Big Fat Dyke Loves Sex

I’ve noticed that a lot of writers think a catchy title can make up for a multitude of literary sins these days. In the case of Jennifer Baumgardner’s recent Alternet article, the title, while sure to draw in readers of all stripes, is not so much catchy as seriously misleading.

Full disclosure: I’ve written about Jennifer Baumgardner’s work before, and dismissively. Unfortunately, this article is even worse than that book of hers that I flogged previously. It’s an awkward mishmash of incomplete criticism and personal details which don’t seem to support the conclusion she doesn’t seem to have. Is it a review? Is it a personal essay? Is it a LiveJournal entry? I’m not sure exactly how to approach it, and yet I can’t resist.

I’ve read Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and nowhere in it does she even suggest that feminism is dead. And while I disagree with Levy’s claim that “It no longer makes sense to blame men,” (p. 35) because “loophole” women (otherwise known as tokens) produce pornography and public sex, she’s hardly blaming women. What Levy does do, fairly well, is explore what passes for “sex” in the culture these days, and what it demands of women:

For women, and only for women, hotness requires projecting a kind of eagerness, offering a promise that any attention you receive for your physicality is welcome… While Janet Jackson introduced Americans to her right nipple at the notorious 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, Justin Timberlake’s wardrobe managed not to malfunction. Not one male Olympian has found it necessary to show us his penis in the pages of a magazine. Proving that you are hot, worthy of lust, and–necessarily–that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women’s work. It is not enough to be successful, rich, and accomplished. Even women like Couric and Jackson and world-champion swimmer Haley Clark, women at the pinnacle of their fields, feel compelled to display their solicitude. (p.33)

This is hardly a declaration that feminism is dead; instead, it reiterates decades-old feminist critiques of the ongoing objectification and sexualization of all women, perhaps especially those women who have demonstrated themselves to be talented, intellectual, and physically strong. Levy’s argument perfectly illustrates what feminists have long pointed out—that patriarchy requires women to demonstrate sexual acquiescence to males to cancel out any threat their otherwise powerful and independent behavior might make to male supremacy. I mean, we can’t even have a song about sisters “doing it for themselves” without reassuring the dudes that “a man still loves a woman/and a woman still loves a man just the same yeah!”

Now that she’s demonstrated how far we haven’t come, Levy asks the questions that women who have the luxury of choice ought to be asking ourselves about our participation in this culture:

“How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women? Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star–a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place–going to render us sexually liberated?” (p. 4)

Baumgardner’s exercised because Levy “squashes all public displays of female sexuality into the box marked ‘objectification.’” Baumgardner seems to disagree with the examples Levy uses, but doesn’t provide any evidence that CAKE parties aren’t “cheesy fake lesbian performances for men in suits” or attempt to explain how the widespread use of the phrase “bros up, bitches down” among hip urban FTM transsexuals isn’t “wildly emulating the most crass and immature high school guys” (not to mention the misogyny of pimp culture that glorifies the prostitution of women). She doesn’t even get all her facts straight; where Baumgardner recalls descriptions of “teen girls using the Internet to post photos of themselves fellating a Swiffer,” in reality Levy’s story describes a girl sending the explicit photos to a boy she liked, who passed them on to his friends, one of whom posted them on the Internet. Levy’s scenario isn’t quite so evocative of an “empowered woman” using the media to “reclaim her sexuality” as Baumgardner recollects, now is it?

