At the intersection of body and spirit live desire and the yearning for wholeness.
We are here today to initiate Difficult Dialogues within our own tribe, to open ourselves to the silenced and unacknowledged voices of women who occupy marginalized positions within the subculture of feminist psychology, to open our ears in a spirit of respectful listening and compassionate understanding to these minority voices, the voices of women who frequently perceive their lived experience as being at variance with feminist theory or who live out versions of feminism that we can not relate to or find troubling. My task today is to highlight some of the challenges feminist psychology faces around issues of sexual diversity as we move into the new millenium.
We must not let our politics blind us to the experiences of girls and women whose life choices may or may not reflect our own life experiences or the feminist analysis into which we came of age. As feminist psychologists of diverse ages, we are historically and culturally located at a multiplicity of intersections and our personal histories inevitably and profoundly affect our personal and political visions. Today, I’ve been asked to speak about some of the issues around sexual diversity requiring that we engage in “difficult dialogues” with one another.
As feminist psychologists, we have focused a great deal of our energy on unearthing the hidden horrors of sexual victimization. For example, in our approach to teen sexuality, we have focused on the sexual abuse of girls, and more recently, boys, and the ways in which girls’sexuality has been exploited and controlled in ways that damage and harm them, both physically and emotionally. In so doing, we have performed a profound service to sexually victimized girls and women, and have profoundly and irrevocably removed society’s mask of denial around experiences of sexual victimization. It is probably one of feminist psychology’s greatest contributions to the culture. We have focused on issues of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and teen pregnancy. We have talked about the value of helping girls celebrate the passage into young womanhood marked by the onset of menses, and we have openly addressed the problematic ways that girls frequently find themselves silenced as they enter adolescence. But something has been missing.
We have spoken of girl’s needs to find their voices, but we have remained silent about their urgently felt need to find their clits, their passion, their sexual agency, or their sexual pleasure. Teenage sexuality terrifies us, and because it terrifies us, we are often unable to be helpful to our daughters in their times of greatest need. More girls than ever today are sexually active, curious and exploring a wide range of forms of sexual self-expression. Both girls and women are feeling increasingly free to explore areas of sexuality we have long considered taboo: body adornment, such as tatoos and piercing, exploration of same-sex attractions, sex with multiple consecutive partners, group sex, even S/M and other kinky forms of sexual expression.
Our traditional ways of understanding female sexuality lead us to be suspicious of these behaviors. When our sense of self-identity as feminist psychologists rests almost exclusively on a feminist political analysis grounded primarily in women’s experiences of sexual victimization, we tend to view many of these choices as self-destructive, an outgrowth of women’s experiences of sexual vicitimization. From a framework of “sex as dangerous,” we cannot make sense of the diverse sexual experiences of women whose forms of sexual expression may differ from our own. A teenage girl’s desire for sexual experimentation may be viewed as a reflection of low self-esteem and dependency on male approval, a woman’s desire for multiple partners becomes routinely pathologized as “promiscuity,” and girls or women who desire multiple sexual partners or actively initiate a range of sexual experiences see themselves as “sluts.” Women who enjoy consensual, adult sexual experiences involving consensual power exchange (S/M) or other non-traditional forms of sexual expression are labeled victims of patriarchy rather than being recognized as self-aware, self-empowered sexual agents and potentially healthy role models for other sexually diverse women.
As we move into the new millenium, I would assert that sexual self-empowerment forms just as powerful and valid a foundation for feminist analysis as the recognition of women’s history of sexual subjugation and sexual victimization. We cannot judge the basis of a woman’s sexual motivation from the externals of her sexual behavior. We have to understand what that behavior means to her and honor her phenomenological reality. Just as there are women whose bisexuality represents a transitional experience en route to a fully formed lesbian identity, there are other women for whom bisexuality becomes an accurate, ongoing representation of their ability to love both men and women. Even as a majority of sex workers may be driven into sexual service by gender-oppressive economic conditions and patriarchal demand, we need to recognize and honor those women for whom sex work is an empowered choice reflective of their love of sex. A woman’s choice to have multiple sexual partners may reflect a fear of emotional commitment or an empowered personal and political choice to reject models of relationship involving possessiveness and “sexual ownership” between lovers. We cannot judge the feminist relevance of a particular form of sexual self-expression from the outwardly manifest behavior. We have to understand the experience of the woman who is living that reality. Every form of sexual expression is potentially feminist in its origin and in its impact.
I see this as the primary challenge facing feminist psychology with respect to the issue of sexual diversity: the challenge of stepping back from our own individual histories and traditional feminist political analysis long enough to listen anew to the voices of a new generation of girls and women, women and girls who have had the benefit of coming of age in an era of feminist-inspired sexual self-empowerment, women whose voices challenge us to make room for their different sexual realities, women who ultimately give us more room to discover and express ourselves.