A Formerly Fearless Feminist, Erica Jong, Shakes her finger at playboy

How ironic to be accused in the glossy, garter-strewn pages of Playboy of having "trivialized sex"! Thank the Goddess Ihaven't lost my sense of humor!

Your series of articles titled Burning Desires: Sex in America (Playboy, April, May, June andJuly) makes some good points but utterly misses others. Your over-allanalysis of sex and feminism is shallow and wrongheaded.

Here's how I see it:

Yes, feminists, like other humanliberationists, thought that a free person ought to have a free body.Then we embraced "free" sex and discovered that in our puritanical, misogynistic culture, there was no such thing. We were thinking offreedom, but our partners were thinking of scoring--an ethosyour magazine has done everything to perpetuate.

We werethinking of love and equality, but our partners were thinking oftheir Don Juan lists. We were thinking of creating a trulyandrogynous culture, but our partners were thinking of putting usinto meat grinders. We discovered that in a culture that worships thewhore/Madonna complex, we had merely become whores.

We hadstarted out wanting to rewrite that script. We ended up having itshoved down our throats (and other parts).

We still want torewrite that script. That is where Andrea Dworkin, Anne Rice, Germaine Greer and I probably do agree. But our books, ourinterviews, our quotes are received into an environment that warpsand twists them--as you have done.

I don't agree withDworkin about legal censorship, but I do agree with her that violencetoward women is omnipresent and must be stopped. Even as I write, women are being raped and thrown from rooftops. Even as I write, violent men are being set free while their victims lie maimed ordead. A society that cannot protect its daughters from rape and abuseis in deep decadence. Feminists recognize that. Why don't you?

The question is: What to do about it? The question is: Doesthe culture subliminally (and not so subliminally) encourage rape? The question is: Can men be potent without violence?Playboy would do well to address these issues rather thanpretend that they don't exist.

We are not just a bunch of silly women who changed our minds. We are passionate liberationists who started out thinking that the pen is mightier than the sword and discovered, after nearly 20 years of public life, that things are not quite so simple. We need to change our culture so that sex can be beautiful, free, loving, equal, sensuous, an expression of connection rather than of fragmentation. What is Playboy doing to further that cause? Not bloody much.

Erica Jong, New York, New York

Playboy replies:

Shame. Erica, after having had a relationship with Playboy for almost 15 years, we would think that you would have a clearer understanding of an author's task and an editor's task. The analysis of sex and feminism is that of the authors, Steve Chapple and David Talbot: They successfully show the diversity and internal contradiction of the feminist movement.

As for twisting words, the quotes attributed to you by Chapple and Talbot contain many of the same points you make in your letter. They quote you as saying that men who write to you take what should be a "feast of life, and put it in their meat grinder." And that, for males, sex is acquisitive (hence, scoring) and that "our society is in deep denial about the violence toward women." Now you say our society is in deep decadence. Well, clearly, as George Bush would say, we stepped in deep doodoo.

We've heard the charges you make before, but from people we respect less.

Our guess is that you feel betrayed by Chapple and Talbot's statement that you "trivialize sex." Yes, you trivialized sex--but so did we. And that was a revolutionary act. We took sex out of the sacred/profane, marital/premarital, moral/immoral dichotomy and looked at it as "that which may be found everywhere, common, ordinary."

Kinsey was accused of reducing sex to statistics, Masters and Johnson of reducing sex to mechanics and Playboy of reducing sex to objects. All are false accusations. We simply broke sex down into something that could be studied, discussed, written about and photographed. We realized thatsex isn't a single thing and celebrated its diversity. We embracedfree sex, the notion of a free spirit in a free body. But we never said that sex was meaning-free, or memory-free, or wisdom-free, or responsibility-free, or consequence-free.

Here's what one of our women editors says: "In the Sixties, women who wrote about sex were trying to take it from its lofty place--only in marriage and commitment--and bring it to a more real place. Women could be just as lusty as men. Women had the same right to enjoy sex for its own sake as men did; sex didn't need a lifetime commitment and it could be good fun. So what happened?

"When sex and disease became hopelessly tied together, the same people who had said they enjoyed sex at its most trivial level now had to beat the typewriter about the danger of uncommitted sex.

"Playboy, too, has published articles about the need for caution. We do not endorse irresponsible sexual behavior. But we have still tried to celebrate sex in all its wonderful, goofy, yes, even trivial flavor. Sex is still fun. Trivial doesn't mean meaningless and caution doesn't mean boredom."

We have always addressed the consequences of sex: pregnancy and disease. But our words of caution are not words of condemnation.

Does Playboy perpetuate scoring? Well, if by scoring you mean a concatenation of crude conquests, we think not. If you mean the keeping of an account or a record of indebtedness, perhaps. What saddens us is the revisionist view of experience that you have adopted. You apply a double standard to desire itself. How simple-minded to claim that all that men are interested in is scoring, that a sequence of partners adds up to a winning figure for men and a loose definition of serial gang bang for women. Men do carry a list--called memory. For some men, the list is long; for others, it's a long list of one. In every sexual encounter, we learn a little something about ourselves, a little something about our partner. You may regret some of the partners you chose, but, remember, they were your choices.

