#PatriarchalSex

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Robert Jensen: Patriarchal Sex

I’ve seen an excerpt from Jensen’s Patriarchal Sex (one quoted by bell hooks in “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”) circulated around so I thought I’d add in a few more abstracts as it is a good piece.

Jensen, R. (1997). Patriarchal sex. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy. Vol. 17, Iss. 1/2: 91-115.

(Note: Jensen is a gay man, but has very clear and critical takes on pornography, patriarchy, and power in general and I find him to be a worthwhile read.)

I begin with a working definition of patriarchal sex: Sex is fucking. In patriarchy, there is an imperative to fuck-in rape and in "normal" sex, with strangers and girlfriends and wives and estranged wives and children. What matters in patriarchal sex is the male need to fuck. When that need presents itself, sex occurs.

From that, a working definition of what it means to be a man in this culture: A man is a male human who fucks.

I am not a prude, but I have come to realize that I am very much afraid of sex. I am afraid of sex as sex is defined by the do i culture, practiced all around me, and projected onto magazine pages, billboards, and movie screens. I am afraid of sex because I am afraid of domination, cruelty, violence, and death. I am afraid of sex because sex has hurt me and hurt lots of people I know, and because I have hurt others with sex in the past. I know that there are people out there who have been hurt by sex in ways that are beyond my words, who have experienced a depth of pain that I will never fully understand. And I know there are people who are dead because of sex.

Yes, I am afraid of sex. How could I not be?

A common response from people when I say things like that is, "You're nuts." Sometimes, when I'm feeling shaky, a voice in the back of my head asks, "Am I nuts?"

I have been doing research and writing on pornography and sexuality for about eight years (Jensen 1996, 1995b, 1994a, 1994b). In the past few years, I have been trying to figure out how to talk to people who think I am crazy and how to deal with my own fear that they may be right. I have been trying to understand why the attack on the feminist critique of patriarchal sex has been so strong and so successful, and how it connects to the backlash against feminist work on sexual violence.

Here's one tentative explanation: It is too scary to be afraid of sex. To go too far down the road with the radical critique of sexuality means, inevitably, acknowledging a fear of patriarchal sex. And if all the sex around us is patriarchal, then we are going to live daily with that fear. And if patriarchal sex seems to be so overwhelmingly dominant that it sometimes is difficult to believe that any other sex is possible, then maybe we are always going to be afraid. Maybe it's easier to not be afraid, or at least to repress the fear. Maybe that's the only way to survive.

But maybe not. Maybe being afraid of sex is the first step toward something new. Maybe things that seem impossible now will be possible someday. Or maybe we will find that we won't need what we thought we needed. Maybe being afraid is the first step out of the fear and into something else that we cannot yet name.

Here is the curriculum for sex education for a normal American boy: Fuck women.

Here is the sexual grammar lesson I received: "Man fucks women; subject verb object" (MacKinnon 1989, p. 124).

The specifics varied depending on the instructor.

Some people said, "Fuck as many women as often as you can for as long as you can get away with it." Others said, "Fuck a lot of women until you get tired of it, and then find one to marry and just fuck her." And some said, "Don't fuck any women until you find one to marry, and then fuck her for the rest of your life and never fuck anyone else."

Some said, "Women are special; put them on a pedestal before and after you fuck them." Others said, "Women are shit; do what you have to do to fuck them, and then get away from them."

Most said, "Only fuck women." A few said, "Fuck other men if you want to."

The basic concepts were clear: Sex is fucking. Fucking is penetration. The things you do before you penetrate are just warm-up exercises. If you don't penetrate, you haven't fucked, and if you haven't fucked, you haven't had sex. Frye (1992, p. 113) defines this kind of heterosexual, and heterosexist, intercourse as, "male-dominant-female-subordinate-copulation-whose-completion-- and-purpose-is-the-male's-ejaculation." That is sex in patriarchy.

Men in contemporary American culture (I make no claim to cross-cultural or historical critique; I am writing about the world in which I live) are trained through a variety of cultural institutions to view sex as the acquisition of pleasure by the taking of women. Sex is a sphere in which men (by this I don't mean that every man believes this, but that many men believe this is true for all men) believe themselves to be naturally dominant and women naturally passive. Women are objectified and women's sexuality is commodified. Sex is sexy because men are dominant and women are subordinate; power is eroticized. In certain limited situations, those roles can be reversed (men can play at being sexually subordinate and women dominant), so long as power remains sexualized and power relations outside the bedroom are unchanged.

