feminism

Who Actually Lost the Sex Wars?

Photo: Getty

Seven years ago, Rebecca Traister observed that “contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its over-­radicalization but rather its under­radicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex.” Feminists fought hard to get consent written into rape law, and yet yes or no has proved necessary but insufficient to meet the power imbalances that exist before anyone takes their clothes off.

So what does it actually look like to have a truly liberated sexual culture? This year has brought plenty of critiques of sex, notably in Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex: A Provocation and Nona Willis-Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution. Both books blend memoir, reporting, and feminist history to seek a better way, with starkly different conclusions. Lorna Bracewell’s Why We Lost the Sex Wars, published last year, reminds us that feminism has fought on this ground before, in the so-called sex wars of the 1980s. It seems intuitive that the anti-pornography feminists of that time lost culturally, politically, and legally — thanks in part to technology like Pornhub, OnlyFans, and hookup apps — but the inchoate dissatisfaction you can find almost anywhere you look suggests a more complicated answer. This conversation, originally hosted by the New York Historical Society, has been edited and condensed; you can view the whole thing here.  

Lorna, who is the “we” in Why We Lost the Sex Wars?

Photo: Courtesy of Lorna Bracewell

Lorna Bracewell: The “we” is all of us. I mean, in a very capacious sense, feminists, people who believe that sexual equality and sexual justice are important things. People who believe that there’s too much sexual violence in the world and that there should be less. People who believe that there is a kind of insufficient amount of what my friend, political theorist Joe Fishel, calls democratic hedonism, like sexual pleasure is not equally distributed. People who are committed to a kind of egalitarian and sexual ethos, that’s the “we,” and I think that the sex wars was a real fecund moment for thinking about how we might go about achieving some of those great feminist desideratums. But unfortunately we’ve forgotten so much of that history. And so that’s why, I mean, we kind of lost, but I don’t think it’s over, right?

I felt like the discursive parameters were really stifling and narrow and inadequate to the problems of sexual justice that feminism is supposed to be confronting. So I was just kind of desperate to find anybody saying anything different about sex than it’s good and it’s fun, and as long as it’s done in private between two consenting adults, what else is there to say about it? And so I decided to turn to the history of the feminist sex wars. And lo and behold, I found a tremendous amount of variety of feminist analyses of sexual politics in that historical moment. And I also found that received understandings of the sex wars were really misleading and inaccurate in all kinds of ways.

Part of what we’ve forgotten is that, all these feminist positions that were staked out during the sex wars — and feminists did not agree on everything during this period, it’s called the sex wars for a reason — but one of the things that feminists shared during this time period was this suspicion of a simplistic liberal sexual politics. Whether you’re talking about anti-pornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, or whether you’re talking about feminists who I call sex radical feminists, like take Pat, now Patrick Califia, or Gayle Rubin, what united them was their shared sense that the sexual politics of postwar liberalism, which was a kind of anti-censorship, sexual freedom as expressive freedom, personal liberty, privacy-oriented sexual politics, that that was really inadequate and pernicious, actually.

How would you define liberalism in the sexual context?

Bracewell: Hugh Hefner is a great example of a figure who embodies this kind of postwar liberal way of thinking about sex and the politics of sex. The problem that Hugh Hefner begins publishing Playboy to overcome is repression. Government has been interfering in the private sphere of individual sexual freedom and ultimately unjust ways that, on Hefner’s analysis, cause all sorts of perversion and pathology. So he wants to free from restraint the kind of liberty of the individual to peruse whatever erotic material they would like to in private, and it’s not going to hurt anybody. Sex is harmless. Sex is apolitical when you’re thinking about sex in this kind of liberal way. And the major obstacle to sexual freedom is government interference or state interference or censorship.

Photo: Emily Shechtman

Nona Willis-Aronowitz: I write in Bad Sex about how in the earliest consciousness-raising sessions in 1967 in tiny East Village apartments, women were getting together and talking about their worries and their fears having to do with their gender. And one of the major perennial issues was sex. It was a very liberatory time for a lot of women because they, first of all, had the pill. Second of all, they were less likely to be stigmatized for having sex. But these women were acknowledging that this was all still on men’s terms and that the sex that they were having was usually bad, that they felt like they’d lost the right to say no. And then I think as the years went on the anti-porn feminists reset the terms of saying, “We want protection from assault and rape and misogynistic porn, rather than a space to indulge our own desires.”

And I think that those early discussions were lost in the late-’70s and early ’80s discussions of sexual liberation. Pro-sex feminists like my mom tried to bring them back, but this purity of understanding what we’re still trying to grapple with, which is: How can you be sexually free in a misogynistic culture? It’s still going to always be on an oppressor’s terms. When I read the transcripts of some of these rap sessions, I was just like, “That literally could happen today.” They were talking about wanting to have sex because they wanted to and not for any other reason. Not for expectation, not because you felt bad for the guy, or because you felt like you couldn’t say no, but simply because you wanted to. That was in 1968.

