If sexual desire is coded as male....

If sexual desire is coded as male, women begin to wonder if they are really ever sexual. Do we distrust our passion, thinking it perhaps not our own, but the construction of patriarchal culture? Can women be sexual actors? Can we act on our own behalf? Or are we purely victims, whose efforts must be directed at resisting male depredations in a patriarchal culture? Must our passion await expression for a safer time? When will that time come? Will any of us remember what her passion was? Does exceeding the bounds of femininity – passivity, helplessness, and victimization – make us deeply uncomfortable? Do we fear that if we act on our most deeply felt sexual passion that we will no longer be women? Do we wish, instead, to bind ourselves together into a sisterhood which seeks to curb male lust but does little to promote female pleasure?

Those words were published in 1984, by Carol Vance, in "Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality". That is the introduction to the extraordinary volume Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, which is basically the proceedings of the famous 1982 'Barnard Sex Conference'. But it strikes me, in the midst of #MeToo, in all its various manifestations, that those words could just as well have been written yesterday. There are all kinds of ways in which women's sexual desires are questioned, not just by slut-shamers but also by a certain breed of 'feminist'. Of course, there are all kinds of ways in which (sexual) desire is shaped by culture. But, as the women who contributed to Pleasure and Danger understood, we need to find a way to reconcile that fact with the reality of the desires we have: to allow ourselves to enjoy what we enjoy while simultaneously fighting against the culture that shapes us. There's no contradiction in that.