers (straight, married women, mostly) not to think that they may be missing out on some crazy adventurous single sex life (after all, if the missionary position is as good as it gets, why even bother to wonder); it plays on women’s insecurities, which is helpful in spurring the readership to buy the products plugged in its pages, which of course keeps the advertisers happy and the magazine in business.
The fact is, women can and do have sex just for sex’s sake. Good sex is about knowing what you want and being assertive enough to get it. Sex can be kinky, erotic, loving, sensual, hysterical, all of the above, or just plain fun—whether it’s a hit-and-quit situation or a long-term relationship. Sex isn’t about being on top or being on the bottom. It’s about being anywhere you want to be.
Hot and Bothered
Unmasking Male Lust
Lisa Jervis / FALL 1997
SEX, SEX, SEX—THAT’S ALL MEN EVER THINK ABOUT. RIGHT? If you’re a girl, you’ve always gotta be ready to fend off an unwanted advance, and if you’re a boy, you’ve always gotta be plotting a move. I mean, isn’t that what we’ve all been told since the moment we emerged from the womb and were identified as having one set of genitalia or another? We hear it from other people, we see it in the movies and on TV, we read it in glossy magazines and pop psychology books. Men always want sex, and women rarely do. Women become sexually attracted to the men they love; men fall in love with the women they find sexually attractive. Women want commitment; men run screaming from it. Women are naturally monogamous; men not only crave variety but are evolutionarily programmed to seek it out.
Recent feminist thought has given much attention to destroying the stereotype of women as sexually passive and emotionally needy. Get down: I’ll be first in line to take a whack at the image of the marriage-minded, no-sex-’til-I-get-what-someone-told-me-I’m-supposed-to-want, Rules-readin’, John Gray-worshippin’ gal. The thing is, though, that this dichotomous gender construction also makes men out to be nothing more than lying, cheating, uncaring, sex-obsessed louts—and that side of the coin hasn’t gotten a whole lot of attention. Traditional heterosexual masculinity—and let me make it very clear that by this I do not mean actual men; I mean the perception of what it means to be a straight man in our current cultural/ popular imagination—has not yet been examined with an eye toward dismantling stale notions of unceasingly high libido and disregard for emotion.
Superhet men’s lifestyle magazines, with their instruction-manual tone and we-have-the-secrets-of-the-good-life manner, quite literally teach masculinity: They tell men how to act, what to look like, and what to buy in order to be men. And their focus on sex is uncomplicated and unstinting. Any guy who is any less—or more to the point, any more—than a rote sex machine will feel like less of a man after reading one of these things. According to Esquire, men are �
�unfeeling brutes” because of their serotonin levels; GQ proclaims, “Sex. That’s what [men] want and we’ll do anything we have to do to get it,” and advises a guy with a lower libido than his girlfriend to see a shrink.
And then there are the implications of cluelessness and infantility. That’s what we get in Men’s Health’s “Tonight’s the Night: A moment-by-moment guide to getting it right the first time.” Do men really need to be told, “8:05: Offer snacks. Finger food is good,” or “9:24: Close ranks. Move your chair closer to hers”? The fact that some magazine editor thinks—even in an oh-look-how-self-deprecating-we-are-doesn’t-that-make-us-charmingly-funny way—that men can’t figure out for themselves to “be nice” and “not ask her to wash up while you catch the fourth quarter” (those are at 7:33 and 9:22, by the way) is pretty insulting.
What else have popular narratives given us lately? The neo-morality tale Fatal Attraction featured a man who couldn’t keep it in his pants no matter how much he loved his wife and kid. And just look where indulging his “natural” compulsion got him—the terrorized owner of a boiled bunny. (Not coincidentally, the strong, sexual woman in this film is not cool and independent, as she first seems, but rather incredibly needy and, it turns out, psychotic.) The television show Men Behaving Badly (well, the name says it all) features commitment-terrified men with sex drives that override even such basic human qualities as tact and coherent speech. Jokes circulate on e-mail painting men as perpetual children with only one thing on their minds (“Age and favorite sport—17: sex; 25: sex; 35: sex; 48: sex; 66: napping. Age and ideal age to get married—17: 25; 25: 35; 35: 48; 48: 66; 66: 17”). Oh, excuse me, I guess that would be two things: mindless pursuit of sex and blind refusal of commitment. The proliferation of brutal and gratuitous rape scenes on film paints male sexuality as rapacious and violent. That we’re often meant to see the rapists in, say, Showgirls and Leaving Las Vegas as disgusting, amoral, and corrupt doesn’t really matter. There’s a sense of plodding inevitability about these scenes: This is the way men are, they suggest, and this is just what happens.
