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Vance put it in her landmark anthology, “Pleasure and Danger. Its subjective judgments about what women should know in their guts did nothing to acknowledge women’s realities and only added to their internal shame machines.Ī group known as pro-sex feminists warned against the dead-end politics of focusing only on sexual violence, which just made women the “moral custodians of male behavior,” as Carole S. If male-centered ideas about sex hardly encouraged self-actualization, neither did this new strain of feminism. “Every woman here knows in her gut,” wrote the writer and anti-porn feminist Robin Morgan in 1978, “that the emphasis on genital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement and coarse invulnerability was the male style and that we, as women, placed greater trust in love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment.” The don’ts extended to women, too: The ones who wanted to be dominated or have casual sex or even have sex with men at all were kidding themselves. “But mind and body are one organism and all tied up together, and it isn’t even physically fun unless the people involved really like each other!” One can sense the nebulousness of it all, the work involved in rewriting longstanding cultural scripts. “I don’t believe you have to be in love and married till death do us part,” one woman said. One woman tried to explain that she didn’t want traditional commitment, exactly - just more connection, more affection, more … something. In it, regular women who were navigating the mores of the sexual revolution struggled to pin down what they were looking for. Arnold wrote her essay, the sociologist Shere Hite released a report on female sexuality. A liberated woman was expected to dodge the roles and rules prescribed to her and replace them with her own desires - the discovery of which often involves unraveling a lifetime of learned behavior. Even as the feminists of the 1960s and ’70s were recognizing the importance of pursuing sexual happiness, it was clear that embracing one’s sexual freedom was going to be easier said than done. Understanding our authentic desires has long been hopelessly stymied by politics. How had I, a supposedly empowered feminist, wound up here? But despite this, I stayed frozen in dissatisfaction, unable to articulate my deepest needs to myself, my partner or my friends. Though sex wasn’t the only thing wrong with our relationship, it was the starkest evidence of our weak connection. And yet I found myself unable to admit a simple fact: Our sex, it turned out, was bad. Our marriage was modern and progressive by most standards: We experimented with nonmonogamy my partner did more laundry than I did. As a result, we have ended up sidelining a chaotic and mystifying but also politically essential process: pursuing desire on one’s own terms.Īt the tail end of 2016, I ended an eight-year relationship about six years too late. But uncovering the answer has proved to be a tall order. The early feminists in those living rooms had their sights set on this question, one they deemed central to liberation. Many heterosexual women felt their emotional needs were left in the dust while their sexual needs often remained a mystery to both their partners and themselves.

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The women’s frustration with the sexual landscape was, as Michelle Goldberg recently put it, “what you get when you liberate sex without liberating women.” There was an expectation for women to be free and horny, but the fact that sex was still tailored to men thwarted those efforts at every turn. The sexual revolution was riding high, but second-wave feminism had barely gotten off the ground. “How could he? We didn’t know really what it was yet.” “But no man had ever really grooved on our sexuality,” she wrote. These women spent much of their adult lives wanting to be considered a “good lay,” which sometimes meant contorting themselves to mirror their male partners’ sexuality. Arnold wrote - and yet the nature of their own desires was often inscrutable. They deemed sex a “huge and crucial” topic, Ms. The women talked about masturbation, lesbianism and the relationship between love and lust. In an essay written in 1970, amid the early years of the women’s liberation movement, the novelist and feminist activist June Arnold recalled several consciousness-raising sessions devoted to sex.

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