GAYLE S . R U B I N " T h i n k i n g Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality" first published in Carole S. Vance (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality ( 1 9 8 4 ) ; this revised and extended version from H. Abelove, M . Borale and D. Helperin, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1 9 9 3 ) THE SEX WARS Asked his advice, Dr. J. Guerin affirmed that, after all other treatments had failed, he had succeeded in curing young girls affected by the vice of onanism by burning the clitoris with a hot iron ... I apply the hot point three times to each of the large labia and another on the clitoris ... After the first operation, from forty to fifty times a day, the number of voluptuous spasms was reduced to three or four ... We believe, then, that in cases similar to those submitted to your consideration, one should not hesitate to resort to the hot iron, and at an early hour, in order to combat clitoral and vaginal onanism in little girls. (Demetrius Zambaco)1 The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic, a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, fam-ine, or nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. Contemporary conflicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious disputes of earlier centuries. They acquire immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behavior often become the vehicles for displacing social anxi-eties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress. The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. As with other aspects of human behavior, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with conflicts of interest and political man-euvering, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are also historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated. In England and the United States, the late nineteenth century was one such era. During that time, powerful social movements focused on "vices" of all sorts. There were educational and political campaigns to encourage chastity, to eliminate prostitution and to discourage masturbation, especially among the young. Morality crusaders attacked obscene literature, nude paintings, music halls, abortion, birth control information and public dancing.2 The consolidation of Victorian morality, and its apparatus of social, medical and legal enforce-ment, was the outcome of a long period of struggle whose results have been bitterly con-tested ever since. The consequences of these great nineteenthcentury moral paroxysms are still with us. They have left a deep imprint on attitudes about sex, medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxi-eties, police conduct, and sex law. The idea that masturbation is an unhealthy practice is part of that heritage. During the nineteenth century, it was commonly thought that "premature" interest in sex, sexual excite-ment, and, above all, sexual release, would impair the health and maturation of a child. Theorists differed on the actual consequences of sexual precocity. Some thought it led to insanity, while others merely predicted stunted growth. To protect the young from premature arousal, " T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" parents tied children down at night so they would not touch themselves; doctors excised the clitorises of onanistic little girls.3 Although the more gruesome techniques have been aban-doned, the attitudes that produced them persist. The notion that sex per se is harmful to the young has been chiseled into extensive social and legal structures designed to insulate minors from sexual knowledge and experience. Much of the sex law currently on the books also dates from the nineteenth-century morality crusades. The first federal anti-obscenity law in the United States was passed in 1873. The Comstock Act – named for Anthony Comstock, an ancestral anti-porn activist and the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice – made it a federal crime to make, adver-tise, sell, possess, send through the mails, or import books or pictures deemed obscene. The law also banned contraceptive or abortifacient drugs and devices and information about them. 4 In the wake of the federal statute, most states passed their own anti-obscenity laws. The Supreme Court began to whittle down both federal and state Comstock laws during the 1950s. By 1975, the prohibition of materials used for, and information about, contraception and abortion had been ruled unconstitutional. How-ever, although the obscenity provisions have been modified, their fundamental constitution-ality has been upheld. Thus it remains a crime to make, sell, mail, or import material which has no purpose other than sexual arousal. 5 Although sodomy statutes date from older strata of the law, when elements of canon law were adopted into civil codes, most of the laws used to arrest homosexuals and prostitutes come out of the Victorian campaigns against "white slavery." These campaigns produced the myriad prohibitions against solicitation, lewd behavior, loitering for immoral purposes, age offenses, and brothels and bawdy houses. In her discussion of the British "white slave" scare, historian Judith Walkowitz observes that "Recent research delineates the vast discrepancy between lurid journalistic accounts and the reality of prostitution. Evidence of widespread entrapment of British girls in London and abroad is slim." 6 However, public furor over this ostensible problem forced the passage of the Criminal Law Amend-ment Act of 1885, a particularly nasty and perni-cious piece of omnibus legislation. The 1885 Act raised the age of consent for girls from 13 to 16, but it also gave police far greater summary juris-diction over poor working-class women and chil-dren ... it contained a clause making indecent acts between consenting male adults a crime, thus forming the basis of legal prosecution of male homosexuals in Britain until 1967 ... the clauses of the new bill were mainly enforced against working-class women, and regulated adult rather than youthful sexual behaviour.7 In the United States, the Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, was passed in 1910. Subsequently, every state in the union passed anti-prostitution legislation.8 In the 1950s, in the United States, major shifts in the organization of sexuality took place. Instead of focusing on prostitution or masturbation, the anxieties of the 1950s con-densed most specifically around the image of the "homosexual menace" and the dubious specter of the "sex offender." Just before and after World War II, the "sex offender" became an object of public fear and scrutiny. Many states and cities, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York State, New York City and Michigan, launched investiga-tions to gather information about this menace to public safety.9 The term "sex offender" sometimes applied to rapists, sometimes to "child molesters," and eventually functioned as a code for homosexuals. In its bureaucratic, medical, and popular versions, the sex offender discourse tended to blur distinctions between violent sexual assault and illegal but consensual acts such as sodomy. The criminal justice system incorporated these concepts when an epidemic of sexual psychopath laws swept through state legislatures.10 These laws gave the psycholog-ical professions increased police powers over homosexuals and other sexual "deviants." From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, erotic communities whose activities did not fit the postwar American dream drew intense persecu-tion. Homosexuals were, along with commu-nists, the objects of federal witch hunts and purges. Congressional investigations, executive orders, and sensational exposés in the media aimed to root out homosexuals employed by the 101 102 GAYLE S . R U B I N government. Thousands lost their jobs, and restrictions on federal employment of homosexuals persist to this day.11 The FBI began systematic surveillance and harassment of homosexuals which lasted at least into the 1970s. 12 Many states and large cities conducted their own investigations, and the federal witch-hunts were reflected in a variety of local crackdowns. In Boise, Idaho, in 1955, a schoolteacher sat down to breakfast with his morning paper and read that the vice-president of the Idaho First National Bank had been arrested on felony sodomy charges; the local prosecutor said that he intended to eliminate all homosexuality from the community. The teacher never finished his breakfast. "He jumped up from his seat, pulled out his suitcases, packed as fast as he could, got into his car, and drove straight to San Francisco . . . The cold eggs, coffee, and toast remained on his table for two days before someone from his school came by to see what had happened." 13 In San Francisco, police and media waged war on homosexuals throughout the 1950s. Police raided bars, patrolled cruising areas, conducted street sweeps and trumpeted their intention of driving the queers out of San Francisco. 14 Crackdowns against gay individuals, bars, and social areas occurred throughout the country. Although anti-homosexual crusades are the best-documented examples of erotic repression in the 1950s, future research should reveal similar patterns of increased harassment against pornographic materials, prostitutes, and erotic deviants of all sorts. Research is needed to determine the full scope of both police persecution and regulatory reform. 15 The current period bears some uncomfortable similarities to the 1880s and the 1950s. The 1977 campaign to repeal the Dade County, Florida, gay rights ordinance inaugurated a new wave of violence, state persecution, and legal initiatives directed against minority sexual populations and the commercial sex industry. For the last six years, the United States and Canada have undergone an extensive sexual repression in the political, not the psychological, sense. In the spring of 1977, a few weeks before the Dade County vote, the news media were suddenly full of reports of raids on gay cruising areas, arrests for prostitution, and investigations into the manufacture and distribution of pornographic materials. Since then, police activity against the gay community has increased exponentially. The gay press has documented hundreds of arrests, from the libraries of Boston to the streets of Houston and the beaches of San Francisco. Even the large, organized and rela-tively powerful urban gay communities have been unable to stop these depredations. Gay bars and bath houses have been busted with alarming frequency, and police have gotten bolder. In one especially dramatic incident, police in Toronto raided all four of the city's gay baths. They broke into cubicles with crowbars and hauled almost 300 men out into the winter streets, clad in their bath towels. Even "lib-erated" San Francisco has not been immune. There have been proceedings against several bars, countless arrests in the parks, and, in the fall of 1981, police arrested over 400 people in a series of sweeps of Polk Street, one of the thoroughfares of local gay nightlife. Queerbashing has become a significant recreational activity for young urban males. They come into gay neighborhoods armed with baseball bats and looking for trouble, knowing that the adults in their lives either secretly approve or will look the other way. The police crackdown has not been limited to homosexuals. Since 1977, enforcement of exist-ing laws against prostitution and obscenity has been stepped up. Moreover, states and muni-cipalities have been passing new and tighter regulations on commercial sex. Restrictive ordi-nances have been passed, zoning laws altered, licensing and safety codes amended, sentences increased and evidentiary requirements relaxed. This subtle legal codification of more stringent controls over adult sexual behavior has gone largely unnoticed outside of the gay press. For over a century, no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children. The current wave of erotic terror has reached deepest into those areas bordered in some way, if only symbolically, by the sexuality of the young. The motto of the Dade County repeal campaign was "Save Our Children" from alleged homosexual recruit-ment. In February 1977, shortly before the Dade County vote, a sudden concern with ' T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" "child pornography" swept the national media. In May, the Chicago Tribune ran a lurid fourday series with three-inch headlines, which claimed to expose a national vice ring organized to lure young boys into prostitution and porn-ography. 