Baumgardner’s also not too clear on her history; Levy’s book gives a much better description of the schism among feminists over issues of pornography and sexual exploitation. It would have been better if Baumgardner had left this alone, given the space constraints she was working with; however, she quotes Carol Vance as saying, “We all felt that this sort of feminist sexual politics was problematic: first because sexuality confronted women with opportunities for pleasure as well as potential for danger.” But as Levy writes, “Raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial…Raunch culture isn’t about opening our minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. It’s about endlessly reiterating one particular–and particularly commercial–shorthand for sexiness…our interest is in the appearance of sexiness, not the existence of sexual pleasure.” (pp. 29-30) Levy interviews many women from high school to their thirties who describe lacking a sense of sexual feelings, engaging in sex they don’t want or don’t enjoy in the hopes that they’ll become powerful or popular. The book ultimately describes a female sexuality that has come to be an object even to women (as it always has been portrayed by malestream culture), and that, rather than providing women with opportunities for pleasure, reflects the goals of masculinist sexuality—-power-over, conquest, domination, winning. Baumgardner writes that “Levy’s message seems to be that sex and sexiness can’t be used by women–only against them.” I would argue that sexuality isn’t a “thing” to be “used” at all, but because “sex and sexiness” have been constructed in patriarchy to be something that men “get” from women, “sexiness” can’t, in fact, be expressed publicly in a liberated, empowering way by women. The fact that some women may get pleasure from male-identified sexual practice doesn’t mean that it accurately represents what female sexuality would be like out from under male dominance. If one’s goal is equality with men, then acting out Levy’s definition of a female chauvinist pig makes sense: “They want to be like men, and profess to disdain women who are overly focused on the appearance of femininity. But men seem to like those women, those girly-girls, or like to look at them, at least. So to really be like men, FCPs have to enjoy looking at those women, too.” (p. 99) It’s another double bind for women-—trying to escape the misogyny that accrues to “girly girls,” women objectify other women; but in so doing women become divorced from our sexuality as a source of pleasure and attachment. So if you just want your piece of the poison pie, head on down to your nearest “gentlemen’s club.” But if what you want is liberation-—if you want the poison pie thrown out so everyone can get a fair share of something different–well, then, you have to do something different, don’t you?

And now we come to the requisite “personal” part of Baumgardner’s essay. I’m completely in favor of using the strength of personal narrative to underpin and enrich political analysis, but unfortunately in this piece there’s not much analysis to support, so the personal details simply come across as whiny and self-pitying. For example, Baumgardner writes, “Feminism has brought much coherence to my life, but in the complicated and often-awkward world of sex and desire, it has proved less useful.” But I have to wonder whether feminism is really “less useful” in the “awkward world of sex and desire,” or if feminist principles are clarifying but difficult to implement in a male-dominated context, since Baumgardner confesses later in the article, “there was a certain dissonance in my attempt to be a good, actualized feminist and my desire to still get the love and sexual attention I wanted.” When getting sexual attention means being sexy and hot as men define it-—that is, being thin, plucked and shaven, dressing scantily, acting receptive to all advances, and making out with your girlfriends in public places—-it’s necessarily going to conflict with living out one’s feminist principles. I can’t help but conclude that this article displays more of Baumgardner’s unresolved conflicts about her feminism and sexuality than she might wish. There’s nothing inherently unfeminist about having unresolved conflicts, but let’s be honest about them, rather than trying to curry favor by writing articles for lefty male venues before we know what we really think. What I think is that Baumgardner couldn’t be an “actualized feminist” and still get the “love and sexual attention” that she wanted because she’d been taught, as we all are, to identify love and sexual attention using the markers of masculinist culture. Once you realize that an erection is not necessarily a compliment, though, being a feminist becomes just that much simpler.

Baumgardner also confesses, “If pressed, I’d venture that at least half of my sexual experiences make me cringe when I think about them today.” Believe me, we all have cringeworthy experiences. She defends hers, however, because “if I didn’t have those moments, I’m not sure I ever would have found my way to the real long-term relationship I have today.” Leaving aside the fact that thousands if not millions of lesbians find love without first sucking face with their girlfriends in Manhattan wine bars for the titillation of their boyfriends, the point isn’t that all our behavior has to be “evolved and reciprocal and totally revolutionary” from the get-go. Our unevolved and unreciprocal and unrevolutionary experiences don’t get us where we are; we get where we are by reflecting upon our experiences, and basing our subsequent decisions upon whether they made us feel the way we thought they would and the way we want to feel. Those of us who are really exploring our own female sexuality aren’t standing on some lofty cloud above Levy’s raunch culture shaking our fingers at the folks down there jiggling around in their G-strings. We critique “sex-positive” culture because we know all about it, from being in it. We’ve all been to our own versions of CAKE parties and seen our share of Playboy and Penthouse. In addition to opposing pornography because it feeds on the sexual abuse, rape, coercion, and trafficking of millions of women and children worldwide who don’t have a “choice” about being “empowered” by “participating” in it, we “anti-sex” feminists oppose pornography because we’ve used pornography and it left us empty. We reject cheap sex and “playing” because we’ve “played” and had cheap sex–and plenty of it–and we realized it had nothing to do with who we were. Like Levy says, “When I’m in the plastic ‘erotic’ world of high, hard tits and long nails and incessant pole dancing…I don’t feel titillated or liberated or aroused. I feel bored, and kind of tense.”(p. 81) Sexual experiences that are not in keeping with our intellectual and social values, our ideas about the ways we want to be treated and the way we want all women to be treated, can’t ultimately be comfortable or enjoyable for women of conscience. Feminism always was about enabling women to be whole people instead of martyrs or blow-up dolls, but in raunch culture Levy accurately perceives that “we have accepted as fact the myth that sexiness needs to be something divorced from the everyday experience of being ourselves.” (p. 44)

