Consumer Sexualities

Women and Sex Shopping

Rachel Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367208080
• eBook ISBN: 9781315447506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Consumer Sexualities explores women's experiences of shopping in 'sex shops' and using sexual commodities in their everyday lives. This enlightening volume shows how women take up sexual consumer 'technologies of the self' to work upon and understand themselves as confident and active sexual agents in postfeminist neoliberal culture. In guiding the reader through the historical emergence of sexual commodities 'for women' in feminism and postfeminism, Wood points to the normalisation and regulation of sexual practices and identities in and through consumption. Indeed, women's accounts show the work involved in constructing the 'right' – knowledgeable, tasteful, and confident – orientation to sexual consumption and, by extension, in becoming an intelligibly 'good' sexual person. At the same time, the author draws upon de Certeau to show how the ordinary contexts in which sexual commodities are used can lead to unpredictable moments of adaptation, discomfort, playfulness, and resistance.

A rich analysis of women's everyday strategies of 'making do' with the kinds of femininity and female sexuality that sex shop culture represents, Consumer Sexualities will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and gender studies with interests in gender, sexuality, sex, and consumption.

1Sexual consumption and liberation in feminism

Feminism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s transformed the ways in which women’s sexual desires, identities, and practices were defined and spoken about, and by whom. Sex shops and sexual commodities, namely the vibrator and dildo, were frequently mobilised in feminist debates around sexuality across this period. This chapter investigates a series of selected historical ‘moments’ in which the discursive and material connections between ideas of ‘sexual consumption’ and ‘female sexuality’ were forged. The role that sexual commodities should play (or not play) within women’s sexual identities, practices, and lives has never been fixed or simply agreed upon, yet taken together the episodes explored in this chapter make up a narrative – albeit a fractured and sometimes fractious one – by which sexual commodity objects and the spaces in which they are sold acquire the potential to be understood as being ‘for women’. By this, I do not only mean that these objects and spaces gained greater acceptability and accessibility for female consumers. More fundamentally, a discourse has emerged in which consumer sexual products gain at least the potential to be understood as objects that might facilitate women’s sexual and even socio-political liberation.

In the feminist debates of the late 1960s to the 1980s, an idea repeatedly emerges, is contested, and re-emerges in which the vibrator enables women to define and discover sexual identities and pleasures on their own terms, and so resist and replace patriarchal or prescriptive constructions of female sexuality.¹ Though continually challenged and reframed, the idea of sexual commodities as being in some way ‘a good thing’ for women inarguably became a subject of debate, if not agreement, over the course of this period. Without this discursive shift to underpin it, sexual consumer culture could never have emerged to play such a pervasive role in contemporary understandings of female sexuality in British life. Feminist framings of women’s sexuality and sexual consumption laid the foundations for the 1990s’ and 2000s’ post-feminist ‘makeover’ of sex shopping explored in the following chapter, in which sexual commodities were remodelled as an integral part of the neoliberal project of the sexual self.

This chapter draws upon a range of popular and theoretical texts produced by feminists during the period under investigation, supplemented by some of the many histories that have since been written on this era. Contemporaneous feminist views are sourced from books and other feminist publications such as Womankind, Off Our Backs, Heresies, On Our Backs, and, most predominantly, the UK women’s liberation magazine Spare Rib. Launched in 1972, Spare Rib captures the changing conceptions of self-defined sexuality, sexual pleasure, and sexual consumerism in British second-wave feminism. Most importantly for this project, Spare Rib was the first resource of information about the ‘feminist’ credentials (or otherwise) of sex toys, and, for British women, a key site of early sexual consumption of vibrators through mail-order advertising. Often a forum for debate and conflict around feminist issues, the magazine represented a range of voices drawn from among the readers as well as the collective that produced each issue. Marsha Rowe, the magazine’s co-founder, explains that the editorial collective had a two-way role, ‘sifting information and ideas and continually making alterations according to response’ (1982: 19). Rather than simply ‘voicing opinion’, the content of Spare Rib shows a range of women participating in a dialogue and sharing their experiences (Winship, 1987: 136). Ideas of female sexuality were under continual revision and contention in Spare Rib, and in the women’s movement in general, over the period discussed in this chapter.

While the subject of Consumer Sexualities is women’s experiences of sex shopping in the UK, it would be near impossible to tell the story of the emerging connections between women’s sexualities and sexual consumerism in this period without also considering developments in the US. American and British feminism developed simultaneously but were far from identical in focus and frequently had divergent agendas; I do not want to propose a simple equivalence between them. Nor do I wish to suggest that feminists in the US somehow ‘led the way’ when it came to women’s sexual liberation. However, I cannot ignore that the first sex shops billing themselves as being ‘for women’ opened in New York and San Francisco, providing an important locale for the emergence of ideas about ‘feminist’ sex shopping. Moreover, widely read American feminists made vital contributions to both the endorsing and opposing of the developing discourse linking liberated female sexuality to consumption. Some geographical shifts in the area under investigation are necessary then, in presenting an unavoidably fragmented collage of ‘moments’ through which understandings and debates around women’s consumer sexualities can nonetheless be seen to emerge. Before taking up the first of these, the following section provides some historical context for the 1960s’ sexual milieu in which second-wave feminism intervened.

