“The lesbian critique of woman-identification and the queer critique of the lesbian feminist critique of sadomasochist practices has been so embracing that it is now hard to imagine that lesbian feminists had any fun in the 1970s. While I share the view that lesbianism is a sexual orientation, which is about desire rather than identification (or desire as well as identification), I would question the distinction between “prosex” and “antisex” within some queer work. Such work tends to posit a new set of “sexual ideals” premised on liberation from what has become known as the moralizing terms of radical lesbian feminism (…). In fact, in reading backward from queer studies to the earlier work of radical feminism I was surprised to find that the most erotic and daring work, the work that moved me the most, was the earlier writing. I found the work of radical lesbian feminists both erotic and demanding, even in the mode of its critique between sex and power. Such lesbian feminists, in writing about male power, also search beyond their critiques for a new sexual vocabulary in which women’s desire for women can be put in other words [and, I would add, in which sexual desire in general can be put in other words, as far as that does not co-opt or appropriate spaces occupied by lesbian desire].
Marilyn Frye, for example, calls for a sexual vocabulary that is open to the different possibilities for action when women’s bodies get closer: “Let it be an open, generous, commodious concept emcompassing all the acts and activities by which we generate with each other pleasures and thrills, tenderness and ectsasy, passages of passionate carnality of whatever duration or profundity. Everything from vanilla to liquorice, from pure to chanteuse, from velvet to ice, from cuddles to cunts, from chortles to tears” (1990:314). In offering a vocabulary for lesbian sex, Frye and other radical lesbian feminists embrace how lesbian orientations can take many social and sexual forms precisely because they do not depend on the terms available within existing sexual vocabularies.”
- Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, pp.194-195.
g-string feminism: this category is dedicated to the g-wearin’ woman who told the g-watchin’ man she was with that she wore g-strings because they stimulated her sexually, and the man who then used this anecdote to encourage his new female partner to wear them (c’mon, some women find it really sexual! it’s empowering! it’s not about being pleasing to the hetero male gaze at the expense of your own physical pleasure at all … wedgies are totally hot right now! et cetera). Likewise dedicated to those gender & sexuality academics and activists who use prosex, queer and BDSM to run down other forms of desire and intimacy - or, as Ahmed puts it, “to posit a new set of sexual ideals”; a project which strikes me as, above and beyond anything else, rather lacking in imagination.
And with my sincere apologies to readers who love the string in their/its own right.