International Socialists

Sexuality remains one of those subjects which liberal society refuses to discuss honestly or sensibly. Alternately demonised  as an indescribable evil by the Christian right, marginalised into pseudoscientific biological determinism by liberals or reduced to a commodified absurdity in the knit-yourself-an-orgasm pages of Cosmo magazine, sexuality is one of the most widely written on - and most misunderstood - of topics. The following article is taken from a talk Emma Weston gave to the Dunedin branch of the International Socialist Organisation in May this year.

Human sexuality is determined not merely biologically, but is shaped by the overall social, economic and political organisation of society. On an individual level a person's sexuality is evolved through childhood conditioning in addition to personal preferences and emotions. In other words, sexuality rests in the mind as well as in the body.

Maurice Godelier wrote once that, "It is not sexuality which haunts society, but society which haunts sexuality." Socially conditioned views on morality, gender roles and "normal" sexuality, whether we conform to these standards or rebel against them, are part of the baggage we bring to sex. In her book Straight sex: the politics of pleasure, Lynne Segal writes, "If we are to assess the prospects for greater sexual agency, we will need to consider changes in the broader context, and forces out of which our gender and sexual identities are made and remade, always precariously, through conflict, envy and struggle."

Analysing the greater social context and the historical development of social attitudes to sex, we realise the context from which our daily lives are affected by wider issues and the kind of society that needs to be created in order to allow more genuinely liberated sexualities to flourish.

The "Sixties" can be viewed as a step in the direction of liberation from the relative moral and religious conservatism that dominated the era preceding it. The development of the contraceptive pill provided women with the freedom to have sex without the worry of unwanted pregnancy, thus opening the way for sex to become a medium of pure pleasure. That is, rather than being simply a function of the marriage relationship for the purpose of reproduction, people could begin to have sex for the fun of it. Women were now free to have sex without the complications of unwanted babies or equally unwanted marriages. But liberated sex was not the automatic result of this. For, although contraception and access to abortion played an essential role and created the material conditions which made liberation begin to be possible, society still had far to go in its views of sexuality and gender roles.

Segal wrote of her generation at this time that, "We moved on from seeing sex as liberation to seeking liberated sex." The construction of sex, then and now, is characterised by three standardising factors: heterosexual relations between a woman and a man; gender roles in which the woman is passive and the man active; and an emphasis on intercourse - "missionary position" penetration of the penis into the vagina.

Practices outside the conventional were condemned as deviant by the forces of both Christian Churches and the right, in the sixties as now. Churches viewed non-reproductive sex as a sin, and worse still with sex for pleasure. Only sex which women enjoyed could be more sinful.

Emphasis is placed on the role of women as submissive to male dominance. Sex is an act which should happen within a marriage relationship, viewed as a gift for reproduction. In the 1960s just as today, Christian fundamentalists advocated the use of sex merely as a tool for the creation of babies.

The list of forbidden and/or sinful practices condemned or discouraged by various Churches is long: sex outside marriage, homosexuality, oral sex, for Roman Catholicism the use of contraception, the list goes on. The final aim of these sorts of morality was a boring form of procreational (reproductive) sex, typically in the missionary position which hopefully results in babies, and lots of them.

For women before the invention of the Pill sex was therefore inextricably linked to pregnancy, birth, feeding children, running around after children, children and children

The Pill created new sexual opportunities for women free from the burden of babies, and the three notions of sex I mentioned earlier found themselves challenged. Feminists challenged in particular women's passive and submissive role in the sexual act. If sex could be transformed into a medium of pleasure and not purely of reproduction then sex could, and should, take on forms women enjoyed. Procreative sex had determined the necessity of a male aroused and with an erect penis, just as it dictated the necessity of male orgasm and ejaculation in order to create the possibility of pregnancy. The implications of this sort of "biological" sex were that it began and ended with the male and the male's pleasure. But if sex could be for pleasure rather than the sole purpose of making babies then this no longer had to be the case. In the context of traditional heterosexual intercourse women had not been getting their share of satisfaction. The Pill meant possibilities of sex for pleasure; and pleasure, finally, for women.

Feminists emphasise the similarity of the clitoris and penis in the orgasm, and began in the sixties to attempt to provide women with more knowledge and awareness of their own clitoris and sexualness in the hope that they might learn to pleasure themselves. One feminist commented, "Orgasm is not something done to us but something we do."