Feminists like me, fortunately, have access to the critiques of the generation of women before us, thanks to feminism-—critiques like the enchanting words from this presentation by Jan Raymond:

I began this talk by stating that, although the lesbian lifestylers talk about sex constantly, they are speechless about its connection to a whole human life, and, therefore, they are speechless about sex itself. The presence of a whole human life in the act of sexuality negates any reductionistic view of sex as good or bad, sheer pleasure or sheer perversion…Sex is a whole human life rooted in passion, in flesh. This whole human life is at stake always.

Because we are feminists, we are able to use ideas like these to help us understand why sexuality divorced from emotion, from our whole lives, wasn’t satisfying, and how we might go about creating the kind of sexual relating we truly desire. And I don’t think such relating always falls into the heterosexist minivan-picket fence-English sheepdog model—-which is often the only alternative to bunny- or boi-hood women are offered. The women I look to as role models have relationships of all shapes and sizes; they often live separately from their lovers, they may spend long periods without a lover, or they may have a week-long encounter at Michfest which changes their lives. I’ll never forget how opposed I was to a friend’s openness to being sexual with someone she’d just met there; but after watching her walk hand in hand through the woods for a week, glowing, with someone who liked her for all kinds of reasons, including her ability to spell four-syllable words, I realized that that interaction was only minimally about the sexual encounter they had together. Instead, it was about the connection, the caring and respect that they developed for each other in that short time, which allowed my friend a stellar example of how she wanted future lovers to treat her. Her experience had absolutely nothing in common with the kind of pick-up sex glorified by Sex and the City. What characterizes the relationships I’m describing is deep affection, respect, and honesty. It’s women seeing each other as whole people, listening to each other, taking each other seriously, and recognizing that they’re on the same side, rather than believing that one has “something” the other one wants and engaging in any kind of dishonest, tacky, coercive or unethical behavior to get it.

Baumgardner ends her article with a plea for “more models and examples of the free, powerful sexuality that Levy says she advocates.” Unfortunately for them, I don’t think either Baumgardner or Levy would recognize me and my ilk as role models. (I’m not sure Levy even knows we exist; she quotes one of her “boi” interviewees as saying, “There was this whole movement of womyn’s land and womyn building houses on womyn’s land and insulating themselves from the rest of the world…It was a whole different world from where we are now.”[p. 125]) Having apparently not divested herself of masculinist definitions of sexiness and hotness, Baumgardner would undoubtedly dismiss me as unhot and unsexy because, as Levy states, “when it pertains to women, hot means two things in particular: fuckable and salable.” (p. 31) As you can see from the photo, malestream culture would find me neither. And yet, during the week that photo was taken, I was enjoying the most heartfelt and physically, emotionally and ideologically satisfying sexual connection of my life to date. It was a long time coming, through many a cringeworthy encounter where I assessed my value based on whether someone else wanted to have sex with me, but now that I’m engaged in a process of making my sexuality about intense connection rather than “getting sex,” I’m never going back. Baumgardner may be confused about whether her feminism or her male-identified sexual past is the real her, but I have no such conflict. I’m a feminist; it just took me a while to transform the sexuality I was raised to feign for the benefit of men. And despite her unwillingness to name male supremacy as the original creator and men as the primary perpetuators and beneficiaries of “raunch culture,” Levy has written a book that might help young women negotiate the false promises of male-centric sexuality and start on the path to real sexual liberation—if they can put aside their own shame and defensiveness long enough to really read it, that is.
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For the sparking of my thinking, I am indebted to the discussion of this article at The Margins.

Filed under: blogging, cats, feminism as politics, feminist sexuality, lesbian feminism, media/culture criticism, reviews by Amy's Brain Today