Sexuality in the 1960s

Intellectual and cultural discourses of sexuality went through significant changes in the 1960s. Freud’s theory of female sexuality, centred on his definition of female orgasm, had been dominant in medical and popular texts from the 1920s to the 1960s (Gerhard, 2000: 454). Freud asserted that ‘mature’ female sexual pleasure should be centred in the vagina, and that women who failed to transfer orgasm from the immature pleasures of the clitoris were dysfunctional and frigid (1962). Sexological texts from Alfred Kinsey et al. (1953) and Masters and Johnson (1966) challenged this understanding for the first time by ‘discovering’ and normalising women’s ability to have clitoral orgasms. Masters and Johnson’s Human Sexual Response was a ‘sensation’ in the 1960s, showing women’s superior capacity for sexual pleasure through multiple orgasms (Gerhard, 2000: 463).

Masters and Johnson’s text chimed with the cultural climate of sexual revolution, in which sexual pleasure and free love were seen as a powerful force for undermining the conservative institutions of marriage and family (Bronstein, 2011: 25). Part of this cultural shift included a new understanding of women as ‘agents with sexual desires’, as the number of sexual partners for both men and women increased, and marriage rates decreased for young people (Gerhard, 2001: 87). This revolution stemmed from a generational conflict, as young people rebelled against their parents’ wartime values of ‘thrift, self-sacrifice and work’ and, particularly for middle-class women, marriage and housework (Segal, 1994: 2). Young women’s rebellion took the form of ‘saying yes to sex’ without shame or secrecy, with women in the UK being freed from some of the fear of the consequences of sexual activity due to the free availability of the contraceptive pill (and its side effects), access to legal abortion, and the liberalised divorce legislation of the late 1960s (Segal, 1994).

However, neither the new 1960s sexology nor the sexual revolution wholly fulfilled their liberatory potential for women. By the late 1960s, many women were disillusioned when they realised that this had been a revolution ‘on male terms’ (Bronstein, 2011: 29). For many women, the reality of ‘free love’ was that they were expected to be sexually available to men and were seen as a ‘prude’ if they didn’t ‘put out’ (Hite, 2000: 340). The 1960s representation of the sexually agentic woman was largely apolitical, paying little heed to the structural and cultural inequalities that restricted women’s freedoms. The ‘liberated’ voracious sexual woman was too often reduced to a fantasy object of consumption, sold by and to men through Playboy magazine and pornography² and reflecting little of the material realities of the sexual revolution for women (Bronstein, 2011). Masters and Johnson’s text had demonstrated women’s capacity for potentially autonomous clitoral pleasure, but they contained the potentially radical implications of their evidence by reproducing heterosexual sex as the only proper place for female sexual pleasure; they represented female sexuality as responsive to a competent male partner, although ideally one newly informed by their sexological findings (Gerhard, 2001). A combination of the sexual climate of the 1960s and the discoveries of the new sexologists practically ‘ensured that second-wave feminists’ would have to take up women’s sexual pleasure as a radically political issue (Gerhard, 2001: 74).

Although 1960s counterculture did not liberate women in the way they might have hoped, it did provide opportunities for political organisation for those women who joined the many New Left, Civil Rights, and student movements of the 1960s in the US and UK (Segal, 1994). Being part of these movements gave women practical skills in organisation, activism, and radical publication that they would later use as part of the women’s liberation movement and, more importantly, made it easier for women to perceive themselves to be political, social, and ‘above all, sexual agents’ (p. 24). As Marsha Rowe has written of Spare Rib, ‘it was a product of the counterculture and a reaction against it’ (1982: 13). The 1960s sexual revolution had linked political liberation to that of sex and sexuality, but had left gender inequalities largely unexamined and unchanged. Women’s liberation was born out of this contradiction, as women took on the challenge of redefining the meaning and representation of female sexual pleasures and identities.

