Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (14 page)

The first thing to note is that sexual submission is the acceptable face of female perversion: pliable, obedient and all about pleasing your man. Most of the available submissive fantasies that Roiphe and others have cited as part of a ‘trend’ of submission insist on their protagonists’ initial unwillingness to be tied to enormous beds and rogered by wealthy professionals. In
Fifty Shades of Grey
, the protagonist only acquiesces to the kink because she wants to please her dominant lover. In
The Story of O
– which, although hardly part of a ‘trend’, having being written in the fifties, is still one of the only dirty books written for women that you can buy in respectable shops – ‘O’ agrees to be whipped and fucked by rich anonymous strangers to please her partner, Renee. These women may learn to love being spanked, but they certainly don’t seek it out: they are passive, rather than just submissive.

In real life, men and women enjoy being bossed around in bed for lots of reasons – sometimes it might be about being punished, sometimes it might be about working out personal baggage, sometimes it might be about taking the break from all the responsibilities you have outside the bedroom, and sometimes it might just be about wanting someone else to do the work. And sometimes, yes, it might be about wanting to experience sex without having to take responsibility for your own desires – it’s not as if we live in a culture where women who want to have sex are encouraged to have it in a shame-free way. Both
Fifty Shades of Grey
and
Twilight
, the teen series the adult erotic novel was based on, are fantasies of pursuit, of the responsibility for sexual agency being entirely in the hands of a man, who desires the point-of-view-protagonist completely.

In a culture where women who express sexual agency are punished, humiliated and threatened with real rather than ritualised violence, that sort of fantasy is entirely comprehensible. What is more significant is that submission – alongside, from time to time, sex work – is the only kind of female sexual ‘unorthodoxy’ that is currently deemed worthy of discussion, and it’s an unorthodoxy trussed up tight in the bondage tape of patriarchal expectations. An unorthodoxy that happens to involve fantasies of being dominated by men. An unorthodoxy practised exclusively, if we go by the examples that fascinate the mainstream press, by women who are young and white and straight and middle-class and, most importantly, fucking fictional. 

Fantasies about pretty young white women being controlled, hurt and dominated by men have always been the part of kink that nobody ever really had a problem with. During the crackdowns on the fetish and kink communities in the 1980s and early 1990s, submissive heterosexual women and their play partners were rarely targeted for prosecution. Today, when you think of ‘fetish’, many people think of Jean Paul Gaultier models strutting the runway in elegant leathers, and arty snaps of willowy girls doing Japanese rope bondage in low-lit loft apartments. You might not be quite so quick to picture middle-aged gay couples in matching latex, or enormous, hairy men with names like Nigel waddling around fetish clubs with joysticks up their bottoms and big grins on their faces, but kink has always been as much about them as it has been about the beautiful young girls, breakable or pretending to break others, who in real life tend to have less disposable income to spend on rubber.

Here are some non-standard sexual trends that editors at 
Newsweek
,
Glamour 
and 
Cosmopolitan 
are less keen to make headlines out of: poor women fucking. Black women fucking. Queer women fucking. Old women fucking. Fat women fucking; ugly women fucking; bossy, arrogant women fucking. Women who are dominant in bed. Women who like to penetrate men with big pink strap-ons. Women who want multiple sexual partners at once or in succession. Women who just want to go to bed early with a cup of tea, an Anna Span DVD and a spiked dildo the size of an eggplant. Here are some more: sex workers who want to be treated like workers, rather than social pariahs. Men who want to get fucked. Men who are gentle and submissive in bed. Men who don’t enjoy penetrative sex. Men for whom sex is an overwhelming emotional experience. I guarantee you that all of these things go on, but any of them might actually destabilise for a second our cultural narrative of sex, gender and power, so none of them are allowed to be ‘trends’.