16 Newspapers across the country ran similar stories, most of them worthy of the National Enquirer. By the end of May, a con-gressional investigation was under way. Within weeks, the federal government had enacted a sweeping bill against "child pornography" and many of the states followed with bills of their own. These laws have re-established restrictions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by some of the important Supreme Court deci-sions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depiction of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. This means that photographs of naked children in anthropology textbooks and many of the ethnographic movies shown in college classes are technically illegal in several states. In fact, the instructors are liable to an additional felony charge for showing such images to each student under the age of 18. Although the Supreme Court has also ruled that it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child pornog-raphy laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors. The laws produced by the child porn panic are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent far-reaching alterations in the regulation of sex-ual behavior and abrogate important sexual civil liberties. But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the exception of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and the American Civil Liberties Union, no one raised a peep of protest. 17 A new and even tougher federal child porn-ography bill has just reached House-Senate conference. It removes any requirement that prosecutors must prove that alleged child porn-ography was distributed for commercial sale. Once this bill becomes law, a person merely possessing a nude snapshot of a 17-year-old lover or friend may go to jail for fifteen years, and be fined $100,000. This bill passed the House 400 to l. 1 8 The experiences of art photographer Jacque-line Livingstone exemplify the climate created by the child porn panic. An assistant professor of photography at Cornell University, Living-stone was fired in 1978 after exhibiting pictures of male nudes which included photographs of her 7-year-old son masturbating. Ms. Magazine, Chrysalis and Art News all refused to run ads for Livingston's posters of male nudes. At one point, Kodak confiscated some of her film, and for several months, Livingstone lived with the threat of prosecution under the child pornog-raphy laws. The Tompkins County Department of Social Services investigated her fitness as a parent. Livingston's posters have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropoli-tan, and other major museums. But she has paid a high cost in harassment and anxiety for her efforts to capture on film the uncensored male body at different ages. 19 It is easy to see someone like Livingston as a victim of the child porn wars. It is harder for most people to sympathize with actual boylovers. Like communists and homosexuals in the 1950s, boy-lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civil liberties, let alone for their erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watchdog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has cleared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and undeserved witch-hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecution, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison. While the misery of the boy-lovers affects very few, the other long-term legacy of the Dade County repeal affects almost everyone. The success of the anti-gay campaign ignited longsimmering passions of the American right, and sparked an extensive movement to compress the boundaries of acceptable sexual behavior. Right-wing ideology linking non-familial sex with communism and political weakness is nothing new. During the McCarthy period, Alfred Kinsey and his Institute for Sex Research 103 104 GAYLE S . RUBIN were attacked for weakening the moral fiber of Americans and rendering them more vulnerable to communist influence. After congressional investigations and bad publicity, Kinsey's Rockefeller grant was terminated in 1954. 20 Around 1969, the extreme right discovered the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). In books and pamphlets, such as The Sex Education Racket: Pornography in the Schools and SIECUS: Corrupter of Youth, the right attacked SIECUS and sex education as communist plots to destroy the family and sap the national will. 21 Another pamphlet, Pavlov's Children (They May Be Yours), claims that the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is in cahoots with SIECUS to undermine religious taboos, to promote the acceptance of abnormal sexual relations, to downgrade absolute moral standards, and to "destroy racial cohesion," by exposing white people (especially white women) to the alleged "lower" sexual standards of black people. 22 New Right and neo-conservative ideology has updated these themes, and leans heavily on linking "immoral" sexual behavior to putative declines in American power. In 1977, Norman Podhoretz wrote an essay blaming homosexuals for the alleged inability of the United States to stand up to the Russians. 23 He thus neatly linked "the anti-gay fight in the domestic arena and the anti-communist battles in foreign policy." 24 Right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, pornography, abortion, and pre-marital sex moved from the extreme fringes to the political center stage after 1977, when right-wing strategists and fundamentalist religious crusaders discovered that these issues had mass appeal. Sexual reaction played a significant role in the right's electoral success in 1980. 25 Organizations like the Moral Majority and Citizens for Decency have acquired mass followings, immense financial resources, and unanticipated clout. The Equal Rights Amendment has been defeated, legislation has been passed that mandates new restrictions on abortion, and funding for programs like Planned Parenthood and sex education has been slashed. Laws and regulations making it more difficult for teenage girls to obtain contraceptives or abortions have been promulgated. Sexual backlash was exploited in successful attacks on the Women's Studies Program at California State University at Long Beach. The most ambitious right-wing legislation initiative has been the Family Protection Act (FPA), introduced in Congress in 1979. The Family Protection Act is a broad assault on feminism, homosexuals, non-traditional families, and teenage sexual privacy.26 The Family Protection Act has not passed and probably will not pass, but conservative members of Congress continue to pursue its agenda in a more piecemeal fashion. Perhaps the most glaring sign of the times is the Adolescent Family Life Program. Also known as the Teen Chastity Program, it gets some 15 million federal dollars to encourage teenagers to refrain from sexual intercourse, and to discourage them from using contraceptives if they do have sex, and from having abortions if they get pregnant. In the last few years, there have been countless local confrontations over gay rights, sex education, abortion rights, adult bookstores, and public school curricula. It is unlikely that the anti-sex backlash is over, or that it has even peaked. Unless something changes dramatically, it is likely that the next few years will bring more of the same. Periods such as the 1880s in England, and the 1950s in the United States, recodify the relations of sexuality. The struggles that were fought leave a residue in the form of laws, social practices, and ideologies which then affect the way in which sexuality is experienced long after the immediate conflicts have faded. All the signs indicate that the present era is another of those watersheds in the politics of sex. The settlements that emerge from the 1980s will have an impact far into the future. It is therefore imperative to understand what is going on and what is at stake in order to make informed decisions about what policies to support and oppose. It is difficult to make such decisions in the absence of a coherent and intelligent body of radical thought about sex. Unfortunately, progressive political analysis of sexuality is relatively underdeveloped. Much of what is available from the feminist movement has simply added to the mystification that shrouds the subject. There is an urgent need to develop T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" radical perspectives on sexuality. Paradoxically, an explosion of exciting schol-arship and political writing about sex has been generated in these bleak years. In the 1950s, the early gay rights movement began and prospered while the bars were being raided and anti-gay laws were being passed. In the last six years, new erotic communities, political alliances, and analyses have been developed in the midst of the repression. In this essay, I will propose elements of a descriptive and conceptual framework for thinking about sex and its politics. I hope to contribute to the pressing task of creating an accurate, humane, and genuinely liberatory body of thought about sexuality. social life and shapes institutions. Sexual essen-tialism is embedded in the folk wisdoms of Western societies, which consider sex to be eternally unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical. Dominated for over a century by medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, the academic study of sex has reproduced essentialism. These fields classify sex as a property of individuals. It may reside in their hormones or their psyches. It may be construed as physiological or psychological. But within these ethnoscientific categories, sexu-ality has no history and no significant social determinants. During the last five years, a sophisticated historical and theoretical scholarship has chal-lenged sexual essentialism both explicitly and implicitly. Gay history, particularly the work of SEXUAL THOUGHTS Jeffrey Weeks, has led this assault by showing "You see, Tim," Phillip said suddenly, "your that homosexuality as we know it is a relatively argument isn't reasonable. Suppose I granted your modern institutional complex. 28 Many histor-first point that homosexuality is justifiable in certain instances and under certain controls. Then ians have come to see the contemporary institu-as an even more there is the catch: where does justification end and tional forms of heterosexuality 29 degeneracy begin? Society must condemn to pro-- recent development. An important contributor tect. Permit even the intellectual homosexual a to the new scholarship is Judith Walkowitz, place of respect and the first bar is down. Then whose research has demonstrated the extent to comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist, the criminally insane demand their pla-- which prostitution was transformed around the ces, and society ceases to exist. So I ask again: turn of the century. She provides meticulous where is the line drawn? Where does degeneracy descriptions of how the interplay of social forces begin if not at the beginning of individual freedom such as ideology, fear, political agitation, legal in such matters?" reform, and medical practice can change the (Fragment from a discussion between two gay structure of sexual behavior and alter its con-men trying to decide if they may love each other, 30 from a novel published in 195027) sequences. Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, has been the most influential and emblematic explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual text of the new scholarship on sex. Foucault oppression. Such a theory needs refined con-- criticizes the traditional understanding of sexu-ceptual tools which can grasp the subject and ality as a natural libido yearning to break free of hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of social constraint. He argues that desires are not sexuality as it exists in society and history. It preexisting biological entities, but rather, that requires a convincing critical language that can they are constituted in the course of historically specific social practices. He emphasizes the convey the barbarity of sexual persecution. Several persistent features of thought about generative aspects of the social organization of sex inhibit the development of such a theory. sex rather than its repressive elements by point-These assumptions are so pervasive in Western ing out that new sexualities are constantly culture that they are rarely questioned. Thus, produced. And he points to a major disconti-they tend to reappear in different political nuity between kinship-based systems of sexual-31 contexts, acquiring new rhetorical expressions ity and more modern forms. but reproducing fundamental axioms, The new scholarship on sexual behavior has One such axiom is sexual essentialism – the given sex a history and created a constructive idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to alternative to sexual essentialism. Underlying 105 106 GAYLE S . R U B I N this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained. 32 This does not mean the biological capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not comprehensible in purely biological terms. Human organisms with human brains are necessary for human cultures, but no examination of the body or its parts can explain the nature and variety of human social systems. The belly's hunger gives no clues as to the complexities of cuisine. The body, the brain, the genitalia, and the capacity for language are all necessary for human sexuality. But they do not determine its content, its experiences, or its institutional forms. Moreover, we never encounter the body unmediated by the meanings that cultures give to it. To paraphrase LeviStrauss, my position on the relationship between biology and sexuality is a "Kantianism without a transcendental libido." 33 It is impossible to think with any clarity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs. Similarly, sexuality is impervious to political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of individual psychology. Sexuality is as much a human product as are diets, methods of transportation, systems of etiquette, forms of labor, types of entertainment, processes of production, and modes of oppression. Once sex is understood in terms of social analysis and historical understanding, a more realistic politics of sex becomes possible. One may then think of sexual politics in terms of such phenomena as populations, neighborhoods, settlements patterns, migration, urban conflict, epidemiology, and police technology. These are more fruitful categories of thought than the more traditional ones of sin, disease, neurosis, pathology, decadence, pollution, or the decline and fall of empires. By detailing the relationships between stigmatized erotic populations and the social forces which regulate them, work such as that of Allan Berube, John D'Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, and Judith Walkowitz contains implicit categories of political analysis and criticism. Nevertheless, the constructivist perspective has displayed some political weaknesses. This has been most evident in misconstructions of Foucault's position. Because of his emphasis on the ways that sexuality is produced, Foucault has been vulner-able to interpretations that deny or minimize the reality of sexual repression in the more political sense. Foucault makes it abundantly clear that he is not denying the existence of sexual repres-sion so much as inscribing it within a large dynamic. 34 Sexuality in Western societies has been structured within an extremely punitive social framework, and has been subjected to very real formal and informal controls. It is necessary to recognize repressive phenomena without resorting to the essentialist assumptions of the language of libido. It is important to hold repressive sexual practices in focus, even while situating them within a different totality and a more refined terminology.35 Most radical thought about sex has been embedded within a model of the instincts and their restraints. Concepts of sexual oppression have been lodged within that more biological understanding of sexuality. It is often easier to fall back on the notion of a natural libido subjected to inhumane repression than to reformulate con-cepts of sexual injustice within a more con-structivist framework. But it is essential that we do so. We need a radical critique of sexual arrangements that has the conceptual elegance of Foucault and the evocative passion of Reich. The new scholarship on sex has brought a welcome insistence that sexual terms be restricted to their proper historical and social contexts, and a cautionary scepticism towards sweeping generalizations. But it is important to be able to indicate groupings of erotic behavior and general trends within erotic discourse. In addition to sexual essentialism, there are at least five other ideological formations whose grip on sexual thought is so strong that to fail to discuss them is to remain enmeshed within them. These are sex negativity, the fallacy of misplaced scale, the hierarchical valuation of sex acts, the dom-ino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of a concept of benign sexual variation. Of these five, the most important is sex neg-ativity. Western cultures generally consider sex to be a dangerous, destructive, negative force.36 Most Christian tradition, following Paul, holds T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" that sex is inherently sinful. It may be redeemed if performed within marriage for procreative pur-poses and if the pleasurable aspects are not enjoyed too much. In turn, this idea rests on the assumption that the genitalia are an intrinsically inferior part of the body, much lower and less holy than the mind, the "soul," the "heart," or even the upper part of the digestive system (the status of the excretory organs is close to that of the genitalia). 37 Such notions have by now acquired a life of their own and no longer depend solely on religion for their perseverance. This culture always treats sex with suspicion. It construes and judges almost any sexual prac-tice in terms of its worst possible expression. Sex is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Virtually all erotic behavior is considered bad unless a specific reason to exempt it has been established. The most acceptable excuses are marriage, reproduction, and love. Sometimes scientific curiosity, aesthetic experience or a long-term intimate relationship may serve. But the exercise of erotic capacity, intelligence, curi-osity, or creativity all require pretexts that are unnecessary for other pleasures, such as the enjoyment of food, fiction, or astronomy. What I call the fallacy of misplaced scale is a corollary of sex negativity. Susan Sontag once commented that since Christianity focused "on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a 'special case' in our culture." 38 Sex law has incorporated the reli-gious attitude that heretical sex is an especially heinous sin that deserves the harshest punish-ments. Throughout much of European and American history, a single act of consensual anal penetration was grounds for execution. In some states, sodomy still carries twenty-year prison sentences. Outside the law, sex is also a marked category. Small differences in value or behavior are often experienced as cosmic threats. Although people can be intolerant, silly, or pushy about what constitutes proper diet, differences in menu rarely provoke the kinds of rage, anxiety and sheer terror that routinely accompany differ-ences in erotic tastes. Sexual acts are burdened with an excess of significance. Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid. Clamoring below are unmarried monogamous heterosex-uals in couples, followed by most other hetero-sexuals. Solitary sex floats ambiguously. The powerful nineteenth-century stigma on mastur-bation lingers in less potent, modified forms, such as the idea that masturbation is an inferior substitute for partnered encounters. Stable, longterm lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sado-masochists, sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism trans-gresses generational boundaries. Individuals whose behavior stands high in this hierarchy are rewarded with certified mental health, respectability, legality, social and physical mobility, institutional support, and material ben-efits. As sexual behaviors or occupations fall lower on the scale, the individuals who practice them are subjected to a presumption of mental illness, disreputability, criminality, restricted social and physical mobility, loss of institutional support, and economic sanctions. Extreme and punitive stigma maintains some sexual behaviors as low status and is an effective sanction against those who engage in them. The intensity of this stigma is rooted in Western religious traditions. But most of its contempo-rary content derives from medical and psychiat-ric opprobrium. The old religious taboos were primarily based on kinship forms of social organization. They were meant to deter inappropriate unions and to provide proper kin. Sex laws derived from Biblical pronouncements were aimed at preventing the acquisition of the wrong kinds of affinal partners: consanguineous kin (incest), the same gender (homosexuality) or the wrong species (bestiality). When medicine and psy-chiatry acquired extensive powers over sexual-ity, they were less concerned with unsuitable mates than with unfit forms of desire. If taboos against incest best characterized kinship systems of sexual organization, then the shift to an emphasis on taboos against masturbation was more apposite to the newer systems organized 107 108 GAYLE S . R U B I N around qualities of erotic experience.39 Medicine and psychiatry multiplied the categories of sexual misconduct. The section on psychosexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental and Physical Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is a fairly reliable map of the current moral hierarchy of sexual activities. The APA list is much more elaborate than the traditional condemnations of whoring, sodomy, and adultery. The most recent edition, DSM-III, removed homosexuality from the roster of mental disorders after a long political struggle. But fetishism, sadism, masochism, transsexuality, transvestism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and pedophilia are quite firmly entrenched as psychological malfunctions. 40 Books are still being written about the genesis, etiology, treatment, and cure of these assorted "pathologies." Psychiatric condemnation of sexual behaviors invokes concepts of mental and emotional inferiority rather than categories of sexual sin. Low-status sex practices are vilified as mental diseases or symptoms of defective personality integration. In addition, psychological terms conflate difficulties of psycho-dynamic functioning with modes of erotic conduct. They equate sexual masochism with self-destructive personality patterns, sexual sadism with emotional aggression, and homoeroticism with immaturity. These terminological muddles have become powerful stereotypes that are indiscriminately applied to individuals on the basis of their sexual orientations. Popular culture is permeated with ideas that erotic variety is dangerous, unhealthy, depraved, and a menace to everything from small children to national security. Popular sexual ideology is a noxious stew made up of ideas of sexual sin, concepts of psychological inferiority, anti-communism, mob hysteria, accusations of witchcraft, and xenophobia. The mass media nourish these attitudes with relentless propaganda. I would call this system of erotic stigma the last socially respectable form of prejudice if the old forms did not show such obstinate vitality, and new ones did not continually become apparent. All these hierarchies of sexual value – religious, psychiatric, and popular – function in much the same ways as do ideological systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvin-ism. They rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble. Figure 10.1 diagrams a general version of the sexual value system. According to this system, sexuality that is "good," "normal," and "natural" should ideally be heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other than male and female. Any sex that violates these rules is "bad," "abnormal," or "unnatural." Bad sex may be homosexual unmarried, pro-miscuous, non-procreative, or commercial. It may be masturbatory or take place at orgies, may be casual, may cross generational lines, and may take place in "public," or at least in the bushes or the baths. It may involve the use of pornography, fetish objects, sex toys, or unusual roles (see Figure 10.1). Figure 10.2 diagrams another aspect of the sexual hierarchy: the need to draw and maintain an imaginary line between good and bad sex. Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychiatric, popular, or political, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as sanctifiable, safe, healthy, mature, legal, or politically correct. The "line" distinguishes these from all other erotic behaviors, which are understood to be the work of the devil, danger-ous, psychopathological, infantile, or politically reprehensible. Arguments are then conducted over "where to draw the line," and to determine what other activities, if any, may be permitted to cross over into acceptability.41 All these models assume a domino theory of sexual peril. The line appears to stand between sexual order and chaos. It expresses the fear that if anything is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across. Most systems of sexual judgment – religious, psychological, feminist, or socialist – attempt to determine on which side of the line a particular act falls. Only sex acts on the good side of the line are accorded moral complexity. For "THINKING SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" THE CHARMED CIRCLE Good, Normal, Natural, Blessed Sexuality Heterosexual Homosexual Heterosexual Married Monogamous Procreative Non-commercial In pairs In a relationship Same generation In private No pornography Bodies only Vanilla Procreative No PornoaraDhv . Casual In a relationship Pornography Nonprocreative THE OUTER LIMITS Bad, Abnormal, Unnatural, Damned Sexuality Homosexual Unmarried Promiscuous Non-procreative Commercial Alone or in groups Casual Cross-generational In public Pornography With manufactured objects Sadomasochistic Figure 10.1 The sex hierarchy: the charmed circle vs. the outer limits 109 110 GAYLE S . R U B I N "GOOD" SEX Normal, Natural, Healthy, Holy Heterosexual Married Monogamous Reproductive At home Major area of contest "The Line" Unmarried heterosexual couples Promiscuous heterosexuals Masturbation Long-term, stable lesbian and gay male couples Lesbians in the Dar Promiscuous gay men at the baths or in the park "BAD"SEX Abnormal, Unnatural, Sick, Sinful, "Way Out" Transvestites Transsexuals Fetishists Sadomasochists For money Cross-generational Best Wors Figure 10.2 The sex hierarchy: the struggle over where to draw the lime instance, heterosexual encounters may be sublime or disgusting, free or forced, healing or destructive, romantic or mercenary. As long as it does not violate other rules, heterosexuality is acknowledged to exhibit the full range of human experience. In contrast, all sex acts on the bad side of the line are considered utterly repulsive and devoid of all emotional nuance. The further from the line a sex act is, the more it is depicted as a uniformly bad experience. As a result of the sex conflicts of the last decade, some behavior near the border is inching across it. Unmarried couples living together, masturbation and some forms of homosexuality are moving in the direction of respectability (see Figure 10.2). Most homosexuality is still on the bad side of the line. But if it is coupled and monogamous, the society is beginning to recognize that it includes the full range of human interaction. Promiscuous homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism, transsexuality and cross-generational encounters are still viewed as unmodulated horrors incapable of involving affection, love, free choice, kindness, or transcendence. This kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics. It grants virtue to the dominant groups, and relegates vice to the underprivileged. A democratic morality should judge sex- ual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide. Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video, should not be ethical concerns. It is difficult to develop a pluralistic sexual ethics without a concept of benign sexual variation. Variation is a fundamental property of all life, from the simplest biological organisms to the most complex human social formations. Yet sexuality is supposed to conform to a single standard. One of the most tenacious ideas about sex is that there is one best way to do it, and that everyone should do it that way. Most people find it difficult to grasp that whatever they like to do sexually will be thoroughly repulsive to someone else, and that whatever repels them sexually will be the most treasured delight of someone, somewhere. One need not like or perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that someone else will, and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or intelligence in either party. Most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone. This notion of a single ideal sexuality charac- T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" terizes most systems of thought about sex. For religion, the ideal is procreative marriage. For psychology, it is mature heterosexuality. Although its content varies, the format of a single sexual standard is continually recon-stituted within other rhetorical frameworks, including feminism and socialism. It is just as objectionable to insist that everyone should be lesbian, non-monogamous, or kinky, as to believe that everyone should be heterosexual, married, or vanilla – though the latter set of opinions are backed by considerably more coer-cive power than the former. Progressives who would be ashamed to dis-play cultural chauvinism in other areas rou-tinely exhibit it towards sexual differences. We have learned to cherish different cultures as unique expressions of human inventiveness rather than as the inferior or disgusting habits of savages. We need a similarly anthropological understanding of different sexual cultures. Empirical sex research is the one field that does incorporate a positive concept of sexual variation. Alfred Kinsey approached the study of sex with the same uninhibited curiosity he had previously applied to examining a species of wasp. His scientific detachment gave his work a refreshing neutrality that enraged moralists and caused immense controversy.42 Among Kinsey's successors, John Gagnon and William Simon have pioneered the application of sociological understandings to erotic variety.43 Even some of the older sexology is useful. Although his work is imbued with unappetizing eugenic beliefs, Havelock Ellis was an acute and sympathetic observer. His monumental Studies in the Psy-chology of Sex is resplendent with detail. 44 Much political writing on sexuality reveals complete ignorance of both classical sexology and modern sex research. Perhaps this is because so few colleges and universities bother to teach human sexuality, and because so much stigma adheres even to scholarly investigation of sex. Neither sexology nor sex research has been immune to the prevailing sexual value system. Both contain assumptions and informa-tion which should not be accepted uncritically. But sexology and sex research provide abun-dant detail, a welcome posture of calm, and a well-developed ability to treat sexual variety as something that exists rather than as something to be exterminated. These fields can provide an empirical grounding for a radical theory of sexuality more useful than the combination of psychoanalysis and feminist first principles to which so many texts resort. 45 SEXUAL TRANSFORMATION As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homo-sexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology ... The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was how a species. (Michel Foucault46) In spite of many continuities with ancestral forms, modern sexual arrangements have a distinctive character which sets them apart from preexisting systems. In Western Europe and the United States, industrialization and urbaniza-tion reshaped the traditional rural and peasant populations into a new urban industrial and service workforce. It generated new forms of state apparatus, reorganized family relations, altered gender roles, made possible new forms of identity, produced new varieties of social inequality, and created new formats for political and ideological conflict. It also gave rise to a new sexual system characterized by distinct types of sexual persons, populations, stratifica-tion and political conflict. The writings of nineteenth-century sexology suggest the appearance of a kind of erotic speciation. However outlandish their explanations, the early sexologists were witnessing the emergence of new kinds of erotic individuals and their aggregation into rudimentary communities. The modern sexual system contains sets of these sexual populations, stratified by the operation of an ideological and social hierarchy. Differences in social value create friction among these groups, who engage in political contests to alter or maintain their place in the ranking. Contem-porary sexual politics should be reconceptualized in terms of the emergence and on-going development of this system, its social relations, 111 112 GAYLE S. RUBIN the ideologies which interpret it, and its characteristic modes of conflict. Homosexuality is the best example of this process of erotic speciation. Homosexual behavior is always present among humans. But in different societies and epochs it may be rewarded or punished, required or forbidden, a temporary experience or a life-long vocation. In some New Guinea societies, for example, homosexual activities are obligatory for all males. Homosexual acts are considered utterly masculine, roles are based on age and partners are determined by kinship status. 47 Although these men engage in extensive homosexual and pedophile behavior, they are neither homosexuals nor pederasts. Nor was the sixteenth-century sodomite a homosexual. In 1631, Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, was tried and executed for sodomy. It is clear from the proceedings that the earl was not understood by himself or anyone else to be a particular kind of sexual individual. "While from the twentieth-century viewpoint Lord Castlehaven obviously suffered from psychosexual problems requiring the services of an analyst, from the seventeenth century viewpoint he had deliberately broken the Law of God and the Laws of England, and required the simpler services of an executioner." 48 The earl did not slip into his tightest doublet and waltz down to the nearest gay tavern to mingle with his fellow sodomists. He stayed in his manor house and buggered his servants. Gay self-awareness, gay pubs, the sense of group commonality, and even the term homosexual were not part of the earl's universe. The New Guinea bachelor and the sodomite nobleman are only tangentially related to a modern gay man, who may migrate from rural Colorado to San Francisco in order to live in a gay neighborhood, work in a gay business, and participate in an elaborate experience that includes a self-conscious identity, group solidarity, a literature, a press, and a high level of political activity. In modern, Western, industrial societies, homosexuality has acquired much of the institutional structure of an ethnic group. 