LAST WEEK, a sexologist, Eric Garrison, hosted a question and answer session called the "G-Spot" for Health and Wellness week for anyone who wanted to learn anything about sex. He spoke to an eager audience of women, the great majority of who were women. Fifty years ago,a lecture with "sex" in the title would have drawn scores of men and had many women blushing excuses for not attending. But things change. Women's status as sexual beings has risen exponentially and will soon, if it hasn't already, surpassed men's. Increased openness about sexuality was a positive sign for women in the baby boomer generation and in the 1970s sexual revolution. In the year 2003, open sexuality has become the defining future of the feminism. And somehow it misses the mark. Women today have become publicly oversexed, but under the false guise of feminism.
Garrison asked as a formality before he began if there were any preliminary questions. All formality aside, one woman in the audience nearly jumped out of her chair and screamed (literally), "What is the best technique for stimulating an oddly positioned clitoris?" Having announced that, she sat and looked triumphantly at the rest of us. As modern women, we all nodded our heads in agreement as if she'd just asked our professor if the test would be essay or multiple choice. Garrison answered the question and no one giggled or blushed -- some even took notes. Sex is one more field of life in which women are constantly trying to improve. We are the generation who commit sections of Cosmopolitan to memory. On the front of sexual knowledge, Maxim does not even approach Cosmo's comprehensiveness. It seems that contemporary women do not have orgasms, they achieve them. Virgin and non-virgin is no longer a significant maturity distinction, but orgasmic and preorgasmic (what Garrison terms people who have never had an orgasm).
And it's all fine and dandy that women can express themselves sexually. Let's give three cheers for legalized birth control, as critical to women's liberation as the Nineteenth Amendment, right now. The complete dissolution of the stigmatic double standard around promiscuity will be one more leap toward gender equality. But the rhetoric of the sexualized woman has gotten out of hand.
The 1990s saw the emergence of a new bourgeois type of sexual liberation. It's a philosophy that says the real steps in the feminist movement occur when all women know how to masturbate, expect mutual satisfaction in the sack, and think that the vagina is beautiful enough to double for wall art. Popular acceptance of female sexuality was key 50 years ago in the movement to bash birth control taboos and make abortion legal. They not only admitted to having libidos but displayed them proudly as badges of honor. And the real problem is that it's all couched in the language of feminism. The new feminist fights the battle for equality in the bedroom instead of the workplace. Women do not look liberated, they look silly.
The perfect example of the too sexually-oriented feminist is in Eve Ensler's play The Vagina Monologues. The proceeds and publicity from the show do support organizations to stop violence against women. That said, the content itself is problematic. One segment explores the pseudo-etymology of a particular four-letter word for female genitalia. The actress then encourages the audience to "reclaim" the word. It is apparently consistent with the women's rights movement for a group of women gets out of chanting "cunt" in unison. The appeal of the Monologues is something surprisingly akin to bathroom humor -- ironically a genre consistently associated with males. The cheap laughs continue further into the performance as another actress explains the moans associated with different types of sexual stimulation. It was cute when Meg Ryan did it in "When Harry Met Sally," but women still find it empowering to fork over five bucks to see someone fake an orgasm on stage. And there's more. The emcee asks the audience, "If your vagina got dressed, what would it wear?" In the realm of profound philosophical questions, it hardly ranks up there with "Is there a God" or the problem of evil. But what a funny image! A vagina dressed up in, say, a feather boa. Oh, it's classic.
These segments of the Vagina Monologues exemplify a claim to be an appeal to women's power but in reality capitalizes on simply the rising market value of sex. Women have mistaken a vague radicalism for actual feminism. They have embraced a desire for change in a legitimate forum- sexual liberation -- but through ridiculous means. As the word "bitch" proliferates among many feminist sects as a term of endearment, sexual openness has gone too far. Talk about it for informative of informational purposes (and Garrison's lecture was) but not for the sake of talking about. The sexual revolution has yet to end, but it will not completed on the day that women march through the streets of D.C. waving their vibrators. The equal rights that can be achieved in the sexual realm will be through preserving the legality of abortion, reducing outdated stigmas and preventing sexual assault.
Women, you say you want a revolution? Reshaping a public opinion of female sexuality is a valid cause. Don't undermine it by turning sex into a satire. The destination is a worthy one; let's choose a more appropriate vehicle to get there.
(Kimberly Liu's column appears Mondays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kliu@cavalierdaily.com.)
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