Politically Correct Sex

What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

--George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

Forget Big Brother. All those years we were on the lookout for Orwell's police state, we were fooling ourselves. Over the past decade, a new threat to personal freedom and the kind of sex that can annihilate a whole culture by a single splendid movement of the arm has arrived on the scene. Her name is Big Sister, and she is watching you.

Orwell had his Junior Anti-Sex League. We have Women Against Pornography. Where Orwell tried to twist reality through Newspeak, with such phrases as Ignorance Is Strength and Freedom Is Slavery, the antiporn feminists have their own brand of mercurial language: SexIs Rape. Desire Is Degradation. The Personal Is Political. The Public Is Private. Pleasure Is Oppression. Porn Is Thought Crime.

The rhetoric fit perfectly with the fire-and-brimstone bombast of fundamentalists such as the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Donald Wildmon. The feminists gave the Meese commission the "damsel in distress" metaphor it needed to work its repressive deed. Even though there was no evidence to prove the claim, porn "harmed" women. The Meese commission called women who would support that charge and ignored women who tried to defend their right to erotica.

There is a hidden agenda to the rhetoric, conservative, cruel and coercive. In the interest of protecting women, many W.A.P. members deny female sexuality. What they have to say about male sexuality is a greater horror story:

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

--Nineteen Eighty-Four

Thought crime one: First they tell us that pornography is violence to women. Covering the antiporn hearings in Minneapolis, reporter Tim Campbell wrote, "The [Susan] Brownmillers of the world have got a lot of women convinced that dirty, rotten, awful things pass through men's minds when they look at porn." Whatever it is men do with erotica is part of a criminal conspiracy that ends in violence to women.

Feminist Pooh-Bah Robin Morgan issued the call to arms: "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice."

The politically incorrect act at the center of this debate is male masturbation. That, and not rape, is the unspoken crime. Women who trooped off to sex guru Betty Dodson's house for group seminars in clitoral aerobics, who elevated the personal act of autoeroticism to a political act of liberation for women, object to the same practice in men. They object to the ease of access to pictures of beautiful women. They object to our power to arouse ourselves. They ridicule male fantasy as immature--the same word Freud used to describe clitoral orgasms. If Freud was patronizing, Women Against Pornography is matronizing. There is an analogy to be made to handgun control. Handguns don't kill people, people kill people. Ignore the tool. The act is the crime. People are punished for their actions. Porn doesn't rape people, people rape people. Images are not acts. Punish the crime and the criminal, not the image, which more often than not is innocent. What most men do with porn could be rephrased: When intercourse is the theory, masturbation is the practice.

Even feminists who oppose censorship have noted that W.A.P. members use language that is right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Edmonton journalist Myrna Kostash writes, "We talk about deprograming the male sexual imagination by offering masturbatory fantasies from the women's movement, as though pornography were only about sexual immaturity."

In an essay called "Political Precedents and Moral Crusades: Women, Sex and the State," feminist Varda Burstyn blames porn on the economy: "Like other forms of sexist culture, pornography will go away when women no longer need to sell their sexuality and when men no longer need or want to look to sexist pictures to find out about sex, to learn what they are supposed to want and be as men and to support their need to feel superior to women."

Another feminist tries to tell me that my taste is a sign of weakness: "Pornography exists to assuage men's insecurities and fears."

It also exists to satisfy male curiosity, an attribute that is essential to my being. I cannot imagine a time when I would no longer want to look at pictures to find out about sex, nor can I imagine letting someone else make that decision for me.

Let's examine this thought crime.

When I see porn, I see objects of wonder, objects of contemplation, objects of delight, objects of obscure and not-so-obscure desire. An occasional come shot. The antiporn feminists roll out the cannonade of loaded terms to describe visual erotica. (Try, for example, to have a conversation about sex without using the words object, humiliate, subordinate, degrade or devalue. Those who speak cant can't.) I could rebut them point by point: When they masturbate to an image of the Soloflex poster, when they seep into theater seats and lingerie while watching Al Pacino, then attack us for admiring Miss August, are they hypocrites or something worse? If they don't masturbate, are they politically correct or tragically repressed? I do not deliver my sexuality into the hands of hypocrites or neurotics.