Segal writes on the notion of gender roles which feminists began to challenge and are challenging still, "The highly contested notions of 'gender' and 'sexuality' are at present conceptually independent. They are held together by cultural imperatives, and practices of heterosexism definitively linked 'the masculine' to activity and dominance, and 'the feminine' to sexual passiveness and subordination. They are nevertheless potentially and frequently actually unstable."

Alternatives presented to sexual intercourse as the mode of sex included emphasis on masturbation, sensuality formerly derided as "foreplay," cunnilingus and additional activities that offered pleasure for women, and that emancipated sex from the penetration of penis into vagina.

Another force of opposition to these new forms of sex has been the political right wing: the entrenched view of the nuclear family, with a man as breadwinner and head of the household, while women provided a free, skilled labour force of child carers, cleaners and cooks. When women moved into the paid workforce alongside men, the right encouraged men to feel as if they had been robbed of their power and masculinity. When capitalism unleashes one of its periodic crises - as happened in the late 1980s - women workers were made scapegoats.

The right fumed they should return to their "natural" roles as married mothers and housewives - submissive in their home, submissive in bed, submissive in politics. Similarly, with the advent of AIDS, the homosexual community became the target for blame, revealing the extent to which the sexual is made political. The right saw lowering moral (read sexual) standards as the cause of most of the problems of the world.

Poor economies were the result of promiscuous single mothers bludging off an indulgent state. Unemployment the result of feminists "forcing" women into the work force. AIDS a punishment visited on the gay community. The right wing's answer was a return to traditional moral standards and the heterosexual nuclear family, but their project was - and is - doomed. The invention of the Pill and changes in the structure of the capitalist economy had encouraged a change in women's consciousness which could not be reversed. Once the Pandora's Box of sexuality had found material conditions which allowed it to be opened, people found it harder and harder to fit easily into those tired old boxes: that men would be sexually "in charge" and dominant all the time, women passive, and that heterosexuals would be 100 per cent attracted to the opposite sex and never to the same sex. Eve Kosofsky refutes these standard oppositions and addresses the character of individual sexuality in the truism, "people are different from one another."

The preferences of any aspect of a person's sexuality, their sexual orientation, their turn-ons, their enjoyment level, their fetishes and any other aspect of a person's sexuality is met by this quote. The traditional constructs - traditional insofar as bourgeois values are presented as beyond question and unchanging over time, "natural" and "human nature" - become ridiculous in this light simply because people are indeed different from one another. In a world where sex is a medium of pleasure and people are different from one another, then logically there should be a diversity of sexual practice.

Unfortunately, in the society we live in today, people are still not liberated in their sexuality. Liberation of any variety, let alone sexual, is impossible in a world characterised by the stigmatisation and oppression of different races, gender, sexual orientations and sexuality. In capitalist society sexuality is reduced, like all other aspects of human interaction, to its cash value, it is commodified. Sex is reduced to a thing, a product. In a society where money and profit take precedence over people, liberated sex can never take place.

It is reduced like all aspects of human relationships to the need of an uncaring and impersonal system. Sex is a political issue. Even talking about liberating sex challenges some of the key ideas central to capitalist society. Right wing politicians become the champions of certain sexualities, the scourges of others.

The sexuality of individuals in society are far more blurred and diverse than the ideologies which govern society dare concede. Power relations see-saw between activity and passivity, and similarly sexual attraction cannot be seen as a black and white process. But according to the social construction of this world under capitalism, a single sexuality is advocated for political reasons. That sexuality is heterosexual relations in the context of marriage, with an active male and a subordinate female. Gay men remain "faggots," lesbians "dykes," passive men "wimps" and dominant women "butch." These are the necessities of capitalism. We cannot liberate ourselves without first identifying and fighting this tyranny's cause - the rotten system of capitalism.

It is only in a world free from oppression, in other words a world where the root cause of oppression - capitalism - has been removed, that more truly liberated human sexualities can begin to flourish. This would be a world where no narrow ideas about "sexuality" would be presented as the only natural and healthy form when in fact it merely suits economic agendas. Let us not just dream of this world of liberated and liberating sex. We can and we must work for creating the world where these dreams can be turned into realities.