Summed up by Andrea Dworkin (1987, p. 63):

“The normal fuck by a normal man is taken to be an act of invasion and ownership undertaken in a mode of predation; colonializing, forceful (manly) or nearly violent; the sexual act that by its nature makes her his.”

One of the key sites in which these sexual values are reflected, reinforced, and normalized is pornography. Domination and subordination are sexualized, sometimes in explicit representations of rape and violence against women, but always in the objectification and commodification of women and their sexuality Dworkin 1981, 1988; MacKinnon 1987, 1993). This results in several kinds of harms to women and children: (1) the harm caused in the production of pornography; (2) the harm in having pornography forced on them; (3) the harm in being sexually assaulted by men who use pornography; and (4) the harm in living in a culture in which pornography reinforces and sexualizes women's subordinate status.

In a world in which men hold most of the social, economic, and political power, the result of the patriarchal sexual system is widespread violence, sexualized violence, and violence-by-sex against women and children. This includes physical assault, emotional abuse, and rape by family members and acquaintances as well as strangers. Along with the experience of violence, women and children live with the knowledge that they are always targets.

So, the conventional view is that rape can't be about sex and has to be about violence, because if it's about sex then each one of us has to ask how deeply into our bodies the norms of patriarchal sex have settled. Men have to ask about how sexy dominance is to them, and women have to ask how sexy submission is to them. And if we think too long about that, we face the question of why we're still having patriarchal sex. And if we face that question, we may have to consider the possibility of stopping. And if we aren't having sex, then we have to face the dominant culture's assumption that we aren't really alive because we aren't having sex.

Women aren't victims, some say, and radical feminism has tried to rum women into victims by focusing on the harms of patriarchal sex.8 This is a deceptively appealing rhetorical move. When members of one class (women) identify a way that members of another class (men) routinely hurt them, those who are hurt are told they are responsible for the injury because they identified it. If women would stop talking about these injuries, the logic seems to be, then the injuries would stop. This strategy seems popular with some women and lots of men lately. I understand why men take this stance; it relieves them of any obligation to evaluate their own behavior and be responsible. And I understand why women don't want to see themselves as always at risk of men's violence and sexual aggression. But saying you aren't at risk because you don't want to be at risk doesn't take the risk away.

What does the word "victim" mean? Dworkin (1990, pp. 38-39) writes:

“It's a true word. If you were raped, you were victimized. You damned well were. You were a victim. It doesn't mean that you are a victim in the metaphysical sense, in your state of being, as an intrinsic part of your essence and existence. It means somebody hurt you. They injured you. ... And if it happens to you systematically because you are born a woman, it means that you live in a political system that uses pain and humiliation to control and to hurt you.”

We live in a world in which some people exercise their power in a way that hurts others. It has become popular to pretend the injuries are the product of the overactive imaginations of whiners. White people routinely tell non-white people that racism is not a big problem and that if the non-whites would stop complaining, all would be fine. Rich people tell poor and working people that there is no such thing as class in the United States and that if we all would just work hard together everything would be fine. Straight people tell lesbian and gay people that if they would just stop making such a public nuisance of themselves everyone would leave them alone and things would be fine. But things aren't fine. We live in racism. Poor and working people are being crushed by a cruel economic system. Heterosexism oppresses lesbians and gays. And men keep fucking women.

I no longer trust myself to chart the course for change, to refashion sex into something I can trust. So, I seek not-sex, something different than what "sex" means in the dominant culture. I want intimacy, trust, and respect from other people, and I hope that it is possible for those things to be expressed physically. But I don't want sex.13

To say that I don't want sex is not to deny my sexuality nor cut myself off from my erotic power, as Audre Lorde uses that term (see also, Heyward 1989). Lorde talks about the way in which women's erotic power is falsely cordoned off in the bedroom, made into "plasticized sensation," and confused with the pornographic (1984, p. 54). For Lorde, the erotic is a life-force, a creative energy:

“those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings (1984, p. 56).”

Lorde writes about expressing her erotic power in some ways that the culture does not define as sexual and others that the culture might call sexual; she writes of the erotic power flowing both in the act of writing a good poem and in "moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love." My expression of the erotic at this point in my life need not include such movement against the body of another. What is crucial is not channeling my erotic energy into sex, but finding other ways to feel that power. Lorde writes:

“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama (1984, p. 59).”