Two FEMINISM and PROMISCUITY

Two FEMINISM AND PROMISCUITY Linda LeMoncheck The strength and unifying vision of a feminist philosophical inquiry into sexuality and sexual preference is its recognition that women’s sexuality can be exploited as a powerful tool for women’s social, economic, and political subordination. Many feminists point to the pervasive sexual harassment, rape, prostitution, pornographic degradation, and spousal abuse of women, as well as women’s struggle to secure reproductive choice and adequate childcare, as strong evidence of the prevalence of powerful social institutions supporting men’s subordination of women through heterosexual sex. (See Barry, 1979, Brownmiller, 1975, Griffin, 1981, Dworkin, 1974, and MacKinnon, 1987). According to this view, women’s erotic desires and sexual preferences, as well as their reproductive choices and responsibilities for childcare, are carefully circumscribed and controlled by cultural sanctions aimed at maintaining heterosexual male power and privilege. Such sanctions are patriarchal, according to Marilyn Frye, when they form part of “institutions, relationships, roles, and activities [that] are male-defined, male-dominated, and operate for the benefit of males and the maintenance of male privilege” (Frye, 1983, p. 96). Many feminists claim that, when women live in a patriarchal society, their sexual exploration, pleasure, and agency become targets for their sexual restriction, repression, and violation (Vance, 1989, p. 1). A feminist philosophy of sex explores the nature and extent of this oppressive environment and seeks to expose women’s sexual subordination in an effort toward change. Thus, a philosophy of sex is uniquely positioned to benefit from a feminist analysis, as it is a philosophy of those very relations in which women’s auto- nomous voices are often submerged, if not silenced altogether. (For feminist analyses of women’s sexuality under patriarchy, see Snitow, Stansell, and Thomson, 1983, Ortner and Whitehead, 1981, Heath, 1982, Suleiman, 1986, Moi, 1985, and Leidholdt and Raymond, 1990). In her fascinating discussion of life as both modern artists’ muse and contemporary ceramicist, Beatrice Wood writes: In a way, my life has been an upside-down experience. I never made love to the men I married and I did not marry the men I loved. I do not know if that makes me a good girl gone bad, or a bad girl gone good. (Wood, 1987) 10 LINDA LEMONCHECK Women’s heterosexual subordination by men is a subordination of identity. In a patriarchal society, women are defined in terms of their heterosex- uality and reproductivity in order to serve the needs and maintain the privi- leges of men. Therefore, women’s sexuality under patriarchy must be very carefully circumscribed, lest it gain an independent credibility and power of its own. Men’s ideal of women is that they be sexual only in a certain way. America’s good girl/bad girl stereotype defines the parameters of ac- ceptable sexual behavior for women, circumscribing their identity as women under conditions of male status and privilege. Sheila Ruth calls this stereotype one of the heterosexual “serviceability” of women, to emphasize how much a woman’s identity is defined by her sexual access to men: the sexually “serviceable” woman is the heterosexually available mistress or lover, sen- suous, responsive, and receptive (Ruth, 1990, p. 87). Wives sometimes fit this stereotype, but only when their husbands have not grown sexually bored with them. The sexually serviceable woman is the sexually “good” woman, playful yet submissive, eager, perhaps slightly mysterious. As a playmate fantasy, she can be even more independent, experienced, exotic, or dangerous. She is to be distinguished from the non-sexual “good” woman/mother/wife who is nur- turing where the sexually serviceable woman will be challenging, virginal where the sexually serviceable woman will be carnal. The stereotype of the sexually “non-serviceable” woman is the bitch-temptress, immodest, coarse, and demanding. She is a promiscuous woman who, despite her sexual availa- bility to men, is non-serviceable, because she is sexually ungovernable, indi- scriminate, and selfish. The seductive lustiness of the serviceable woman be- comes salacious, lewd, and uncomfortably lascivious in the non-serviceable woman. Her non-sexual counterpart is cloying, manipulative, and catty. A non-serviceable woman is “bad.” The irony in these distinctions is that they are arbitrarily and ambiguous- ly applied (Ruth, 1990). Feminists not only object to the content and restric- tiveness of the stereotypes, but they also object to the fickle, tenuous, and often contradictory ways in which women are asked to instantiate them. A wife may be congratulated by an ambitious husband for the way she success- fully flirts with his boss at a company cocktail party. Having lost his chance at promotion, he may regard her identical flirtation as an insensitive assault on his masculinity or refer to her as “the bitch who can’t shut her mouth.” If her clothes are not sexy enough, she is “frumpy.” When in those very same clothes, she seduces the wrong man, she is “sleazy.” Many husbands want a wife who is simultaneously sexually available and chaste, the virgin who is a whore in bed. A woman is “bad” whether she strays on purpose or by acci- dent, because, like a servant, she is supposed to know what is expected of her. What the above examples suggest is that a woman is “good” only by be- ing both an experienced sexual seductress and a non-sexual maternal caretak- er with the capacity to know not only which role suits which occasion for which man, but also how to play both roles at once. Success in one social .

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