You imply that as a result of the sexual revolution, men have acquired a swaggering confidence, while women are ravaged with self-doubt. There is empirical evidence to the contrary. When the Playboy Readers' Sex Survey compared number of lovers with sexual self-esteem, men reported that the more lovers they had, the greater their self-esteem. Women reported the same. Still, for some, the specter of being promiscuous, easy, a slut and a whore raises its head. The double standard is alive and well, but we are not guilty of it. You carry the enemy within.

Your feelings about the sexual revolution are shared by some very strange bedfellows. Joseph Sobran, noted conservative twit, believes, as you do, that "the sexual revolution is great for men.... A man no longer has to fear moral censure now for regarding women as fair game for his randy appetite, provided he's tactful enough to stop short of rape or sexual harassment. That's what the sexual revolution was all about." But he continues: "The sexual revolution tore away all the moral and social protections women used to enjoy against the wrong kind of men. As of the early Sixties, the rats and wolves were running loose."

The moral and social protections to which Sobran refers are the very chains the feminist movement attempted to unshackle: In order to protect women from the freedom to make mistakes, men will shelter them in the convent, keep them barefoot and pregnant at home. That kind of protection is exploitation. The true disease of the Madonna/whore or virgin/slut dichotomy is that it creates a class of protected women (those who don't like sex) and a class of unprotected women (those who do). It also puts men into the strait jacket of polar roles: father/playboy, hero/villain, saint/rat.

In The Playboy Philosophy, Hugh Hefner wrote: "Sex exists--with and without love--and in both forms it does far more good than harm. The attempts at its suppression, however, are almost universally harmful, both to the individuals involved and to society as a whole. This is not an endorsement of promiscuity or an argument favoring loveless sex--being a romantic fellow myself, I favor sex mixed with emotion. But we recognize that sex without love exists; that it is not, in itself, evil; and that it may sometimes serve a worthwhileend."

Playboy's contribution to the revolution was the insight that the girl next door was neither Madonna nor whore but a sexual being like ourselves.

Hefner quoted Dr. Roger Wescott: "'The case for sexual freedom is the same as the case for any other kind of freedom--political, social or religious: Liberty releases and fulfills human potentialities, while restriction cramps and distorts them. Let us therefore no longer refuse free rein to that immense potential for good which resides, too often mute andunrealized [within each of us].'"

You were thinking of love and equality; we were thinking of potential. You wanted to create an androgynous culture; we wanted to create a culture androgynous in every area but sex. Sorry, but some of the differences are the very heart of desire. There are parts of culture that still label women Madonnas and whores, but when you start doing it to yourself, you've joined the enemy. The sexual revolution was about labels; the other side has never exhausted its arsenal.

If you want an analogy closer to home, we viewed sex and sexual partners the same way you view a stack of blank paper. Some of the stories you write are best sellers; some stay in your desk drawer forever; some go straight to the wastebasket. You would not be a writer without failure; you would not be a lover without regrets. But do you give up? Do you accept someone else's label for you (hack, trivial, hopeless romantic)? Would you like a society in which women couldn't be writers, or lovers? Of course not.

You ask how Playboy can photograph women in garters when women are being thrown from rooftops. First, let us start with what we are not doing. We may trivialize sex; we don't trivialize violence.

We did not publish the picture of a woman being fed to a meat grinder. That, dear Erica, was Hustler. It has become the most successful recruiting poster in the history of the feminist movement. If Larry Flynt hadn't conceived it, Andrea Dworkin would have. She believes that all sex is rape; you come dangerously close to mouthing her rhetoric when you say you've had liberation shoved down your throat. Sexual hatred in any form is vile.

We do not promote or condone rape or stand idly by while other men perpetrate it. We are baffled at a court system that releases violent males. We are as horrified by cruelty as you are.

Readers of Playboy know that our record on sexual violence is clear. We abhor it. But beware of the wrongheaded, simple-minded, cant-spouting sisters of the feminist fringe who claim that we associate violence and sex because we show naked breasts within pages of an article on rape, that we tickle the dragon's tail.

Women are a target for certain types of men--men who are possessed by sexual hatred the way whites who lynched blacks were possessed by racial hatred. Do you address the problem by labeling all men rapists or all men racists? No. We accept the fact that violence is a male problem--but it is a problem of power, not sex.

Studies of rapists indicate that they do not rape for sex. They yearn for the display of power and control the way a stick-up artist yearns for the moment of the drawn gun. Some experts suggest that the need to assert this kind of inappropriate power comes from a childhood history of powerlessness and abuse.

What Playboy has written for years is that sex is itself a route to empowerment--confidence, self-esteem, identity. This was a thought shared by many feminist writers. Maybe we should suggest that schools start power-education programs to instill respect for self and others in young men before they reach fighting weight.

But we can't even get them to teach sex education.