49 The relocation of homoeroticism into these quasi-ethnic, nucleated, sexually constituted communities is to some extent a consequence of the transfers of population brought about by industrialization. As laborers migrated to work in cities, there were increased opportunities for voluntary communities to form. Homosexually inclined women and men, who would have been vulnerable and isolated in most pre-industrial villages, began to congregate in small corners of the big cities. Most large nineteenth-century cities in Western Europe and North America had areas where men could cruise for other men. Lesbian communities seem to have coa-lesced more slowly and on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, by the 1890s, there were several cafes in Paris near the Place Pigalle which catered to a lesbian clientele, and it is likely that there were similar places in the other major capitals of Western Europe. Areas like these acquired bad reputations, which alerted other interested individuals of their existence and location. In the United States, lesbian and gay male territories were well established in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the 1950s. Sex-ually motivated migration to places such as Greenwich Village had become a sizable socio-logical phenomenon. By the late 1970s, sexual migration was occurring on a scale so sig-nificant that it began to have a recognizable impact on urban politics in the United States, with San Francisco being the most notable and notorious example. 50 Prostitution has undergone a similar met-amorphosis. Prostitution began to change from a temporary job to a more permanent occupa-tion as a result of nineteenth-century agitation, legal reform, and police persecution. Prosti-tutes, who had been part of the general working-class population, became increasingly isolated as members of an outcast group. 51 Prostitutes and other sex workers differ from homosexuals and other sexual minorities. Sex work is an occupation, while sexual deviation is an erotic preference. Nevertheless, they share some common features of social organization. Like homosexuals, prostitutes are a criminal sexual population stigmatized on the basis of sexual activity. Prostitutes and male homo-sexuals are the primary prey of vice police everywhere.52 Like gay men, prostitutes occupy well-demarcated urban territories and battle with police to defend and maintain those terri- T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" | 113 tories. The legal persecution of both popula-tions is justified by an elaborate ideology which classifies them as dangerous and inferior unde-sirables who are not entitled to be left in peace. Besides organizing homosexuals and prosti-tutes into localized populations, the "moderniza-tion of sex" has generated a system of continual sexual ethnogenesis. Other populations of erotic dissidents – commonly known as the "perver-sions" or the "paraphilias" – also began to coalesce. Sexualities keep marching out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and on to the pages of social history. At present, several other groups are trying to emulate the successes of homosexuals. Bisexuals, sado-masochists, indi-viduals who prefer cross-generational encoun-ters, transsexuals, and transvestites are all in various states of community-formation and identity-acquisition. The perversions are not proliferating as much as they are attempting to acquire social space, small businesses, political resources, and a measure of relief from the penalties for sexual heresy. SEXUAL STRATIFICATION An entire sub-race was born, different – despite certain kinship ties – from the libertines of the past. From the end of the eighteenth century to our own, they circulated through the pores of society; they were always hounded, but not always by laws; were often locked up, but not always in prisons; were sick perhaps, but scandal-ous, dangerous victims, prey to a strange evil that also bore the name of vice and sometimes crime. They were children wise beyond their years, precocious little girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious servants and educators, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary collectors, ramblers with bizarre impulses; they haunted the houses of correction, the penal colonies, the tribunals, and the asylums; they carried their infamy to the doctors and their sickness to the judges. This was the numberless family of perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and akin to mad-men. (Michel Foucault53) The industrial transformation of Western Europe and North America brought about new forms of social stratification. The resultant inequalities of class are well known and have been explored in detail by a century of scholar-- ship. The construction of modern systems of racism and ethnic injustice has been well docu-mented and critically assessed. Feminist thought has analyzed the prevailing organization of gender oppression. But although specific erotic groups, such as militant homosexuals and sex workers, have agitated against their own mis-treatment, there has been no equivalent attempt to locate particular varieties of sexual persecu-tion within a more general system of sexual stratification. Nevertheless, such a system exists, and in its contemporary form it is a consequence of Western industrialization. Sex law is the most adamantine instrument of sexual stratification and erotic persecution. The state routinely intervenes in sexual behavior at a level that would not be tolerated in other areas of social life. Most people are unaware of the extent of sex law, the quantity and qualities of illegal sexual behavior, and the punitive character of legal sanctions. Although federal agencies may be involved in obscenity and prostitution cases, most sex laws are enacted at the state and municipal level, and enforcement is largely in the hands of local police. Thus, there is a tremendous amount of variation in the laws applicable to any given locale. Moreover, enforcement of sex laws varies dramatically with the local political cli-mate. In spite of this legal thicket, one can make some tentative and qualified generalizations. My discussion of sex law does not apply to laws against sexual coercion, sexual assault, or rape. It does pertain to the myriad prohibitions on con-sensual sex and the "status" offenses such as statutory rape. Sex law is harsh. The penalties for violating sex statutes are universally out of proportion to any social or individual harm. A single act of consensual but illicit sex, such as placing one's lips upon the genitalia of an enthusiastic part-ner, is punished in many states with more severity than rape, battery, or murder. Each such genital kiss, each lewd caress, is a separate crime. It is therefore painfully easy to commit multiple felonies in the course of a single eve-ning of illegal passion. Once someone is con-victed of a sex violation, a second performance of the same act is grounds for prosecution as a repeat offender, in which case penalties will be even more severe. In some states, individuals 114 GAYLE S . R U B I N have become repeat felons for having engaged in homosexual love-making on two separate occasions. Once an erotic activity has been proscribed by sex law, the full power of the state enforces conformity to the values embodied in those laws. Sex laws are notoriously easy to pass, as legislators are loath to be soft on vice. Once on the books, they are extremely difficult to dislodge. Sex law is not a perfect reflection of the prevailing moral evaluations of sexual conduct. Sexual variation per se is more specifically policed by the mental-health professions, popular ideology and extra-legal social practice. Some of the most detested erotic behaviors, such as fetishism and sado-masochism, are not as closely or completely regulated by the criminal justice system as somewhat less stigmatized practices, such as homosexuality. Areas of sexual behavior come under the purview of the law when they become objects of social concern and political uproar. Each sex scare or morality campaign deposits new regulations as a kind of fossil record of its passage. The legal sediment is thickest - and sex law has its greatest potency in areas involving obscenity, money, minors, and homosexuality. Obscenity laws enforce a powerful taboo against direct representation of erotic activities. Current emphasis on the ways in which sexuality has become a focus of social attention should not be misused to undermine a critique of this prohibition. It is one thing to create sexual discourse in the form of psychoanalysis, or in the course of a morality crusade. It is quite another to depict sex acts or genitalia graphically. The first is socially permissible in a way the second is not. Sexual speech is forced into reticence, euphemism, and indirection. Freedom of speech about sex is a glaring exception to the protections of the First Amendment, which is not even considered applicable to purely sexual statements. The anti-obscenity laws also form part of a group of statutes that make almost all sexual commerce illegal. Sex law incorporates a very strong prohibition against mixing sex and money, except via marriage. In addition to the obscenity statutes, other laws impinging on sexual commerce include anti-prostitution laws, alcoholic beverage regulations, and ordinances governing the location and operation of "adult" businesses. The sex industry and the gay econ-omy have both managed to circumvent some of this legislation, but that process has not been easy or simple. The underlying criminality of sexoriented business keeps it marginal, underdevel-oped, and distorted. Sex businesses can operate only in legal loopholes. This tends to keep investment down and to divert commercial activ-ity towards the goal of staying out of jail rather than the delivery of goods and services. It also renders sex workers more vulnerable to exploita-tion and bad working conditions. If sex com-merce were legal, sex workers would be more able to organize and agitate for higher pay, better conditions, greater control, and less stigma. Whatever one thinks of the limitations of capitalist commerce, such an extreme exclusion from the market process would hardly be socially acceptable in other areas of activity. Imagine, for example, that the exchange of money for medical care, pharmacological advice, or psychological counseling were illegal. Medical practice would take place in a much less satisfactory fashion if doctors, nurses, drug-gists, and therapists could be hauled off to jail at the whim of the local "health squad." But that is essentially the situation of prostitutes, sex workers, and sex entrepreneurs. Marx himself considered the capitalist mar-ket a revolutionary, if limited, force. He argued that capitalism was progressive in its dissolution of pre-capitalist superstition, prejudice and the bonds of traditional modes of life. "Hence the great civilizing influence of capital, its produc-tion of a state of society compared with which all earlier stages appear to be merely local progress and idolatry of nature." 54 Keeping sex from realizing the positive effects of the market economy hardly makes it socialist. The law is especially ferocious in maintaining the boundary between childhood "innocence" and "adult" sexuality. Rather than recognizing the sexuality of the young, and attempting to provide for it in a caring and responsible man-ner, our culture denies and punishes erotic interest and activity by anyone under the local age of consent. The amount of law devoted to protecting young people from premature expo-sure to sexuality is breath-taking. T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY' The primary mechanism for insuring the separation of sexual generations is age of con-sent laws. These laws make no distinction between the most brutal rape and the most gentle romance. A 20-year-old convicted of sexual contact with a 17-year-old will face a severe sentence in virtually every state, regard-less of the nature of the relationship. 