not the motorcycle diaries

Intellectual resistance, Victor Pelevin apparently said once, is like sex in two condoms - i.e. a pleasurable experience that is completely risk free. The use of the sexual metaphor here is no accident for me, I must say. Notwithstanding the personal insecurity I suffer viz. the figure of The Sexy Intellectual Woman (she writes essays with titles like the erotics and aesthetics of subjugated subcultures andrupturing the libidinal economies of feminine desire, wears rimmed glasses and thigh-high boots, can quote Breton in the original French and never has a headache), I am growingly conscious of the thread in my artsy-academic field of research that explores particular hetero women’s sexual aesthetic practices as though they are inherently radical slash revolutionary, and are in fact examples of feminist disruption of patriarchal power relations.

I’m as partial as the next first-world-feminist to a rousing celebration of the clitoris. However there’s a few understandings that I am not quite satisfied are shared with many artsy-academic ladies. They are:

1. Academic discourse on sex and ladydesire by conventionally attractive, clever young women is, generally,entirely palatable to conventional mandesire.

2. All sexual/aesthetic practices by women and men in western societies take place within a patriarchal system of power relationships. The patriarchal gaze, and the potential for approval or rejection against the patriarchal standard, will define to some extent what women do.Like capitalism, patriarchy is a dominating force in our post slash modern world. People who recognise this do radicalism much better than people who don’t. It doesn’t mean they are dupes of The System.

3.Women’s sexual radicalism is defined as: being knowledgeable and assertive about sexual desire (masturbating, orgasms), flouting conventions about women being passive, unsexual or undesirous; having sex with women, enjoying any variation on traditional missionary position sex, having fulfilling affairs outside of loveless bourgeois marriages. I am all for women’s sexual independence, which I think is basically what accounts of these historical and contemporary ‘behaviours’ are all about. However, without a certain level of detail re patriarchal context,accounts of such sexual radicalism just play into conventional patriarchal hetero mandesire and subjugates those many women who haven’t had the opportunity to explore their sexuality or who wouldn’t mind a few days without trying a new sex position/partner or who are really quite disposed to the idea of monogamy and long-term commitment.

4.Is radicalism really to be located in who does what sexually with whom? All the accounts of the double standards and emotional danger of ‘radical’ sex between men and women seem to be written by women. Where is this reflectiveness and vulnerability from ‘radical’ men? Where is the evidence of their emotional labour in attempting to come to a position of freedom and equal exchange with the loved/lusted after opposite sex? Emotional growth (and dare I say maturity), while not conventionally sexy and generally relegated to the ‘life and spirit’ pages of the middle-aged media weeklies, is also a source of radicalism in how men and women have relationships with each other.

For fuck’s.