Ok, you say. W.A.P. members are extremists. Most feminists are more moderate. Let's take Gloria Steinem. She tries to distinguish between "porn (pictures of prostitutes) and erotica (pictures of two people in love, a mutually pleasurable sexual expression between people who have enough power to be there by positive choice)." Couples depicted in erotica would be making the same salary. Their jobs would be of equal interest. The thought of jerking off to pictures of Yuppies in love sort of misses the point. Of course, when Steinem puts her notions of politically correct and politically incorrect into motion, the result is a travesty. Last year, she complained that the editing of the movie The Postman Always Rings Twice concentrated too much on the orgasmic reactions of Jessica Lange. In the sex scenes, we did not look upon the face of Jack Nicholson, only that of Lange. Steinem turned an erotic encounter into a paid political announcement, with equal-time provisions for the candidate from Peoria. If her position weren't so pompous and tyrannical, it would be silly.

The yardsticks our culture uses to measure sexual correctness are an affront to dignity. One of my favorites is the notion of wholeness. Sara Diamond argues that pornography "concentrates on fragments of the female form: a breast, foot, mouth. This allows the viewer to distance himself from the real person to whom the fragment belongs, avoiding the demands of relating to a whole, intelligent, emotional and active woman." Before you may turn to the Playmate, boys, you must read the Data Sheet. For erotica to be politically correct, we must know as much about the person depicted as Walter Mondale knew about Geraldine Ferraro. We have to read her résumé, do her taxes, proofread her Ph.D. thesis on "Fat Is a Feminist Issue."

There is justice. When Ms. ran a Calvin Klein ad for Obsession, politically correct letters came pouring in: "If nothing else, surely you could not fail to notice that the face of the seminude woman in the photograph is not shown. What better way to objectify women than to render her faceless? Truly, she is the object of this man's sexual obsession. Ms. magazine should not be a party to this kind of exploitation."

The editors of Ms. covered their rhetorical asses with the following:

Sex and nudity in advertising are often inappropriate. At their worst, they are used to depict men's dominance and their violence toward women. This ad is intended as a sensuous ad for a sensuous body product. Instead of a nonemotional, dominant man and an emotional, vulnerable woman, it's the man in this ad who is emotional and vulnerable. Now that we've begun to untangle sex from violence and inequality, women are ready for a mutual, freely chosen sensuality of our own.

Nevertheless, as many readers point out, the woman's face is not shown in the image. The next step will be to show a whole woman, face and all, who is also equal and sensuous. We thank you for your thoughtful letters, and we are making them available to the advertiser.

Other women try the tack that erotica creates false illusions. Feminists at the University of Chicago, for example, protested Playboy, claiming, "Playboy sets an unreal standard for sexual attractiveness that many of the models themselves could not attain were it not for airbrushing and other photographic techniques. Women are taught to identify their worth with their sexual appearance and desirability and to feel less of a woman, less valuable for any deviations they may have from this artificial standard." They fear comparison. The members of the Junior Anti-Sex League want solidarity, sisterhood, conformity. It's not a new approach. According to sociologist Murray S. Davis, in a book called Smut:

Certain primitive tribes sacrificed their most sexual attractive members, ostensibly to honor their gods but (cynics believe) actually to equalize the erotic ranking of those remaining. We moderns are not so savage, but some have suggested taxing the attractive to compensate the repulsive for their sad lot in life, continually condemned as they are to collapsing the erotic reality of nearly everyone they encounter.

Andrea Dworkin, the high priestess, poet and prophetess of the antiporn movement, has a simple definition of politically correct sex: "Sexual relations between a (concluded on page 85) Correct Sex (continued from page 68)man and a woman are politically acceptable only when the man has a limp penis." Robin Morgan has an equally incendiary definition: "I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman out of her own genuine affection and desire." The feminists have reduced sex to a game of Mother, May I? or worse. The only politically correct sex is sex initiated by a woman, the only sanctioned acts those that a politically aware woman does not find degrading.

In the not-too-distant past, there were nice girls and sluts, Madonnas and whores. Women Against Pornography has betrayed the very revolution that allows it to exist. In an essay called "Politically Correct? Politically Incorrect?" anthropologist Muriel Dimen summarizes the early part of the feminist revolution:

Feminism demands sexual freedom for women. In this way it becomes politically correct for women to be sexual explorers, visiting, if not settling down in, homosexuality or polysexuality, experimenting with cocksucking or anal intercourse or tantric sex, trying out orgies or perhaps even celibacy.... Sexuality is by its nature an experience that benefits from a stance that anything goes, that any avenue may (but not must) be explored. Erotic pleasure mushrooms when there are no musts. But this accessibility means that sexual experience can be affected by anything. Sexual intimacy is too generous an experience to exclude anything, including the forces of the unconscious and the forces of hierarchy. When you get into bed with someone you bring all of you: your past, remembered or forgotten; your present, including parts of it which you think your rational mind can keep out; your hopes for the future. Sexual intimacy is therefore particularly resistant to rules of political correctness--or, rather, when it succumbs to rules, passion disappears.