55 Nor are minors permitted access to "adult" sexuality in other forms. They are forbidden to see books, movies, or television in which sexuality is "too" graphically portrayed. It is legal for young people to see hideous depictions of violence, but not to see explicit pictures of genitalia. Sexually active young people are frequently incarcerated in juvenile homes, or otherwise punished for their "precocity." Adults who deviate too much from conven-tional standards of sexual conduct are often denied contact with the young, even their own. Custody laws permit the state to steal the children of anyone whose erotic activities appear questionable to a judge presiding over family court matters. Countless lesbians, gay men, prostitutes, swingers, sex workers, and "promiscuous" women have been declared unfit parents under such provisions. Members of the teaching professions are closely mon-itored for signs of sexual misconduct. In most states, certification laws require that teachers arrested for sex offenses lose their jobs and credentials. In some cases, a teacher may be fired merely because an unconventional lifestyle becomes known to school officials. Moral turpi-tude is one of the few legal grounds for revoking academic tenure. 56 The more influence one has over the next generation, the less latitude one is permitted in behavior and opinions. The coer-cive power of the law ensures the transmission of conservative sexual values with these kinds of controls over parenting and teaching. The only adult sexual behavior that is legal in every state is the placement of the penis in the vagina in wedlock. Consenting adults statutes ameliorate this situation in fewer than half the states. Most states impose severe criminal pen-alties on consensual sodomy, homosexual con-tact short of sodomy, adultery, seduction, and adult incest. Sodomy laws vary a great deal. In some states, they apply equally to homosexual and heterosexual partners and regardless of marital status. Some state courts have ruled that married couples have the right to commit sod-omy in private. Only homosexual sodomy is illegal in some states. Some sodomy statutes prohibit both anal sex and oral-genital contact. In other states, sodomy applies only to anal penetration, and oral sex is covered under separate statutes. 57 Laws like these criminalize sexual behavior that is freely chosen and avidly sought. The ideology embodied in them reflects the value hierarchies discussed above. That is, some sex acts are considered to be so intrinsically vile that no one should be allowed under any circum-stance to perform them. The fact that individ-uals consent to or even prefer them is taken to be additional evidence of depravity. This system of sex law is similar to legalized racism. State prohibition of same-sex contact, anal penetra-tion, and oral sex make homosexuals a criminal group denied the privileges of full citizenship. With such laws, prosecution is persecution. Even when they are not strictly enforced, as it usually the case, the members of criminalized sexual communities remain vulnerable to the possibility of arbitrary arrest, or to periods in which they become the objects of social panic. When those occur, the laws are in place and police action is swift. Even sporadic enforcement serves to remind individuals that they are members of a subject population. The occasional arrest for sodomy, lewd behavior, solicitation, or oral sex keeps everyone else afraid, nervous, and circumspect. The state also upholds the sexual hierarchy through bureaucratic regulations. Immigration policy still prohibits the admission of homo-sexuals (and other sexual "deviates") into the United States. Military regulations bar homo-sexuals from serving in the armed forces.58 The fact that gay people cannot legally marry means that they cannot enjoy the same legal rights as heterosexuals in many matters, including inher-itance, taxation, protection from testimony in court, and the acquisition of citizenship for foreign partners. These are but a few of the ways that the state reflects and maintains the social relations of sexuality. The law buttresses structures of power, codes of behavior and 115 116 GAYLE S . R U B I N forms of prejudice. At their worst, sex law and sex regulation are simply sexual apartheid. Although the legal apparatus of sex is staggering, most everyday social control is extralegal. Less formal, but very effective social sanctions are imposed on members of "inferior" sexual populations. In her marvelous ethnographic study of gay life in the 1960s, Esther Newton observed that the homosexual population was divided into what she called the "overts" and the "coverts." "The overts live their entire working lives within the context of the [gay] community; the coverts live their entire nonworking lives within it." 59 At the time of Newton's study, the gay community provided far fewer jobs than it does now, and the non-gay work world was almost completely intolerant of homosexuality. There were some fortunate individuals who could be openly gay and earn decent salaries. But the vast majority of homosexuals had to choose between honest poverty and the strain of maintaining a false identity. Though this situation has changed a great deal, discrimination against gay people is still rampant. For the bulk of the gay population, being out on the job is still impossible. Generally, the more important and higher-paid the job, the less the society will tolerate overt erotic deviance. If it is difficult for gay people to find employment where they do not have to pretend, it is doubly and triply so for more exotically sexed individuals. Sado-masochists leave their fetish clothes at home, and know that they must be especially careful to conceal their real identities. An exposed pedophile would probably be stoned out of the office. Having to maintain such absolute secrecy is a considerable burden. Even those who are content to be secretive may be exposed by some accidental event. Individuals who are erotically unconventional risk being unemployable or unable to pursue their chosen careers. Public officials and anyone who occupies a position of social consequence are especially vulnerable. A sex scandal is the surest method for hounding someone out of office or destroying a political career. The fact that important people are expected to conform to the strictest standards of erotic conduct discourages sex perverts of all kinds from seeking such posi-tions. Instead, erotic dissidents are channeled into positions that have less impact on the mainstream of social activity and opinion. The expansion of the gay economy in the last decade has provided some employment alter-natives and some relief from job discrimination against homosexuals. But most of the jobs provided by the gay economy are low-status and low-paying. Bartenders, bathhouse attend-ants, and disc jockeys are not bank officers or corporate executives. Many of the sexual migrants who flock to places like San Francisco are downwardly mobile. They face intense com-petition for choice positions. The influx of sexual migrants provides a pool of cheap and exploitable labor for many of the city's busi-nesses, both gay and straight. Families play a crucial role in enforcing sexual conformity. Much social pressure is brought to bear to deny erotic dissidents the comforts and resources that families provide. Popular ideology holds that families are not supposed to produce or harbor erotic non-conformity. Many families respond by trying to reform, punish, or exile sexually offending members. Many sexual migrants have been thrown out by their families, and many others are fleeing from the threat of institutionaliza-tion. Any random collection of homosexuals, sex workers, or miscellaneous perverts can pro-vide heart-stopping stories of rejection and mistreatment by horrified families. Christmas is the great family holiday in the United States and consequently it is a time of considerable tension in the gay community. Half the inhabitants go off to their families of origin; many of those who remain in the gay ghettos cannot do so, and relive their anger and grief. In addition to economic penalties and strain on family relations, the stigma of erotic dissidence creates friction at all other levels of everyday life. The general public helps to penalize erotic nonconformity when, according to the values they have been taught, landlords refuse housing, neighbors call in the police, and hood-lums commit sanctioned battery. The ideologies of erotic inferiority and sexual danger decrease the power of sex perverts and sex workers in social encounters of all kinds. They have less " T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" protection from unscrupulous or criminal behav-ior, less access to police protection, and less recourse to the courts. Dealings with institutions and bureaucracies – hospitals, police, coroners, banks, public officials – are more difficult. Sex is a vector of oppression. The system of sexual oppression cuts across other modes of social inequality, sorting out individuals and groups according to its own intrinsic dynamics. It is not reducible to, or understandable in terms of, class, race, ethnicity, or gender. Wealth, white skin, male gender, and ethnic privileges can mitigate the effects of sexual stratification. A rich, white male pervert will generally be less affected than a poor, black, female pervert. But even the most privileged are not immune to sexual oppression. Some of the consequences of the system of sexual hierarchy are mere nui-sances. Others are quite grave. In its most serious manifestations, the sexual system is a Kafkaesque nightmare in which unlucky victims become herds of human cattle whose identifica-tion, surveillance, apprehension, treatment, incarceration, and punishment produce jobs and self-satisfaction for thousands of vice police, prison officials, psychiatrists, and social work-ers. 60 SEXUAL CONFLICTS The moral panic crystallizes widespread fears and anxieties, and often deals with them not by seeking the real causes of the problems and conditions which they demonstrate but by dis-placing them on to "Folk Devils" in an identified social group (often the "immoral" or "degen-erate"). Sexuality has had a peculiar centrality in such panics, and sexual "deviants" have been omnipresent scapegoats. (Jeffrey Weeks61) The sexual system is not a monolithic, omnipo-tent structure. There are continuous battles over the definitions, evaluations, arrangements, pri-vileges, and costs of sexual behavior. Political struggle over sex assumes characteristic forms. Sexual ideology plays a crucial role in sexual experience. Consequently, definitions and evaluations of sexual conduct are objects of bitter contest. The confrontations between early gay liberation and the psychiatric establishment are the best example of this kind of fight, but there are constant skirmishes. Recurrent battles take place between the primary producers of sexual ideology – the churches, the family, the shrinks, and the media – and the groups whose experience they name, distort, and endanger. The legal regulation of sexual conduct is another battleground. Lysander Spooner dis-sected the system of state-sanctioned moral coercion over a century ago in a text inspired primarily by the temperance campaigns. In Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication of Moral Liberty, Spooner argued that government should protect its citizens against crime, but that it is foolish, unjust, and tyrannical to legislate against vice. He discusses rationalizations still heard today in defense of legalized moralism – that "vices" (Spooner is referring to drink, but homosexuality, prostitution, or recreational drug use may be substituted) lead to crimes, and should therefore be prevented; that those who practice "vice" are non compos mentis and should therefore be protected from their selfdestruction by state-accomplished ruin; and that children must be protected from suppos-edly harmful knowledge. 