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Sexuality plays a key role in analyses of women’s oppression. Indeed, some theorists argue that it is the central technology through which structures of gender operate, whilst some suggest that it is important, but subordinate to other factors such as divisions of labour and class. As we saw in the previous chapter, first wave feminists attacked the ‘double standard’ of morality that stigmatized prostitutes but not their male clients, indicating that feminists have seen sexuality as central to women’s subordination for generations. Specifically, in challenging the naturalist or essentialist construction of gender, feminists also questioned the biological rationalizations of sexual behaviour that underpinned ideas of gender difference. Second wave feminists took this further, contesting the idea that women’s biological capacities for child- bearing determined their social position and developing critical analyses of sexual violence and exploitation and of the ideologies that justified them as inevitable consequences of men’s ‘natural’ sexual desires and needs.

Kate Millett argued that sexuality was integral to the patriarchal order. She saw sexual violence and the sexual objectification of women as central to patriarchal domination, based on the ideological construction of dominant masculinities and passive, sexually subordinate femininities. Catherine MacKinnon argued that sexuality should form the principal focus of any analysis of gender:

Sexuality … is a form of power. Gender, as socially constructed, embodies it, not the reverse. Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission. If this is true, sexuality is the linchpin of gender inequality. (MacKinnon, 1996: 185)

Other writers, such as Susan Brownmiller (1975), focused on the sexual violence committed by men towards women as a manifestation of male power, while Adrienne Rich (1980) provided a radical critique of heterosexuality as a social institution that trapped women into sexual and social subordination to men (see Ch. 4.5). The idea of ‘men possessing women’ is a key theme in many feminist analyses of sexuality and forms the basis of Andrea Dworkin’s account of pornography (1981), which similarly focused on men’s exploitation of women’s sexuality, citing the widespread commercial businesses of pornography (in the days before the current expansion through the internet and video/DVD technologies) as evidence that the violent and exploitative treatment of women in pornography served to confirm and sustain the ‘normality’ of women’s subordination.

In widening the scope of critiques of essentialist legitimizations of women’s subordination to include sexuality, feminists effectively left no aspect of gendered relations to the realm of the ‘natural’ or inevitable. The radicalism of identifying sexuality as a technology of gender is that it puts the most intimate and apparently natural aspects of male/female relations under the sociological microscope, linking sexual practices and experiences to structural issues such as the existence of a patriarchal social system and to cultural issues such as ideological constructions of masculinities and femininities.

Moreover, as with gender, refusing to accept the naturalness of sexuality immediately raises the possibility that it can be subject to cultural, historical change, both through long- term social processes such as the increasing economic independence of women and lessening dependence on marriage and, crucially, through personal and political intervention. Indeed, the politicization of such an apparently intimate and natural part of our lives is all too evident in contemporary society, with public discussion of sexual expectations, prostitution and pornography as manifestations of male exploitation. We also live in a period in which rape within marriage is no longer legal in many societies, in which police services are in theory (if not always in practice) geared towards dealing sensitively with sexual violence, and in which expectations of younger generations have certainly moved on from the notion of a passive and subordinate female sexuality. These are achievements directly attributable to feminism. There are, however, counter- tendencies within the complexities of the contemporary globalized world, such as the expansion of commercial sex tourism (see Introduction to Part II) and the proliferation of diverse forms of pornography facilitated by new technologies, as well as the increasing sexualization of popular culture (see Ch. 8.2)

Perhaps the most important and durable consequence of these challenges to essentialism has been the widespread acceptance that sexual violence and exploitation are in part derived from wider, social inequalities of power between men and women. The achievement of the second wave has been that feminist arguments draw out the continuities between ‘normal’ heterosexuality and violence, focusing on the construction of masculine sexuality as aggressive and sexual violence as a form of patriarchal control. Two important sociological questions remain: first, whether ‘normal’ heterosexuality is fundamentally and irrevocably based on women’s subordination; and, second, how the social structuring of gender and sexuality relates to, depends on or intersects with other social divisions, specifically class and race (see section 2.11 below and Parts II and III).