In truth, there has never been anything controversial about the fantasy of female submission. These days, most of the ‘mainstream’ pornography readily available online involves some variation on the theme of outrages against young, prone, fuckable females. The rituals of whips, leather and safe-words are not part of the language of ‘normal’ porn, but otherwise the horny prospect of prone pretty girls having violent sex done to them and learning to love it is a dialect of desire everyone understands – so much so that lots of young men grow up knowing no other box to put their lust in. In Lena Dunham’s
Girls
, the protagonist’s useless hipster quasi-boyfriend spouts ‘dirty talk’ that Katie Roiphe identifies as specifically sado-masochistic – but actually, it could be lifted off the commentary on any ‘vanilla’ porn site. Check it out on RedTube.com if you don’t believe me. Actually, don’t. Actually, do.

Female sexual submission has never really been shocking. Right now, we are in the middle of a sexual counter-revolution. The backlash is on against even the limited amount of erotic freedom women have won over fifty years of hard campaigning: abortion and birth control are under attack, sexual health clinics are kitted out with bomb detectors and staffed by doctors who come to work wearing bullet-proof vests,
¹⁵
and a fully grown woman is denounced as a slut and a whore by male commentators across America for suggesting as part of a congressional hearing that yes, she may once or twice have had intercourse for pleasure rather than procreation.
¹⁶
And men who consider contraceptives morally wrong continue to be put forward as semi-serious contenders for leader of the free world.
¹⁷

The sexual heresies that truly upset the pearl-clutchers of middle America have nothing to do with whips and chains. That’s just faux-outrage, a bit of editorial baiting designed to upset feminists and titillate everyone else who likes to get cross and horny over the idea of dirty little girls tied up with tape.

No, what really gets social conservatives angry still happens not in swanky fetish clubs, but behind the closed doors of abortion clinics. It’s women who want to be able to choose to terminate a pregnancy. Women who want to control their own fertility. Women who want sexual autonomy, which is what any attack on abortion rights is fundamentally about. Women who want to live independently or raise children without the help of men. Women who want sex on its own merit, whether it comes wrapped in black bondage rope or scattered with rose petals.

Female sexual autonomy itself is what’s really unorthodox today. Agency and self-determination, the right to own our own desire – those are the kind of forbidden fantasies women across the world still pant over in private, unable to pronounce for fear of being slut-shamed. As Rousseau might put it: ‘Whether the woman shares the man’s desires or not, whether or not she is willing to satisfy them . . . the appearance of correct behaviour must be among women’s duties.’
¹⁸

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Men are supposed to be desiring beings. That men and boys are constantly, aggressively up for it is rarely questioned, and those who have a more complicated relationship with erotic desire, those who would prefer to be seduced, those who are shy and unsure, those who would rather be fucked than do the fucking, those who would rather stay at home with a cup of tea and Skyrim and maybe talk dirty to a stranger on the Internet if she fancies it – those men and boys are not invited to speak of their desires. Sex is something men are supposed to want, and enjoy, and know instinctively how to do. For women and girls, sex is meant to be more like work, and that work is identified as our primary identity just as clearly as a male police officer or bank director is a cop or a capitalist before anything else, in this world where profession makes us.

Men have sex; women are sex. Being a woman, and being a woman whose role in life is to sexually attract, please and coddle men is still phrased as the primary occupation of every female, although some of us are still on strike.

For women living in a society where men rule, sexuality has always been work, and alienated work at that. You’re expected to perform sex as a posture all the time, not to please yourself but to keep other people happy, and you’ll get on just fine as long as you don’t ever ask for power or pay. The men in our lives forget how to behave like lovers and instead behave like bosses, expecting a certain standard of performance while remaining terrified that we will one day realise our own power. The orgasm itself is work, something you have to produce in order to satisfy your partner, or the person behind the camera, if there’s a difference. Your performance will be measured, tested, held up to a certain standard: you’re not getting laid, you’re getting graded. 