Christine, in your book you critique that sort of liberal sexual politics, but you also think that can’t be separated from the feminist movement. 

Photo: Courtesy of Christine Emba

Christine Emba: Rethinking Sex is in some ways a call to arms against our current sort of “anything goes” sexual culture. I wrote it to critique the idea that getting the right kind of consent — we’ve gone from “no means no,” to “yes means yes,” to enthusiastic consent — is the only standard that we can have for whether sex is good or not.

I also pushed in the book to question whether some of the assumptions that we have raised and held on to post the sexual revolution and post the high-water marks of the feminist movement are correct. Whether they are actually helping us, especially young women and men who are making their way through the world day, or whether they’re harming us in some ways. So I wanted to ask, what assumptions are we holding that aren’t serving us? Where did we think the sexual revolution should have taken us — and where did we end up? I spoke to dozens of young women and men to hear what they thought of the state of sex and our sexual culture, and even feminism today. I heard a lot of heteropessimism and a lot about consumerism and a longing for relationships and settling for less. Many young women talked about how they identified as feminists, or at least they thought that they did, or they used to, but they, in some ways, felt that modern feminism had served them a bill of goods in some places, or was no longer as relevant as it used to be.

Willis-Aronowitz: I was born to one of these feminists who were asking these questions in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s. I grew up with this idea, with a very pro-sex lens on feminism, not to be confused with the sort of liberalism of anything goes besides consent. I don’t think my mom would’ve ever said that, and neither would any of her friends. But I did also grow up in the ’90s where, I think, the peak of that philosophy was afoot. And sometimes it was labeled feminism, sometimes it wasn’t, but it was very much like, feminism equals getting as many orgasms as you can and having a lot of sex and loving it and that’s it. And I decided to write Bad Sex shortly after my divorce. I have this liberation from this unsatisfying relationship, which was itself a reaction to how bad hookup culture was. And then find myself eight years later in a really confusing and multi-layered sexual landscape where I truly want to figure out my authentic desires but don’t always know how to do it. And I think, unlike Christine’s book, I say on one hand the hookup culture, the casual sex is unsatisfying, but also if you do achieve what a lot of women purport to say they want, especially heterosexual women, which is a committed relationship, there are also toxic dynamics and expectations waiting for you on the other side.

Christine, you reject the argument that there just isn’t enough liberation in the kind of sex that people are having now. You say that men and women are fundamentally different in their desires and that feminists need to become more comfortable with embracing that.

Emba: This has changed somewhat after Dobbs, but we are in one of the most sexually free eras in history. Contraception is available. There is less stigma, very little stigma at this point around premarital sex. The age of marriage has moved much later for women and for men. So everybody should be having a great time. And yet so many people are, in fact, not — to the point that we are in what has been termed by a number of writers as a sex recession, where young people especially are simply choosing not to have sex or are either being pushed into this place. One of the things that I heard again and again was that the liberatory, anything-goes atmosphere left them feeling lost in some ways. Now that the rules are gone, there’s very little understanding or direction for what they should actually be doing, how to form relationships with each other. And then also in the space of total liberation, in some ways, it is the most confident, and in fact, sometimes the most maligned, who are best able to take advantage of spaces where there are no rules.

Originally sex positivity meant something specific and it was actually coined by Nona’s mother, Ellen Willis, in an essay called “Lust Horizons.” It was saying that, yes, women’s sexuality should be recognized, shouldn’t be quashed as a way of punishing men or punishing the patriarchy. It was kind of as a pushback to the idea of political celibacy, but that was a specific critique aimed at a particular idea circulating in the feminist movement at the time in the late ’70s, early ’80s. But today the term within contemporary feminism has become a shorthand for a general willingness, when it comes to sex, for being up for anything, often with anyone, with an emphasis on adventurousness and with the understanding that this is what liberation looks like. But within that, there is the forced assumption that sex doesn’t matter. That one shouldn’t have too many feelings about it. That women and men want sex in the same way, generally go after it in the same way. Equality looks like having as much sex and being as gung ho about sex as men do, when in fact many people, women and men, don’t find that liberating at all.

I spoke to a lot of young women and men who felt that in an atmosphere where total liberalism, total positivity was expected, there was no room to interrogate or criticize their desires. Not criticize as in marginalize, but ask, “Where is this desire coming from? Do I need to indulge it? What does this say about society at large? Can I even say no to something? Am I allowed to dislike something without being a conservative or a bad feminist or a prude or a repressed person?”

