If sex and power are what women want, don't stop them

If sex and power are what women want, don't stop them
Laurie Penny I Thursday, 2 June 2011 I www.independent.co.uk

Laurie Penny said:

If it is harmful for an eight year old to engage with a culture that encourages her to look like a porn star, why is it any less harmful at 18 or 28?

There has been much talk of a feminist "renaissance" in Britain and America, but the loudest voices appear to be preoccupied with the wrong questions.

With female workers facing redundancy across the public sector, feminist campaigners seem more concerned with chanting outside the Playboy club, or asking if the "SlutWalk" marches, in which women and girls assert their right to express themselves sexually without fear of rape, "encourage promiscuity". The word "sexualisation" has become a universal shorthand for a kind of abject whorishness, whereby sex is something imposed on women and girls, who can never be sexual, only "sexualised".

Men and boys have no place in this consensus, which seems to deem that adult sexuality is something that men enjoy and women merely endure.

In Tanith Carey's new book, Where Has My Little Girl Gone?, the author encourages parents to protect their daughters for as long as possible from the harmful world of "sexualisation" and raunch culture. This is a stunningly defeatist attitude: after all, if it is harmful for an eight-year-old to engage with a culture that encourages her to starve herself and shames her for not looking like a porn star, why is it any less harmful at 18, or 28?

It is always painful to watch a young woman grow up into what the French feminist Virginie Despentes calls "the universal market of the consumable chick". It is no solution, however, to follow Carey's advice and simply prevent those girls from "growing up too soon". The solution is to fight for a world in which girls can grow up with dignity, and it is that basic vision that the current "sexualisation" debate fails to deliver.

There is not a feminist on the planet who believes that the passive, porny, malnourished stereotype of female submission currently saturating advertising, pornography and pop culture is anything but harmful. But that stereotype has really nothing to do with sex – it is a sterile image of conformity that demands women look sexy while punishing us for actually expressing lust. The stereotype has become so ubiquitous that it has created a false consciousness whereby we assume that this is the only kind of female sexuality that can possibly exist.

It is as if we have lived for so long in a world of McDonald's that we have begun to believe that all food is unhealthy and exploitative. We must begin to remember that there are other meals, and that women's hunger for sex is wholesome and legitimate, just like our hunger for food, power and adventure – while admitting that, from time to time, the guilty pleasure of an occasional Happy Meal does little damage.

What our limited feminist conversation lacks is a coherent politics of female desire.

Some of us might want sex, and lots of it. Some of us might want power, and lots of it. And some of us might want to change the whole world. No wonder the forces of reaction are so keen to stop us growing up.

Read more at: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinio...e-what-women-want-dont-stop-them-2291864.html