Say amen, somebody.

The antiporn wing of the feminist movement, however, is not happy with sexual adventurers. It views permissiveness as an extension of male privilege. In an essay called "The Taming of the Id," feminist Alice Echols writes, "To curb the promiscuity and rapacity spawned by the sexual revolution, cultural feminists propose that we impose upon the culturea female sexual standard"--a standard that seems to correspond to their understanding of their mothers' sexual values.

The main weapon in this attempt has been the antiporn legislation proposed by Catharine MacKinnon and Dworkin. Their Indianapolis ordinance stated that porn harmed women as a class and that any woman could bring suit against any material that offended her. Two feminist lawyers, Nan Hunter and Sylvia Law, opposed it, arguing that "the ordinance vests in individual women a power to impose their views of politically or morally correct sexuality upon other women by calling for repression of images consistent with those views.... It would require the judiciary to impose its views of correct sexuality on a diverse community...." The judge who overturned the Indianapolis ordinance was adamant: "This is thought control. It establishes an approved view of women, of how they may react to sexual encounters, of how the sexes may relate to each other...."

In an address at Harvard, MacKinnon presented witnesses and evidence that portrayed deep throat as a politically incorrect act that no self-respecting woman could perform. It was never an act between consenting adults. Before a woman could perform it, she had to give up her will via hypnosis. Said MacKinnon, "Most concretely, before 'Linda Lovelace' was seen performing deep throat, no one had ever seen it being done in that way, largely because it cannot be done without hypnosis to repress the natural gag response. Yet it was believed. Men proceeded to demand it of women, causing the distress of many and the death of some." (We let that stand--as she did--without supporting evidence.)

This was an opening salvo of the argument that porn puts ideas into men's heads, endangering women with expectations. MacKinnon introduced a letter from a distraught woman:

Linda was so convincing that she enjoyed what she was doing that our husbands began to think they were cheated in life with us upper-middle-class wives. "I'm not satisfied. You don't know how to be a woman." And every young girl was brainwashed to show our husbands that they could be a better Linda Lovelace than the wife they had at home.... I saw a lot of heartbreaks, nervous breakdowns in women who were being coerced in sex--many tranquilizers were taken because they had to keep up with the times or else. Being forced to do something they don't enjoy, or "Someone else will gladly go out with me." I even saw a business fail because the husband was so preoccupied with this type of sex.

The woman concluded by urging her sisters to avoid wrecking their lives by letting their boyfriends and husbands force them to be "recepticals [sic] instead of cherished wives."

In the old days, he thought, a man looked at a girl's body and saw that it was desirable and that was the end of the story. But you could not have pure love or lust nowadays. No emotion was pure because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act!

--Nineteen Eighty-Four

One can compose a list of politically correct/incorrect sex acts by studying the various ordinances. In a study called "False Promises: Feminist Antipornography Legislation in the U.S.," authors Lisa Duggan, Nan Hunter and Carole S. Vance looked at the MacKinnon description of Deep Throat and argued, "These descriptions are very revealing, since they suggest that multiple partners, group sex and oral sex subordinate women and, hence, are sexist. The notion that the female character is used by men suggests that it is improbable that a woman would engage in fellatio of her own accord."

The politically correct sex of the antiporn movement is every bit as coercive, as orthodox, as sex in a police state. It extends the power of the state into your bedroom. Law and Hunter, in a brief to the Indianapolis judge reviewing the MacKinnon-Dworkin ordinance, described the extent of its tyranny:

It ... makes socially invisible women who find sexually explicit images of women "in positions of display" or "penetrated by objects" to be erotic, liberating or educational. These women are told that their perceptions are a product of false consciousness and that such images are so inherently degrading that they may be suppressed by the state. At the same time, it stamps the imprimatur of state approval on the belief that men are attack dogs triggered to violence by the sight of a sexually explicit image of a woman. It ... makes socially invisible those men who experience themselves as gentle, respectful of women or inhibited about expressing their sexuality.

"For Andrea Dworkin, 'Sexual relationships are politically acceptable only when the man has a limp penis.'"