‘The myth of the vaginal orgasm’

First distributed at a 1968 Women’s Liberation Conference in the US, Ann Koedt’s essay, ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’ (1970), was the first and most widely read feminist text to take up the issue of female orgasm. Koedt began the essay by deconstructing Freud’s assertion of the vaginal orgasm as the only ‘normal’ and healthy form of sexual pleasure for women. Supporting her claims with Masters and Johnson’s research, she contended that the clitoris, not the vagina, was the primary location of sexual pleasure for women, but unlike the sexologists, she imbued this discovery with new political significance. The medical and psychoanalytic assertion that sexual pleasure must be located in the vagina, and the definition of women who failed to achieve this as ‘frigid’, had, Koedt argued, structured ideas of ‘normal’ heterosexual sexual practice as to persistently disregard female pleasure (1970). If heterosexual intercourse positions ‘defined as “standard”’ were not ‘mutually conducive to orgasm’, Koedt contended, women needed to demand that ‘they no longer be defined as standard’ (1970).

Koedt argued that denial of clitoral sexuality had persisted for so long because full acknowledgement and normalisation of it would fundamentally destabilise and threaten not only heterosexual sexual practice, but the very institution of heterosexuality. As a source of female sexual pleasure, the clitoris allowed for sexual pleasure to exist autonomously from the patriarchal discourses of heterosexuality and reproduction. Koedt’s essay positioned the clitoris as a potent symbol of female sexual autonomy. Women claiming their clitoral orgasm, Koedt believed, had the potential to become a revolutionary force that could undermine male power and the narrow definitions of women’s role as wives, mothers, and objects of male desire: ‘The recognition of clitoral orgasm as fact would threaten the heterosexual institution’ (1970).

A similar, although perhaps even more politically radical, essay appeared in the 1970 collection of women’s liberation writings Sisterhood Is Powerful. In ‘The Politics of Orgasm’, Susan Lydon wrote that the findings of Masters and Johnson were ‘revolutionary and liberating’ (1970: 222). For Lydon, the normalisation of vaginal orgasm, and the pathologising of women’s ‘independent’ clitoral pleasure, had been central to the patriarchal project of making women ‘sexually, as well as economically, socially and politically subservient’ (1970: 223). She wrote that the repression of female sexuality was not simply one aspect of male domination, but that suppressing female sexual pleasure ‘was crucial to ensure her subjugation’ (p. 224). Unlike Koedt, Lydon directly criticised Masters and Johnson for failing to expand upon the political significance of their findings; she contends that their conclusion, that female sexual pleasure rivals that of men, is ‘naïve’ and misses the point (p. 228). Instead, she calls for women to ‘define and enjoy’ female sexuality wholly independently from male sexuality, stating that this will represent the ‘first step towards her emancipation’ (p. 228).

Both Koedt and Lydon are key to the history being traced in this chapter. They represent the early connections made between sexual freedom and political emancipation, and point to the role that the clitoris played as a symbol of that emancipation. Sexual liberation through enjoyment of the quintessentially autonomous clitoral orgasm was understood here to be emblematic and catalytic of women’s wider social and political liberation.

‘Our bodies, ourselves’

The women’s health movement was built from small groups of women, known as ‘Consciousness Raising’ (CR) groups, who met to discuss their experiences of frustration with a medical profession dominated by prescriptive male ‘experts’. Sexuality was an important concern for early CR groups, as participants spoke about their intimate lives for the first time with other women and often discovered the vastly common experience of disappointing or unpleasant sexual experiences with men (Bronstein, 2011: 42). These groups represented one key mode of feminist knowledge production, whereby feminist theory and knowledge about sexuality were built through the sharing of women’s personal experiences and self-discoveries. Shared subjective experiences would form the basis of a collective understanding of women’s subordination and ways to change it – neatly expressed in the phrase ‘the personal is political’ (Segal, 1994: 32). CR groups led to the formation of key movement ideas and to the production of texts that could be more widely distributed and discussed.

Women’s health movement groups produced texts that empowered women in making choices about their health and contained detailed information about women’s bodies. The most influential of these texts was Our Bodies, Ourselves. First published as a booklet in 1970, the women’s health tome emerged as one of the most widely read and translated feminist texts (Davis, 2007: 5). The British edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves encourages women to reclaim knowledge of their bodies from male-dominated medical and sexual cultures (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1978). This discovery was to be enabled by two objects: a detailed description of female genitalia instructing women to look closely at their own vulvas in a mirror to identify their own clitoris, labia, and so on (p. 29); and the recommended purchase and use of a speculum to view the cervix internally. The authors emphasise the importance of using a piece of medical technology to claim knowledge about a part of ‘our bodies that we have learned to ignore or fear’ (p. 29). Similarly, the women’s health text For Ourselves argues that women have been encouraged to be ignorant about their genitals and encourages readers to take a ‘v...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: consumer sexualities
• 1 Sexual consumption and liberation in feminism
• 2 Consumer sex: technologies of the self
• 3 Sexual spaces: going sex shopping
• 4 The sexy body: wearing lingerie
• 5 Sexual objects: using ‘sex toys’
• Conclusion: (sexual) politics of the ordinary
• Index