Straight Sex

Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure

Lynne Segal

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781781687567
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781687581
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Is heterosexual sex inherently damaging to women? Is it possible for women to enjoy sensuality and pleasure with men that does not increase male power? Lynne Segal's unflinching examination of feminist thinking on sexuality over the past twenty-five years tackles these questions head on. Only two decades ago, politically aware women often declared themselves both sexual liberationists and feminists - their right to sexual fulfillment symbolized their right to selfhood. However, the most positive women's writing on female sexuality in recent years has come primarily from the lesbian community. Segal addresses the silence of heterosexual feminists on questions of sex and love and notes the shift toward sexual conservatism. She looks at the trends that followed Sixties radicalism: sex as a subversive activity, the "liberated orgasm," sex advice literature, gender uncertainties, Queer politics, antipornography campaigns, and the rise of the moral right.

1. My generation:
sex as subversive

Make love. We must make love Instead of making money.

Adrian Mitchell¹

The search for pleasure/orgasm covers every field of human activity from sex, art and inner space, to architecture, the abolition of money, outer space and beyond

Tom McGrath²

It is the sex which people are really thinking about when they talk about the inexpressible decadence of the sixties. (And it wasn’t just heterosex, either; oh, dear, no.)

Angela Carter³

However in tune with the times we may try to be, we are all products of particular historical moments. These are the moments – and there may be more than one of them – when we most actively engage and try to make sense of the world. Political generations matter. The visions of such formative periods stay with us, influencing our outlook and activities, even if personal disillusion or reaction overtake them. It is always worth returning to such periods, reflectively, to grapple anew with their inspirations and limitations. My own formation began with the anti-authoritarian agendas of student life in Sydney in the 1960s. It continued with the Women’s Liberation Movement in London in the 1970s, and the subsequent debates and conflicts within Anglo-American feminism and the Left, in the 1980s.

Of course, the ordering of historical memory through decades, however useful, involves quite artificial cut-off points. ‘The Sixties’ exists today primarily as a powerful metaphor for current ideological contests between progressives and conservatives over economic, political and moral agendas. Yet at the time it was simply the emergence of a wave of Western youth desperate to flee domestic, suburban comfort for inner-city stimulation and squalor: ‘We’ve got to get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.’⁴ I was one of them. In 1960 I left home, became a student and hoped never, ever, to find myself in any situation that could remind me of the regret, frustration, bitterness and interminable rowing that suffused my childhood, as maternal appeasement tried, only to fail and fail again, to soothe paternal impatience and aggression in the family in which I grew up.

Leaving home was leaving behind, as fast and as fully as possible, the bourgeois world of our parents: leaving home, just because they had ‘sacrificed most of their lives’ for us, just because they had bought us ‘everything [their] money could buy’, just because they had so much invested in us. For the dissenting children of the professional middle classes, like me, would rather have done anything than end up the way they wanted us to be; would rather have gone anywhere than become like our parents: home-owning, married, and hypocritical about sex.

It was hardly surprising that there was such conflict between these two generations. The parental values of thrift, self-sacrifice and work were the necessary attributes for surviving the anguished years of economic depression and war. Understandably, that pre-war generation had since become acquisitively eager for every new symbol of security and, above all, respectability and status. They lived in a time when order, standardization and uniformity were near universal goals: ‘Clothes’, as historian Raphael Samuel recalls, ‘were worn as an affirmation of social position rather than a display of personal self, and they were regimented to a degree; skirt lengths rose or fell uniformly, above or below the knee, according to the dictates of the season; a man who wore suede shoes was morally suspect … for a woman to ladder her stockings was a social disaster, and men hitched their trouser creases for fear of baggy knees.’⁵ Now, a newly consumer-driven capitalist market was helping to promote the growing cult of youth – self-emancipation, self-expression and fun – aimed at the ‘teenage consumer’ with just a little money to spend and scant interest in saving it (wages rose by 72 per cent, and prices by only 45 per cent, between 1951 and 1963).⁶

Yet in Britain it had been working-class youth, whose relative deprivation contrasted most with the cosy assumptions of general affluence in the new ‘classless’ society, who had first consciously set out to shock and distance themselves from their hard-working and respectable parents. The media of the late fifties had only just recovered from the shock of the arrogant, aggressive Teddy Boy, rocking around the clock to the sounds of Bill Haley or the more sexually provocative Presley, when at the turn of the decade it discovered the full-blooded working-class Rocker: the hot and sulky, Brando-style, leather-clad biker, who was out to mash up his rival Mod, the ‘effeminate’, super-cool and upwardly mobile lower middle-class, grammar school boy, in to smart clothes, pep pills, soul music, ska and scooters.⁷ Only later were these rebellious teenage cultures superceded by the ever widening threat and titillation of large numbers of middle-class youth who, with newly found egalitarian delight, hurried on down into the joys of the generation gap – rejecting middle-class ambition – to dance, get high, and get laid.

