Sexual liberation can turn oppressive for women
The conclusion of Louise Perry’s “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century,” which was published in Britain in June and will arrive here next month, is titled “Listen to Your Mother.” Arguing that young women need to protect themselves from a sexual culture that treats them as disposable, Perry urges them to draw from the accumulated wisdom of previous generations. Feminism, she writes, “needs to rediscover the mother, in every sense.”
That is, in part, what Nona Willis Aronowitz does in her new book, “Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution,” though not quite in the way that
Perry intends. Both Willis Aronowitz and Perry are interested in the gap between the rhetoric of sexual liberation and women’s real-world experiences, although their politics are very different.
Perry’s idea of motherly wisdom is conservative; her book begins with some radical feminist premises but concludes with an endorsement of conventional marriage. Willis Aronowitz’s mother, however, was pro-sex feminist writer Ellen Willis, someone unlikely to tell young women, as Perry does, that “loveless sex is not empowering.”
In crisis after the dissolution of her marriage, Willis Aronowitz, the sex and love columnist for Teen Vogue, looks to Willis’ work for guidance. Unlike Perry, she writes entirely within the frameworks of the left.
Willis Aronowitz is committed to personal autonomy and the pursuit of pleasure, and often she finds it; there’s more good sex in her memoir than you’d expect from the title. Still, she spends a lot of time reproaching herself for failing to embody her own ideals of brash, independent hedonism. She’s unhappy in her marriage because the sex is bad — a symbol for a deeper lack of connection — but is ashamed of her fears about leaving. “What kind of self-sufficient feminist was petrified of being single?” she writes.
It’s not clear where Willis Aronowitz got the idea that she was supposed to be endlessly, insouciantly sexually intrepid. That wasn’t Willis’ message.
She believed in the value of erotic pleasure, but she was always cleareyed about the coercive side of the sexual revolution. Women in the 1960s, she wrote, were oppressed both by cultural puritanism and by men’s demands “that women have sex on their terms, unmindful of the possible consequences and without reference to our own feelings and needs.”
The most interesting parts of “Bad Sex” are about the places where politics and desire conflict.
Willis Aronowitz discovered that her mother was devastated by the infidelity of her father, socialist organizer and scholar Stanley Aronowitz. Pregnant with Nona, Willis wrote in her diary of hoping that a baby would help heal her relationship.
Yet, Willis Aronowitz still sometimes hesitates to question whether her political ideas about sex are serving her.
In a 1981 essay that Willis Aronowitz quotes in
“Bad Sex,” Willis wrote that our convictions about sex “do not necessarily reflect our real desires; they are as likely to be aimed at repressing the pain of desires we long ago decided were too dangerous to acknowledge, even to ourselves.” Sexual desires, however, are not the only desires that we repress. In a moment of doubt, Willis Aronowitz worries that “I secretly wanted monogamy, that I was just like every other woman who wanted to tie her man down.” One lesson of feminism, surely, is that being like other women, rather than a shining unfettered exception, isn’t such a terrible thing.