Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism

The Politics of Pleasure

J. Gwynne

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137326546
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyses the impact of postfeminist discourse and the mainstreaming of pornography on our understanding of intimacy and female sexuality. It is a broad critical survey of a recent publishing phenomenon – the female-authored erotic memoir – and positions the texts under analysis as complex and contradictory expressions of popular feminism.

1

Agency

Abstract: The first chapter analyses the manner in which women’s erotic memoirs validate sexual assertion as a form of empowerment and agency. While femininity and feminine sexualities in Western cultures have generally been positioned by a number of contemporary feminists as disempowering and constructed in subordination to dominant masculine sexualities, this chapter explores how postfeminist culture extolls women who subvert this pattern by forcefully expressing their sexual expectations and desires. While recognising that contemporary women do assert their sexual desires, this chapter suggests that postfeminist sensibilities of choice and empowerment are complicit in masking a social reality in which little has changed in terms of real-world sexual practices.

Gwynne, Joel. Erotic Memoirs and Postfeminism: The Politics of Pleasure. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137326546.

Since the late 1960s, feminists have exposed the complexity and ubiquity of power within heterosexual relations. Over the course of the past 40 years, it has been clearly and resolutely argued that desire as socially constituted, whether lesbian or heterosexual, is inevitably gendered, and that heterosexual desire is premised on gender difference; on the sexual “otherness” of the desired object. This difference is not an anatomical one but a social one, a hierarchy of gender, since it is gender hierarchy which renders anatomical differences socially and erotically significant.¹ In the 21st century, we have witnessed a seismic shift in the manner in which desire – specifically female desire – is constructed and represented in visual and written forms. Female desire is now invariably read in the context of female empowerment, and often through the critical vernacular of postfeminism; a much contested and nebulous term in itself. Sarah Gamble’s definition of postfeminism as “women dressing like bimbos, yet claiming male privileges and attitudes”² demonstrates the strength of some feminists’ scepticism, which often derives from challenging any conceptualisation of the term as representing a movement that strives for equality between the sexes.

Gamble astutely observes that “postfeminism” is often barricaded in inverted commas, suggesting that critics are not only wary of positioning the term as representing definite and resolute feminist values, but are even unsure as to whether the term represents a “con trick engineered by the media or a valid movement”.³ The difficulty in locating postfeminism as a valid movement is largely due to two determining factors. First, there is an absence of unified feminist values and sensibilities in the multitude of mediums and contexts in which postfeminist thought is expressed. This is largely because it is “skewed in favour of liberal humanism” and embraces a “flexible ideology which can be adapted to suit individual needs and desires”.⁴ Second, and perhaps most important of all, many feminists who align themselves to more traditional forms of feminism reject postfeminism by identifying it as a betrayal of a history of feminist struggle, a “rejection of all it has gained”.⁵ Due to the visible success of past feminist movements, contemporary British culture presents a plethora of social contexts that have proven fertile ground for the growth of postfeminist forms of empowerment. In Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010), Natasha Walter charts a highly sexualised culture in which the constant reinforcement of one type of role model is “shrinking and warping” the choices on offer to young women. Indeed, the author comments that “sexualised images of young women are threatening to squeeze out other kinds of images of women throughout popular culture”,⁶ and attributes this shift to the fact that prostitution and the values of the sex industry have “moved from the margins to the mainstream”.⁷

This can be seen not only through the publication of numerous bestselling accounts of prostitution, such as Belle de Jour’s The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (2005), but through the publication of books marketed as non-fictional erotic memoirs of educated career women who are not prostitutes. More often than not, these accounts are identified as an indication of the strength of postfeminist culture; its celebration of female sexual empowerment and “refusal of any definition of women as victims who are unable to control their own lives”.⁸ Indeed, just as postfeminism is inclined to be “unwilling to condemn pornography”,⁹ recent erotic memoirs demonstrate a challenge to sexual absolutism or those who may pass judgement on any facet of women’s sexual decision-making. In this chapter, I will explore the following question: Do these memoirs celebrate women’s autonomous negotiation of sexual decision-making or, conversely, do they reflect a saturation of, and submission to, male-dominated sexual values ascribed by the popularisation and mainstreaming of the sex industry? I will aim to answer this question by focusing on two interlinked thematic strands: the conceptual representation of sexual politics, and the material representation of sexual practices.

Sexual politics

In The New Feminism (1999), Walter condemns the occasional hysteria of second-wave feminist thought, commenting that in the 1970s “all treatments of sexuality in culture were forced to reveal the imprint of sexism: fairy tales, fiction high and low, erotica, cinema, photography, sculpture”, concluding that a minority of feminists perceived “any hint of sexuality in culture” as “proof of sexism”.¹⁰ Now, in the 21st century, the representation of dominant female sexuality, across all mediums of visual and textual expression, predominantly avoids the usual cultural trap of promiscuity; the image of the uncontrolled nymphomaniac. Just as contemporary popular culture is more receptive to female sexual expression, feminist critical discourse has become more tolerant to the liberating possibilities of heterosexual relations, with feminists such as Walter asserting that any insistence on perceiving heterosexual culture as a threat to female agency entails losing “the great power that women have often felt in that world”.¹¹ Similar to Gamble’s assertion of postfeminism as an ethos inseparable from liberal humanism, Walter argues that unless the potential advantages of heterosexual relations are fully realised, feminists “run the risk of placing women as victims even when they are not”.¹²

It is this climate of active female sexual expression and a more inclusive feminist discourse that has seen recent erotic non-fiction memoirs thrive. Suzanne Portnoy’s bestseller The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker (2006) successfully captures the zeitgeist of postfeminist sexual assertion. Portnoy is “not in the market for a boyfriend” but rather “in the market for getting what [she] want[s]”.¹³ Her circle of friends and female support-network espouse a personal philosophy that “men shouldn’t get a name”,¹⁴ and therefore an identity, until they have had sex with Portnoy three times, reducing them first and foremost to sexual objects. On the subject of casual sex, Portnoy makes it clear that “freedom means sex”,¹⁵ and sexual activity is positioned as a counterpoint to the traditional role of a mother that she previously occupied: “One thing is clear, however: not getting fucked at all is not an option. I love sex. My kids-free Friday nights come along just twice a month, and I have to take advantage of them.”¹⁶ The importance of sex extends beyond pleasure, and is employed as a direct tool of empowerment, evident in her recollection of a sexual experience at university: “I fucked him because he looked arrogant and I thought it would be satisfying to demolish his ego.”¹⁷ There is no clarification regarding how, exactly, this aim is achieved through intercourse, but the intent is clear: for Portnoy, sex, freedom and power are interdependent.

The explicit link made by Portnoy between an ethos of postfeminist sexual liberation and freedom is precipitated by a frustration towards a reactionary culture that still upholds the values of sexual essentialism: a belief in the deep, unchanging character of innate sexuality. This frustration and a move towards egalitarianism between the sexes based on mutual understanding are sentiments that bind many recent eroti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Agency
• 2  Intimacy
• 3  Pornography
• 4  Transgression
• C  onclusion
• Bibliography
• Index