62 The discourse on victimless crimes has not changed much. Legal struggle over sex law will continue until basic freedoms of sexual action and expression are guaranteed. This requires the repeal of all sex laws except those few that deal with actual, not statutory, coercion; and it entails the abolition of vice squads, whose job it is to enforce legislated morality. In addition to the definitional and legal wars, there are less obvious forms of sexual political conflict which I call the territorial and border wars. The process by which erotic minorities form communities and the forces that seek to inhibit them lead to struggles over the nature and boundaries of sexual zones. Dissident sexuality is rarer and more closely monitored in small towns and rural areas. Consequently, metropolitan life continually beckons to young perverts. Sexual migration creates concentrated pools of potential partners, friends, and associates. It enables individuals to create adult, kin-like networks in which to live. But there are many barriers which sexual migrants have to overcome. According to the mainstream media and 117 118 GAYLE S. RUBIN popular prejudice, the marginal sexual worlds are bleak and dangerous. They are portrayed as impoverished, ugly, and inhabited by psychopaths and criminals. New migrants must be sufficiently motivated to resist the impact of such discouraging images. Attempts to counter negative propaganda with more realistic information generally meet with censorship, and there are continuous ideological struggles over which representations of sexual communities make it into the popular media. Information on how to find, occupy, and live in the marginal sexual worlds is also suppressed. Navigational guides are scarce and inaccurate. In the past, fragments of rumor, distorted gossip, and bad publicity were the most available clues to the location of underground erotic communities. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, better information became available. Now groups like the Moral Majority want to rebuild the ideological walls around the sexual undergrounds and make transit in and out of them as difficult as possible. Migration is expensive. Transportation costs, moving expenses, and the necessity of finding new jobs and housing are economic difficulties that sexual migrants must overcome. These are especially imposing barriers to the young, who are often the most desperate to move. There are, however, routes into the erotic communities which mark trails through the propaganda thicket and provide some economic shelter along the way. Higher education can be a route for young people from affluent backgrounds. In spite of serious limitations, the information on sexual behavior at most colleges and universities is better than elsewhere, and most colleges and universities shelter small erotic networks of all sorts. For poorer kids, the military is often the easiest way to get the hell out of wherever they are. Military prohibitions against homosexuality make this a perilous route. Although young queers continually attempt to use the armed forces to get out of intolerable hometown situations and closer to functional gay communities, they face the hazards of exposure, court martial, and dishonorable discharge. Once in the cities, erotic populations tend to nucleate and to occupy some regular, visible territory. Churches and other anti-vice forces constantly put pressure on local authorities to contain such areas, reduce their visibility, or to driye their inhabitants out of town. There are periodic crackdowns in which local vice squads are unleashed on the populations they control. Gay men, prostitutes, and sometimes transvestites are sufficiently territorial and numerous to engage in intense battles with the cops over particular streets, parks, and alleys. Such border wars are usually inconclusive, but they result in many casualties. For most of this century, the sexual under-worlds have been marginal and impoverished, their residents subjected to stress and exploita-tion. The spectacular success of gay entrepre-neurs in creating a variegated gay economy has altered the quality of life within the gay ghetto. The level of material comfort and social elabo-ration achieved by the gay community in the last fifteen years is unprecedented. But it is impor-tant to recall what happened to similar miracles. The growth of the black population in New York in the early part of the twentieth century led to the Harlem Renaissance, but that period of creativity was doused by the Depression. The relative prosperity and cultural florescence of the gay ghetto may be equally fragile. Like blacks who fled the South for the metropolitan North, homosexuals may have merely traded rural problems for urban ones. Gay pioneers occupied neighborhoods that were centrally located but run down. Conse-quently, they border poor neighborhoods. Gays, especially low-income gays, end up competing with other low-income groups for the limited supply of cheap and moderate housing. In San Francisco, competition for low-cost housing has exacerbated both racism and homophobia, and is one source of the epidemic of street violence against homosexuals. Instead of being isolated and invisible in rural settings, city gays are now numerous and obvious targets for urban frus-trations. In San Francisco, unbridled construction of downtown skyscrapers and high-cost condo-miniums is causing affordable housing to evap-orate. Megabuck construction is creating pressure on all city residents. Poor gay renters are visible in low-income neighborhoods; multi- " T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" millionaire contracters are not. The specter of the "homosexual invasion" is a convenient scapegoat which deflects attention from the banks, the planning commission, the political establishment, and the big developers. In San Francisco, the well-being of the gay community has become embroiled in the high-stakes politics of urban real estate. Downtown expansion affects all the territo-rial erotic underworlds. In both San Francisco and New York, high investment construction and urban renewal have intruded on the main areas of prostitution, pornography, and leather bars. Developers are salivating over Times Square, the Tenderloin, what is left of North Beach, and South of Market. Anti-sex ideology, obscenity law, prostitution regulations, and the alcoholic beverage codes are all being used to dislodge seedy adult businesses, sex workers, and leathermen. Within ten years, most of these areas will have been bulldozed and made safe for conven-tion centers, international hotels, corporate headquarters, and housing for the rich. The most important and consequential kind of sex conflict is what Jeffrey Weeks has termed the "moral panic." Moral panics are the "political moment" of sex, in which diffuse attitudes are channeled into political action and from there into social change. 63 The white slavery hysteria of the 1880s, the anti-homosexual campaigns of the 1950s, and the child pornography panic of the late 1970s were typical moral panics. Because sexuality in Western societies is so mystified, the wars over it are often fought at oblique angles, aimed at phony targets, con-ducted with misplaced passions, and are highly, intensely symbolic. Sexual activities often func-tion as signifiers for personal and social appre-hensions to which they have no intrinsic connection. During a moral panic, such fears attach to some unfortunate sexual activity or population. The media become ablaze with indignation, the public behaves like a rabid mob, the police are activated, and the state enacts new laws and regulations. When the furor has passed, some innocent erotic group has been decimated, and the state has extended its power into new areas of erotic behavior. The system of sexual stratification provides easy victims who lack the power to defend themselves, and a preexisting apparatus for controlling their movements and curtailing their freedoms. The stigma against sexual dissidents renders them morally defenseless. Every moral panic has consequences on two levels. The target population suffers most, but everyone is affected by the social and legal changes. Moral panics rarely alleviate any real prob-lem, because they are aimed at chimeras and signifiers. They draw on the pre-existing dis-cursive structure which invents victims in order to justify treating "vices" as crimes. The crim-inalization of innocuous behaviors such as homosexuality, prostitution, obscenity, or recre-ational drug use, is rationalized by portraying them as menaces to health and safety, women and children, national security, the family, or civiliza-tion itself. Even when activity is acknowledged to be harmless, it may be banned because it is alleged to "lead" to something ostensibly worse (another manifestation of the domino theory). 64 Great and mighty edifices have been built on the basis of such phantasms. Generally, the outbreak of a moral panic is preceded by an intensification of such scapegoating. It is always risky to prophesy. But it does not take much prescience to detect potential moral panics in two current developments: the attacks on sado-masochists by a segment of the feminist movement, and the right's increasing use of AIDS to incite virulent homophobia. Feminist anti-pornography ideology has always contained an implied, and sometimes overt, indictment of sado-masochism. The pic-tures of sucking and fucking that comprise the bulk of pornography may be unnerving to those who are not familiar with them. But it is hard to make a convincing case that such images are violent. All of the early anti-porn slide shows used a highly selective sample of S/M imagery to sell a very flimsy analysis. Taken out of context, such images are often shocking. This shock value was mercilessly exploited to scare audi-ences into accepting the anti-porn perspective. A great deal of anti-porn propaganda implies that sado-masochism is the underlying and essential "truth" towards which all pornog-raphy tends. Porn is thought to lead to S/M porn which in turn is alleged to lead to rape. This is a just-so story that revitalizes the notion that sex 119 120 GAYLE S . R U B I N perverts commit sex crimes, not normal people. There is no evidence that the readers of S/M erotica or practicing sado-masochists commit a disproportionate number of sex crimes. Antiporn literature scapegoats an unpopular sexual minority and its reading material for social problems they do not create. The use of S/M imagery in anti-porn discourse is inflammatory. It implies that the way to make the world safer for women is to get rid of sado-masochism. The use of S/M images in the movie Not a Love Story was on a moral par with the use of depictions of black men raping white women, or of drooling old Jews pawing young Aryan girls, to incite racist or antiSemitic frenzy. Feminist rhetoric has a distressing tendency to reappear in reactionary contexts. For example, in 1980 and 1981, Pope John Paul II delivered a series of pronouncements reaffirming his commitment to the most conservative and Pauline understandings of human sexuality. In condemning divorce, abortion, trial marriage, pornography, prostitution, birth control, unbridled hedonism, and lust, the pope employed a great deal of feminist rhetoric about sexual objectification. Sounding like lesbian feminist polemicist Julia Penelope, His Holiness explained that "considering anyone in a lustful way makes that person a sexual object rather than a human being worthy of dignity." 65 The right wing opposes pornography and has already adopted elements of feminist anti-porn rhetoric. The anti-S/M discourse developed in the women's movement could easily become a vehicle for a moral witch-hunt. It provides a readymade defenseless target population. It provides a rationale for the recriminalization of sexual materials which have escaped the reach of current obscenity laws. It would be especially easy to pass laws against S/M erotica resembling the child pornography laws. The ostensible purpose of such laws would be to reduce violence by banning so-called violent porn. A focused campaign against the leather menace might also result in the passage of laws to criminalize S/M behavior that is not currently illegal. The ultimate result of such a moral panic would be the legalized violation of a community of harmless perverts. It is dubious that such a sexual witch- hunt would make any appreciable contribution towards reducing violence against women. An AIDS panic is even more probable. When fears of incurable disease mingle with sexual terror, the resulting brew is extremely volatile. A century ago, attempts to control syphilis led to the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts in England. The Acts were based on erroneous medical theories and did nothing to halt the spread of the disease. But they did make life miserable for the hundreds of women who were incarcerated, subjected to forcible vaginal exam-ination, and stigmatized for life as prostitutes. 