I was at a party speaking to a young woman who I told her I was writing this book on sex and she wanted to ask me advice. And she was telling me this story about how she was dating this guy. He was great except that he choked her sometimes during sex, and she didn’t really like that, but she consented to it because, you know, this is what people are doing these days. She’s a modern sex-positive person. She feels like she shouldn’t push back against his desires or stigmatize what he wants, and she didn’t feel like she had any recourse to say no. So, was that okay? Was this situation okay? And to me, obviously, the situation did not seem okay. This idea that everyone is an individual, autonomous, that we should not push people to explain themselves or change their desires or change their behaviors or question themselves, has left us in a place where we are unable to critique and have real discussions about what good actually looks like.

Lorna, do you hear a parallel with Christine’s critique of our very different contemporary landscape with what those feminists were writing about in the ’80s?

Bracewell: Partly. Their big beef with pornography was that they felt it was intrinsically dehumanizing. For Andrea Dworkin, the film Deep Throat really made quite an impact. She was very animated around how oral sex, a kind of sadistic enactment of oral sex was becoming normalized through pornography, which I think rhymes with Christine’s story about choking becoming like, “Oh, well, that’s just a thing that people do without having a conversation prior about whether or not we might enjoy this,” right?
Where I think that they would diverge, maybe, with Christine, you were talking about there’s a kind of intrinsic difference in what women want out of sex and what men went out of sex. I don’t know that the anti-pornography feminists who I write about would go with you there. Anti-pornography feminism as it was originally conceived by people like Robin Morgan or people like Andrea Dworkin, they would vehemently reject the kind of biological essentialism underpinning that kind of claim. Where I think where they would take it is they would say, like, “Look, not everybody wants the kind of heterosexual script.” And it’s not just that men want it, women don’t, but it’s like, we need to be open to people wanting a variety of things with regard to sexuality, and we should cultivate a sexual culture that facilitates and enables people to pursue those sexual aims.

I think what Andrea Dworkin and her ilk would say is that patriarchy has constructed an asymmetry of vulnerability with regard to sex. That is not an essential biological, inevitable, natural asymmetry. It is a socially produced and constructed asymmetry. So, yes, men and women under conditions of patriarchy certainly experience sex differently, right? But that is not because of some intrinsic, ineluctable, gendered feature of men and women.

Nona, you write that a sort of capitalist, liberal approach to sex is unsatisfying, but you come to a different conclusion about gender difference, or whether certain kinks or habits are inherently harmful. 

Willis-Aronowitz: I think both my mother and I would agree that missing anything from the past having to do with heterosexual relationships is extremely, extremely dangerous. Feminists from the second wave were old enough to remember what it was like when there was maybe a little bit more chivalry, or probably not an expectation that you would get choked in bed, but that came with all kinds of other bribes and other regulatory expectations that I’m happy do not exist anymore. I gravitated to a more committed relationship, partly in reaction to these soulless, not very vulnerable sexual experiences that I was having in my early 20s. And I think it was a bit of a cautionary tale.

More women want commitment than men, but I don’t think that that’s an intrinsic difference. It’s a socialized difference and it’s not necessarily going to make them happy if they eventually do find that. I think what does make people happy, and this is what I explore in my book is, and also what Christine does acknowledge, is that no matter what kind of sexual encounter or romantic encounter you’re having, you do need to drum up a huge amount of vulnerability for it to be worth anything, and that’s a huge ask, again, in a misogynistic culture. There’s a lot of self-protection going on because a lot of men are, again, not that they don’t want vulnerable, transcendent encounters, but they’re socialized not to engage with them. And so why, as a 22-year-old woman trying to have sex, would you be vulnerable in that way? It’s really a huge risk, and sex is always going to be a huge risk, I believe, even in a utopian culture where there was no misogyny. It still is a very risky encounter where you really do have to surrender to the other person and really trust them a lot. And so I think that gets to the other issue, which is, is some kind of sex ultimately damaging no matter what? I think it really depends on the context. It can’t just be in a vacuum of like, is choking always wrong? I don’t think that BDSM approached correctly and in the right context is intrinsically unethical.

Emba: I’m not actually trying to necessarily be a total biological or gender essentialist and say that women only want soft sex and men only want really intense, choking-related sex. But I do think that one of the flattenings that has happened in some ways in the postmodern feminist moment is this suggestion that men and women should go after sex in the same way, and that their vulnerabilities, as you were pointing out, are the same. And in fact this is a difference, and I think that this is something that earlier feminists were aware of. When it comes to sex, women can get pregnant after sex and the consequences for that tend to be different as compared to those who can’t get pregnant after sex.

The original feminists really did have a revolutionary idea in mind, smashing a patriarchal system that centered male preferences and toxic value systems and assumed that the male system and the male body was the default, and replacing it with a new vision that also allowed in women and their distinctive concerns and valued and protected those. And I think what many have observed in this moment is that the most modern, most recognizable forms of feminism to younger people, the sort of girlboss and lean-in feminism is what you might actually call neoliberal feminism, actually ignored that ask and settles for less.

Who Actually Lost the Sex Wars?