To admit desire is to make a serious professional mistake: to own up to lust is to surrender ‘erotic capital’. Women’s only real power – still, always, in this nominally free world – is supposed to be the power of ‘no’, even when that ‘no’ is worth so little in practice.

The frigid core of what we like to think of as modern, liberated sexuality does not reveal itself often. But there are clues, and one of them is that despite all those raunchy music videos the white-hanky brigade are perennially up in arms about, despite the porny pop-ups and airbrushed tits on every advert for soap and cereal, the generation that grew up in this notionally oversexed world still has next to no idea how to fuck, and we’re not having it any more often than our parents did.

The phrase ‘sexual objectification’ is often used as shorthand for the welter of images of thin young white women prone and spread-eagled on every saleable surface, from newspapers to promotional panty-adverts. But what’s wrong with objectification? Isn’t that just what you do when you fancy someone? That rhetorical question, raised tirelessly by dumb choruses of big boys frightened that someone’s going to take their spank bank away, deserves a little undressing.

Sexual objectification doesn’t get oppressive until it is done consistently, and to a specific group of people, and with no regard whatsoever paid to their humanity. Then it ceases to be about desire and starts to be about control. Seeing another person as meat and fat and bone and nothing else gives you power over them, if only for an instant. Structural sexual objection of women draws that instant out into an entire matrix of hurt. It tells us that women are bodies first, idealised, subservient bodies, and men are not.

There is much discussion of what constantly having to look at those images does to girls’ self-esteem, as if the problem would be solved if we could only make the poor little things feel better about their lives under the weaponised misogyny of neoliberalism. But boys have to see those pictures, too. What does that do to them?

For boys, sexual objectification of women is enforced long before sex itself is a realistic prospect. Ritual dehumanisation of women is part of how boys learn to bond, how they prove to one another that they are men. It’s a sort of incantation against equality that starts at school and continues at work, in public space, when we walk the streets as adults. No matter how much we are told we ought to be flattered, dogwhistle sexual objectification of women and girls is chiefly performed by men for the benefit of other men. 

Women’s feelings don’t really matter. That’s the point. 

Objectification itself isn’t the problem. The problem is unequal objectification. And here, it’s useful to remind ourselves of Caitlin Moran’s litmus test for sexism, whereby if only women have to put up with a certain situation – say, seeing their gender reduced to oiled, half-naked, dead-looking stereotypes on every surface that’ll take an advert before they’ve even had their cornflakes – then it’s sexist.
¹⁹
When it comes to sexual objectification, the misogyny is in discrepancy. Objectification is oppressive when it erases every other form of desire apart from men’s desire for women’s commodified bodies. 

The solution to this seems to be more boys in tight pants. Which is one of my favourite solutions to anything.

We can keep sexy pictures and still call a halt to the routine and oppressive sexual objectification of women and girls. We can keep naughty pin-ups, just so long as we provide them for people who aren’t straight men. If the Internet has taught us one thing, it’s that all kinds of people like to get their kit off for money and attention. Objectification can be mutual. It can be fun. It can even be freeing. But right now, for most of us, and particularly for women, sexual objection and sexual freedom are painfully different things.

My age group was among the first to grow up with hardcore pornography as a substitute for the plain sex education most of us were still denied. Shagging both within and outside your own cohort gives the lie to the idea that, behind closed zippers, young people are any better informed about sex than their parents. Just because you know what goes where doesn’t mean you can get it in, or even that you do on a regular basis. 

This apparent contradiction has gone unremarked, in the main because of the centuries-old overlap between those who complain loudest about the depravity of the young and those who suspect that the selfish, wanton and almost certainly infected youth of today are having not just more sex than they ever did, but more sex than anyone has ever had, in the history of the human race, ever. The fact that a recent study showed teenagers in 2012 were actually having less sex than teens did ten years ago
²⁰
does not fit the narrative about a slow slide into erotic Armageddon, in part because nobody in their thirties can seriously contemplate the possibility that the youth of today are getting it less than they did.