66 Whatever happens, AIDS will have farreaching consequences on sex in general, and on homosexuality in particular. The disease will have a significant impact on the choices gay people make. Fewer will migrate to the gay meccas out of fear of the disease. Those who already reside in the ghettos will avoid situa-tions they fear will expose them. The gay economy, and the political apparatus it sup-ports, may prove to be evanescent. Fear of AIDS has already affected sexual ideology. Just when homosexuals have had some success in throw-ing off the taint of mental disease, gay people find themselves metaphorically welded to an image of lethal physical deterioration. The syn-drome, its peculiar qualities, and its transmissibility are being used to reinforce old fears that sexual activity, homosexuality, and promiscuity led to disease and death. AIDS is both a personal tragedy for those who contract the syndrome and a calamity for the gay community. Homophobes have gleefully hastened to turn this tragedy against its victims. One columnist has suggested that AIDS has always existed, that the Biblical prohibitions on sodomy were designed to protect people from AIDS, and that AIDS is therefore an appropriate punishment for violating the Levitical codes. Using fear of infection as a rationale, local rightwingers attempted to ban the gay rodeo from Reno, Nevada. A recent issue of the Moral Majority Report featured a picture of a "typ-ical" white family of four wearing surgical masks. The headline read: "AIDS: HOMO-SEXUAL DISEASES THREATEN AMERI-CAN FAMILIES."67 Phyllis Schlafly has recently issued a pamphlet arguing that passage " T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" between feminism and sex is complex. Because sexuality is a nexus of the relationships between genders, much of the oppression of women is born by, mediated through, and constituted within, sexuality. Feminism has always been vitally interested in sex. But there have been two strains of feminist thought on the subject. One tendency has criticized the restrictions on women's sexual behavior and denounced the high costs imposed on women for being sexually active. This tradition of feminist sexual thought has called for a sexual liberation that would work for women as well as for men. The second tendency has considered sexual liberalization to be inherently a mere extension of male privilege. This tradition resonates with conservative, antisexual discourse. With the advent of the antipornography movement, it achieved temporary hegemony over feminist analysis. The anti-pornography movement and its texts have been the most extensive expression of this discourse.71 In addition, proponents of this view-point have condemned virtually every variant of sexual expression as anti-feminist. Within this framework, monogamous lesbianism that occurs within long-term, intimate relationships, and which does not involve playing with polarized roles, has replaced married, procreative heterosexuality at the top of the value hierarchy. Heterosexuality has been demoted to somewhere in the middle. Apart from this change, everything else looks more or less familiar. The lower depths are occupied by the usual groups and behaviors: prostitution, transsexuality, sado-masochism, and cross-generational activities.72 Most gay male conduct, all casual sex, promiscuity, and lesbian behavior that does involve roles or kink or non-monogamy are also censured. 73 Even THE LIMITS OF FEMINISM sexual fantasy during masturbation is denounced as a phallocentric holdover. 74 We know that in an overwhelmingly large number This discourse on sexuality is less a sexology of cases, sex crime is associated with pornography. We know that sex criminals read it, are clearly than a demonology. It presents most sexual influenced by it. I believe that, if we can eliminate behavior in the worst possible light. Its descrip-the distribution of such items among impressiona-- tions of erotic conduct always use the worst ble children, we shall greatly reduce our fright-available example as if it were representative. It ening sex-crime rate. (J. Edgar Hoover70) presents the most disgusting pornography, the most exploited forms of prostitution, and the In the absence of a more articulated radical least palatable or most shocking manifestations theory of sex, most progressives have turned to of sexual variation. This rhetorical tactic con-feminism for guidance. But the relationship sistently misrepresents human sexuality in all its of the Equal Rights Amendment would make it impossible to "legally protect ourselves against AIDS and other diseases carried by homo-sexuals." 68 Current right-wing literature calls for shutting down the gay baths, for a legal ban on homosexual employment in food-handling occupations, and for state-mandated prohibi-tions on blood donations by gay people. Such policies would require the government to iden-tify all homosexuals and impose easily recogniz-able legal and social markers on them. It is bad enough that the gay community must deal with the medical misfortune of having been the population in which a deadly disease first became widespread and visible. It is worse to have to deal with the social consequences as well. Even before the AIDS scare, Greece passed a law that enabled police to arrest suspected homosexuals and force them to submit to an examination for venereal disease. It is likely that until AIDS and its methods of transmission are understood, there will be all sorts of proposals to control it by punishing the gay community and by attacking its institutions. When the cause of Legionnaires' Disease was unknown, there were no calls to quarantine members of the American Legion or to shut down their meeting halls. The Contagious Diseases Acts in England did little to control syphilis, but they caused a great deal of suffering for the women who came under their purview. The history of panic that has accompanied new epidemics, and of the casualties incurred by their scapegoats, should make everyone pause and consider with extreme scepticism any attempts to justify antigay policy initiatives on the basis of AIDS. 69 121 122 GAYLE S. RUBIN forms. The picture of human sexuality that emerges from this literature is unremittingly ugly. In addition, this anti-porn rhetoric is a massive exercise in scapegoating. It criticizes nonroutine acts of love rather than routine acts of oppression, exploitation, or violence. This demon sexology directs legitimate anger at women's lack of personal safety against innocent individuals, practices, and communities. Anti-porn propaganda often implies that sexism originates within the commercial sex industry and subsequently infects the rest of society. This is sociologically nonsensical. The sex industry is hardly a feminist Utopia. It reflects the sexism that exists in the society as a whole. We need to analyze and oppose the manifestations of gender inequality specific to the sex industry. But this is not the same as attempting to wipe out commercial sex. Similarly, erotic minorities such as sadomasochists and transsexuals are as likely to exhibit sexist attitudes or behavior as any other politically random social grouping. But to claim that they are inherently anti-feminist is sheer fantasy. A good deal of current feminist literature attributes the oppression of women to graphic representations of sex, prostitution, sex education, sado-masochism, male homosexuality, and transsexualism. Whatever happened to the family, religion, education, child-rearing practices, the media, the state, psychiatry, job discrimination, and unequal pay? Finally, this so-called feminist discourse recreates a very conservative sexual morality. For over a century, battles have been waged over just how much shame, distress, and punishment should be incurred by sexual activity. The conservative tradition has promoted opposition to pornography, prostitution, homosexuality, all erotic variation, sex education, sex research, abortion, and contraception. The opposing, pro-sex tradition has included individuals like Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld, Alfred Kinsey and Victoria Woodhull, as well as the sex education movements, organizations of militant prostitutes and homosexuals, the reproductive rights movement, and organizations such as the Sexual Reform League of the 1960s. This motley collection of sex reformers, sex educators, and sexual militants has mixed records on both sexual and feminist issues. But surely they are closer to the spirit of modern feminism than are moral crusaders, the social purity movement, and anti-vice organizations. Nevertheless, the current feminist sexual demonology generally elevates the anti-vice crusaders to positions of ancestral honor, while condemning the more liberatory tradition as anti-feminist. In an essay that exemplifies some of these trends, Sheila Jeffreys blames Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpen-ter, Alexandra Kollantai, "believers in the joy of sex of every possible political persuasion," and the 1929 congress of the World League for Sex Reform for making "a great contribution to the defeat of militant feminism."75 The anti-pornography movement and its avatars have claimed to speak for all feminism. Fortunately, they do not. Sexual liberation has been and continues to be a feminist goal. The women's movement may have produced some of the most retrogressive sexual thinking this side of the Vatican. But it has also produced an exciting, innovative, and articulate defense of sexual pleasure and erotic justice. This "prosex" feminism has been spearheaded by lesbians whose sexuality does not conform to movement standards of purity (primarily lesbian sadomasochists and butch/femme dykes), by unapologetic heterosexuals and by women who adhere to classic radical feminism rather than to the revisionist celebrations of femininity which have become so common. 76 Although the antiporn forces have attempted to weed anyone who disagrees with them out of the movement, the fact remains that feminist thought about sex is profoundly polarized. 77 Whenever there is polarization, there is an unhappy tendency to think the truth lies some-where in between. Ellen Willis has commented sarcastically that "the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvin-ist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between." 78 The most recent development in the feminist sex wars is the emergence of a "middle" that seeks to evade the dangers of anti-porn fascism, on the one hand, and a supposed "anything goes" libertarianism, on the other. 79 Although it is hard to criticize a T H I N K I N G SEX: N O T E S FOR RADICAL THEORY" position that is not yet fully formed, I want to draw attention to some incipient problems. 80 The emergent middle is based on a false characterization of the poles of the debate, construing both sides as equally extremist. According to B. Ruby Rich, "the desire for a language of sexuality has led feminists into locations (pornography, sadomasochism) too narrow or overdetermined for a fruitful discus-sion. Debate has collapsed into a rumble." 81 True, the fights between Women Against Por-nography (WAP) and lesbian sado-masochists have resembled gang warfare. But the responsi-bility for this lies primarily with the anti-porn movement, and its refusal to engage in prin-cipled discussion. S/M lesbians have been forced into a ...
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