No doubt for partially strategic reasons, the movement’s proponents have rarely asked what good sex-by which I mean not virtuous but delicious sex-would look like for women, and under which conditions it might be realized.Ī spate of books published this year have asked these neglected questions, urging us to interrogate the political and social sources of our desires and dissatisfactions. It is telling that #MeToo has focused not on women asserting but on women assenting (or failing to assent).
In this picture, sexual agency is mostly reserved for male philanderers and predators. In the public imagination, they figure at best as passive consenters, accepters or rejectors of male propositions, at worst as the hapless prey of nefarious lechers. As the formidable Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan writes in her debut essay collection, The Right to Sex, her female students regularly report that they regard their erotic lives as “at once inevitable and insufficient.” In short, the young women in Srinivasan’s classes are resigned to sex that is consensual but underwhelming.Īnd who can blame them? There are vanishingly few contemporary contexts in which women are taught or encouraged to demand electrification, or indeed, to want actively at all.
Heterosexual women are forever licensing liaisons that don’t excite them-perhaps because they have despaired of discovering anything as exotic as an exciting man, or because it no longer even occurs to them to insist on their own excitement, or because capitulation to unexciting men is so exhaustingly expected of them and so universally glorified in popular depictions of romance. Even in our era of ostensible liberation, women face emotional and social pressures, both externally imposed and uneasily internalized, to appease men at the cost of their own enjoyment. Sex that is merely consensual is about as rousing as food that is merely edible, as drab as a cake without icing. Still, hollow consent, unaccompanied by inner aching, is at least as ubiquitous as sexual coercion. In the public imagination, sexual agency is mostly reserved for male philanders and predators female pleasure is alien at best. A focus on rape and assault is warranted in a culture where sexual crimes are so tragically common: one in every six women in the United States is the victim of rape or attempted rape, and 81 percent of women have experienced some form of sexual harassment. On the one hand, it is not hard to understand why consent and its absence are at the forefront of mainstream conversation. One of the least interesting things a woman can do vis-à-vis sex is consent to it-yet lately, we seem to have less to say about female erotics than we do about male abuses.
Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century Three new books explore the gap between sex that is good and sex that is virtuous, making the complexities of desire central to our conversations about sexual ethics.Ĭitadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accountability, and Reconciliation
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