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LUST and DISGUST by Laura Kipnis
Discussed in this essay:
Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin. Basic Books. 315 pages. $15.95.
Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good, by Wendy Shalit. Random House. 316 pages. $25.95.
Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both, by Laura Sessions Stepp. Riverhead. 288 pages. $24.95.
Sex is bad for women, and I mean bad in every sense of the word: from the dismal quality of the experience itself, to the lasting harms - psychological, social, existential - it inflicts. At least this is a premise with a certain traction in the cultural imagination, and it seems in no danger of losing its hold, even in an era that simultaneously pays frequent lip service to the polar-opposite premise-sexual disparity between men and women is now a fact, and sex is finally good for women, so let's all party. In short, there are many conflicting stories circulating about what women are getting up to in bed, and how much they're really enjoying it, and whether proclaiming enjoyment is even a reliable indicator of anything when it's a woman doing the proclaiming; we are the sex, after all, notorious for faking enjoyment. In fact, for women, even good sex-or sex you mistakenly thought was good-may be bad for you, in ways you can't calculate.
{...}
Previously I was under the impression that it was only heterosexual sex that disgusted Dworkin. But as Levy's introduction helpfully informs, Dworkin-who died in 2005 at the age of fifty-eight-may have proclaimed herself a lesbian, yet she was not known to have logged any hours in the actual enterprise, either romantically or sexually. Nevertheless, clearly she thought about sex a lot. Additionally, she was an unorthodox enough lesbian to have loved and secretly married a man, her soulmate, with whom she cohabited for over three decades; he, too, was gay, and happened to have health
insurance. Happily, Dworkin found the kind of love she either believed in or could tolerate: one that didn't involve bodies, the messy meeting up of alien genitals, or accommodation to male desire. She had far less confidence in the ability of other women to hew to their own nonconformist paths, perhaps not without reason.
{...}
This is all depressingly familiar. So is the litany of harms we're told derive from casual sex. Stepp and Shalit do know how to thump that fear card: between the two of them, they manage to haul in anorexia, depression, suicide, selfcutting, an empty life of careerism and singlehood, STDs (of course), along with rapists and serial killers handpicking their victims from the photos of girls in revealing outfits on MySpace.com (that one is Shalit's).
Monocausal arguments (casual sex causes X) shade into hysterical ones (the bogeymen will get you). The question I find interesting is why it's invariably sex that produces these hysterical arguments about risk, while other social risks get a pass. Most of us would agree that auto fatalities are tied to driving in cars, that driving carries risks, but no one-at least in secular society- is proposing that women stop driving. Maybe it's an unanswerable question: Freud started out by trying to decipher the mysteries of female hysteria and ended up churning out twenty- four volumes. Hysteria is a dybbuk, hopping from one generation to the next in slightly altered guises, eluding the bondage of reason.
Dworkin, too, had her female fears, though at least she wasn't peddling the story that everything used to be better in the old days. All in all, if I had to cast my vote for a sexual alarmist, I'm for Dworkin, the radical firebrand, in lieu of the well-meaning aunties. The new alarmism is so tepid compared with the old alarmism. Dworkin found sex tragic and disgusting, but she wasn't trying to spawn a generation of nice girls-though she also had no time for sexual experimentation, and she disliked men (along with sex) too much to concede that nice girls stifled by conventionality and greedy for freedom have always pursued it by trying to act like men, whether that means careers, adventurism (from joan of Arc to Amelia Earhart), or sleeping around. Emulating men has its problems, to be sure. Men haven't got it all figured out either---other than how not to buy books telling them to have
less sex, which may be why no one writes them. For my money, this in itself would be a condition for women to aspire to.
More at www.harpers.org
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