century of development of public, social sexual preoccupation in the West in liberal areas has shifted the social expectation of coupling away from marriage and its privatization of women under one male authority, the husband, toward sex and the public colonization of women for male sexual servicing. Conservative areas of post-industrial society demonstrate the effort to reconfine women within the family, under reproductive and sexual control.
A sexual imperative looms over coupling. It signifies for the late twentieth century what marriage had meant for previous centuries in terms of control of women. As women are no longer necessarily identified as wives, they are expected to be known through their sexual connection to another. Coupling has become a social signification that women are sexually connected to another—therefore under control, a control of women that marriage no longer assures. The imperative that women be/are sexual is a historically recent social force constituted to sustain male domination when women cannot be controlled by marriage or in economic dependency.
The 1960s sexual revolution took as its bibles the works of sexologists and pornographers, both of which groups, as Sheila Jeffries pointed out, were hostile to women’s liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.8 Finally, by the 1980s, they had reduced the meaning and significance of women’s “liberation” to pornography where “liberation” means trespassing traditional masculinist sexual norms to replace them with modern, public masculinist norms that reduce woman to sex. The culture of sexual liberation, developed in the twin discourses of sexology and pornography, produces sex as an objectified “thing” to be gotten, taken, had. That “thing” has been reified in the orgasm. As Stephen Heath points out, orgasm is “the key manoeuvre in the sexual fix”:
As long as orgasm holds the centre of the stage, we will never get out of the sexual norm, a redirection of the sexual, the realization of sex as a commodity with men and women placed and held essentially, as their “nature,” male and female, the difference, as the agents of that exchange.9
In a century-long development of a masculinist culture of sex in the West, sexuality has been made compulsive, and it is compulsively treated as if compulsive sex is “normal” sex. The deployment of sexuality generally follows the progression of pornography, which emerged for massive distribution in the early 1960s. As legal control of pornography was lifted, its subject matter escalated from pictures of nude women to more provocative poses. By 1967 more sexual explicitness was expected by consumers,10 which finally led to hard-core, violent, humiliating, degrading sex and the snuff films in which women were murdered in the sexual fix.
Today male domination is sustained in large part by the failure of society to distinguish between sex that is exploitation and sex that is positive human experience, enhancing rather than destroying human lives. Feminism has intervened in the patriarchal construction of sex. In their civil rights approach to pornography, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon redefined pornography to be “a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women.”11 Dworkin and MacKinnon defined pornography as harm not only because it is violent—because it presents women being penetrated by objects or animals, because it presents women injured, bleeding, bruised in pornographic sex—but at its core pornography is violating because “women are presented as dehumanized sexual objects, things or commodities.”12
Legally, Dworkin and MacKinnon have identified the subject matter of pornography as “graphic, sexually explicit presentation that produces a subordination of women through pictures and/or words” (emphasis added). Prostitution is the enacted version of pornography, where the graphic representation of the subordination of women comes to life. The normalization of prostitution is the pornographic deployment of that subordination into private lives and personal relationships. Now, not only is it the daily, subjective experience of a class of women, identified by their commercial availability to service men sexually, but of women as a class through the prostitution of sexuality.
In defense of male domination, sexual liberals, those who have promoted sex as a form of freedom and as a matter only of individual choice without regard to whether that sex enhances or harms human experience, have moved to censor the civil rights approach to pornography. By the 1990s the progression and escalation of pornography has become the masculinist culture of sex in which prostitution is the normative model for sexual behavior. It does not stop there. This Western masculinist construction of sex, this colonization of women’s bodies, is a major dimension of Western hegemony as American, European, and Australian men, in the military, in businesses, and as tourists, impose that sex in the form of market demand on women in Third World countries. The U.S., U.N., or other occupying military forces have not just discovered sex for the first time when they rape and prostitute women of Third World countries, nor is that the end of it when they return home to lovers or wives.
In each historical condition of sexualization—feudalism, industrialization, and post-industrial society—the subordination of women is accomplished through (1) the sexualization that reduces women to biology, locating women in a class condition where they are expropriated bodies to be fetishized, which treats sex and women’s lives as essential rather than social reality; (2) the reduction of human beings to bodily functions, driving women out of history; and (3) atemporality in which women cease to exist in time. In sexual exploitation, women are universalized and therefore not historical, biologized and therefore not social.
By contrast, Catharine MacKinnon summarizes the legal and social reality that would obtain if sex were not the condition of subordination:
If the sexes were equal, women would not be sexually subjugated. Sexual force would be exceptional, consent to sex could be commonly real, and sexually violated women would be believed. If the sexes were equal, women would not be economically subjected, their desperation and marginality cultivated, their enforced dependency exploited sexually or economically.13
Prostitution of Sexuality
When prostitution is normalized it is no longer the exchange of money and the anonymity in the fact that she has known this guy maybe 10 minutes that differentiates how women in prostitution experience the night from how many women, teenagers, and young girls around the world experience it. By the 1990s, sex that is bought in the act of prostitution and promoted in pornography does not look significantly different from the sex that is taken in rape, pressured in teenage dating, and apparently given in many private relationships. This leads to the conclusion that, in the West, normatively the lines between rape, prostitution, and private sex have blurred.
The legacy to women of the sexual liberation movement and the legitimization of pornography of the 1960s has not been women’s liberation but rather the prostitution of sexuality. By the 1990s, the video cassette recorder has done more than bring pornography home into the bedroom and private sexual relations. With the camcorder, it has made the bedroom—or wherever pornography that is prostituted sex is done—the location for making pornography. It has been reported that about one-third of the approximately 75 new adult videos each month are made by amateurs at home.14 And as husbands and lovers see a market value to film their private, intimate moments at home, women are reporting that the sex scenes are becoming more and more torturous. Diana Russell in her study of rape found that 10% of the 930 women she interviewed had experienced pornography being brought into their sex lives:
Ms. C: He was a lover. He’d go to porno movies, then he’d come home and say, “I saw this in a movie. Let’s try it.” I felt really