Those who made their mark on the sixties were a noisy and vociferous minority, particularly as students, benefitting from the dramatic growth in higher education. This relatively underworked and overprivileged, demographically bulging post-war generation had emerged into an era of unprecedented economic boom with high employment and widespread affluence, only – without fear of lack – to reject them both. Such a rejection was all the more striking and strange when espoused by the young women of the day, because the conservatism of the fifties was so strongly symbolized through women, marriage and family. ‘My ambition’, recalls Jane Wibberley, expressing so many young people’s rebellion, ‘was not to have a career and especially not to be a secretary, teacher or nurse and not to get engaged or married.’⁸

Negative, you think? A double negation, as so many saw it then. It was the only way to create something positive for those who had grown up within the tense domesticity and anxious conformity of the fifties, when a seemingly endless and all-embracing conservative consensus held sway throughout almost every Western nation, in both northern and southern hemispheres. It was a consensus rigidly upheld through carefully manipulated paranoia and illusion: a fear of the dangers of communism abroad and an illusion of harmony at home.⁹ All the old internal conflicts, whether of class or sex, were thought to have been ‘removed’ by the expansion of the welfare state. (The subject of race was as yet no more a topic for serious thought or discussion than sexuality, outside marriage advice literature – the scandal of the Kinsey Report notwithstanding.)

This was a time when, in Detroit, Robin Hood could be banned from the public library for ‘preaching Communist doctrine’.¹⁰ And in Britain in the early 1960s you could still be expelled from school for using the word ‘contraceptive’ in an unofficial school magazine.¹¹ The paradox of that period of relative affluence, as the British sociologists Bogdanor and Skidelsky were later to summarize it, was that the first effects of the widening of opportunity had been to narrow human life to the quest for goods, status and position: ‘The more room at the top there was, the more energy was expended trying to get there.’¹² In the USA, G.K. Galbraith had passed much the same judgement on his society, suggesting that those benefitting from the new affluence were becoming slaves to the wants ‘increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied’.¹³

Following the recent interest in the sixties at the close of the eighties, we now have a rich oral history of those years to add to contemporary sociological opinion, the best of it free from both false nostalgia or the now more familiar dismissal and mockery.

Saying yes to sex

Living a mere two hundred years before the moment of his greatest glory, it is William Blake who best captures the spirit of the sixties. It was his ‘Proverbs of Hell’, celebrating excess in all its forms, which ended up daubed upon the corrugated iron concealing empty city buildings or the stone walls decorating rural communes. The explosive linking of music, sexuality and, more gradually, politics, in the youth revolts of that decade meant that love, bursting free from all pretence of marital constraint, was on the move. Love, seeking not itself to please, set out to change the world, through self-emancipation and compassion. Or was love, seeking only self to please, thoughtlessly nihilistic, emboldened by newly accessible contraception and relative affluence? Was there a difference?

The fastest way into an understanding of the new mood of youth in the sixties, especially in its early years, is through its music: a music which took seriously its evangelizing message linking freedom and pleasure. Pop music then had a new purpose, as cultural critic Simon Frith comments nostalgically, ‘to make out of pleasure a politics of optimism, to turn passive consumption into an active culture.’¹⁴ The poet Thom Gunn echoes his memory, identifying London in 1964–5 with the Beatles: ‘They stood for a great optimism, barriers seemed to be coming down all over … there was an openness and high-spiritedness and relaxation of mood.’¹⁵ For Margaret Thatcher, a decade later, a very similar perception of sixties ‘permissiveness’ and ‘sexual freedom’ was not something to celebrate, but to incriminate as the source of Britain’s cultural decline: ‘Instant gratification became the philosophy of the young and the youth cultists.’¹⁶ Subservience to authority and dogged hard work were no longer fashionable, she admonishes, replaced by time wasted in speculation and aggressive verbal hostility.

For women to participate actively in that scene, as so many did, was for them to surrender themselves to the soft seductions of the Beatles – right on cue, in ’62; ‘Love, Love Me Do’ – the group who remained the emblem and toast of the sixties and would write its anthem, ‘All you need is love’. It was a time, Richard Neville boasts, ‘when all the best girls’ got to be fucked by the ‘pigeon-chested weaklings’, like himself, and John Wayne cantered off into the sunset.¹⁷ Some women, of course, did prefer something tougher, and they tuned in to the harsher lustiness of the Stones, the Animals, the Trogs, the Fugs or any of the many other Beasts of sixties beat. Later, perhaps, they would succumb to the tough-talking political males, Bob Dylan’s ‘It ain’t me, Babe’ or Mick Jagger’s ‘Street Fighting Man’. But whether screaming, swooning and fainting at Beatles concerts, or lining up to compete with other groupies and score a fuck with the Rolling Stones (and then write about it), it was sexual excitement – primarily heterosexual excitement, in some form or another – that so many young women were after. ‘The words were subordinate to the rhythm’, Sheila Rowbotham remembers, of the time just before she was to help inspire her generation of women into feminism, ‘and the music went straight to your cunt and hit the bottom of the spine. They were like a great release after all the super-consolation romantic ballads.’¹⁸

Marsha Rowe, who was to call together her sisters from the Underground Press in London of the late sixties to co-launch the first feminist magazine, Spare Rib, has written of her own teenage time in Sydney, Australia:

Cut off from a world of touching for so many years, I yearned to be loved and caressed.… I could see myself in how boys reacted to me. We flaunted this desire for one another in front of our...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Preface
• 1. My generation: sex as subversive
• 2. The liberated orgasm? feminists fall out
• 3. The coital imperative: sexology and sex research
• 4. Laws of desire: psychoanalytic perspectives and disputes
• 5. Gay and lesbian challenges: transgression and recuperation
• 6. Rethinking heterosexuality: women with men
• 7. Sex in society: social problems, sexual panics
• Notes
• Index