Jane Sexes It up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire
- Book Review,
by Merri Lisa Lisa Johnson (Editor)
From Publishers Weekly
The feminist battles over pornography in the 1970s and '80s left Gen-X third-wave feminists with a complex set of questions, says Johnson. Why do women still settle for unsatisfying sex? What does a thoughtful feminist do about her politically incorrect fantasies? Is heterosexual romance incompatible with female self-determination? While some feminists might tackle these questions without mentioning any body parts, much less their own, the contributors to this racy volume make a great effort to speak honestly about their erotic experiences in intimate, jargon-free essays edited by Johnson, a former stripper with a Ph.D. in English. There are entries from women working as prostitutes and strippers, women into exhibitionism, self-mutilation, muscle-building, girl gang-banging even women working out the impulse toward heterosexual marriage. While no one claims to have definitive answers to the big questions, certain perspectives do emerge. Among them: desire is "both socially constructed and beyond social construction"; viewing sex as a performance a deliberate trying on of other roles can be empowering; anything that defies the traditional heterosexual rules of engagement be it wanting a spanking or masturbating to rape fantasies makes space for different sexualities; and, maybe most importantly, contradictions are okay even feminists don't have to make sense all the time. It's not for the straitlaced, but sex-positive feminists will find this a provocative, important anthology that speaks honestly to the question of pleasure and how to get it. (Mar. 15)Forecast: Jane should please readers of Nerve.com and forward-thinking Camille Paglia fans. Antipornography feminists may want to steer clear.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Nashville Scene, March 14-40, 2002
Feminism reinvents itself with wit and moxie.
Boston Weekly Dig, May 8, 2002
Over 15 writers gracefully address the possible paradox . . . of feminism, tackling the more subtle issues of human psychology.
Book Description
In Jane Sexes It Up, 20 young, progressive feminists reflect on the limitations they think are imposed by establishment feminism on their bodies and their behavior. In these essays, headed up by editor Merri Lisa Johnson’s “Generation X Does the Sex Wars,” the writers confess their seemingly antifeminist longings and question what role feminist ideals should play in women’s sexuality. In “Spanking and the Single Girl,” Chris Daley wonders whether it’s acceptable to play the submissive role in an S/M exchange. In “Vulvodynia — How Porn Made Me a Woman,” Katinka Hooijer reveals her affection for porn and the inner conflict her predilection inspires. Sex toy store owner Sarah Smith declares a “dildo revolution” — for women and men, gay and straight — in her essay of the same name. Whatever the angle, the authors all champion a sex-positive feminism.
Excerpted from Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire by Merri Lisa Johnson. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Wanting Him Anyhow: Third Wave Feminism & the Problem of Romance "Denouncing male oppression clashes with wanting him anyhow." Katie Roiphe, The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism I spent the last four years trying to convince a particular man to marry me. ("Think what you will! Shock, shock!") You could say we broke up in August of 2000, you could even say we broke up over the marriage issue, but the truer thing to say is that our relationship modulated from marriage track to something less well defined but infinitely more pleasant. I met this man at a time when he was turning decidedly away from marriage, during the emotionally intense period between unofficial separation and legal divorce—not, most experts would say, the best time for forging new relationships, and he would have agreed. I, on the other hand, having been divorced for several years, and having recently extracted myself from a terribly mismatched couplehood formed in the desperate wake of my own divorce, was ready for my second husband, and he was going to be it. Long story short, we fell madly in love despite all the odds and reveled in our passion for a long time and from very long distances. We rendez voused in Vegas and Buenos Aires. I hung an old poster on my bedroom wall from a play called Love Rides the Rails to commemorate our unconventional affair and dedicated myself to becoming the new New Woman—independent, unpossessive, self-sufficient, supportive. I would learn to love lightly, in May Sarton’s phrase, to be passionate without being desperate. And indeed I did develop a more mature sense of self and of relationships through the interlocking processes of wooing him and getting over my need to be wooed, but the bottom line is, I also wanted him to marry me. To prove I was good enough. I wanted to win the prize, be the bride. Ever since my disastrous first run for beauty queen in sixth grade, I had longed deeply and stoically for the trophy and the glory. He wouldn’t give me either. And in my quiet reflective moments, I didn’t want him to. But something about the machinery of the relationship, with all the weight of heterosexual history bearing down on me, usurped my best feminist intentions, pressing my desires for companionship into cookie-cutter shapes—hard edged, straight, inflexible—and I ended up channeling some chick from the fifties, complete with hope chest and china pattern. Worse, I became a Whitney Houston song: "Hold me. Marry me. Love me forever and make me feel safe." Pitching idea after idea—"Marriage doesn’t have to be that way. It can be whatever we (read: you) want"—I debated and finagled, strung long threads of philosophy, drew his attention to relevant movie plots. Me: Don’t you love me enough to make me your wife? Him: I love you too much to make you something that small. Me: You’re right, you’re right, I know you’re right. I stalked around my house like a cat making a fat tail, thinking this is crazy! Women have way more to lose than men by getting married. If anyone should be holding back, I huffed, it should be me. I knew about (and believed) feminist critiques of marriage, and truth be told, I wasn’t sure I could revise it to please us both. All that notwithstanding, I wanted to marry him anyway. Part of me still does. There is no clear moral to this story. In the time since we "broke up," I have liked myself better, liked him better, and liked us better (on the occasional phone call or email message). I don’t know how long something like this, without a name or any rules, can be sustained before it collapses into the available paths of Exes or Getting Back Together, but it feels like there’s a clue or seed of relationship revolution in the dynamics passing between us now. Outside the prison house of our capital "R" Relationship, we are free to go about the business of enjoying each other once more. Now that I’ve given up the project of convincing him to marry me, I have less to lose by admitting in public that I don’t know how to be a girlfriend or wife and maintain that space between us, that connection without clutching. I can own up to the noteworthy fact that I’ve never felt as relaxed in a room with a man as I feel right now—alone after midnight, drinking coffee, and working at my computer. Solitude gets sexier and sexier the more I relax into it—like an herbal tea bath—let myself steep.
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