>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 02/10 8:02 PM >>>
Hi Charles:
You might check out the original Free Love movement in the United States. In the 19th century, when women like Victoria Woodhull spoke of Free Love initially, they didn't simply mean men and women having sex with each other without the sanction of the State & the Church. _________
Charles: When you say "they didn't simply mean , etc.", do you mean they did mean this and the rest of what you say, or do you mean they didn't mean "women and men having sex with each other ..." at all. ?
Yoshie: They also meant women saying 'no' without encountering pressures from lovers to say 'yes.' They were most often opposed to abortion as well. So, even before the advent of 2nd-wave feminism, the gay liberation front, radicalesbians, the queer nation, etc., 'free love' meant liberating women from not only the sorts of oppressions Engels wrote of but also from the ways in which different-sex love + sexuality were organized, _under the circumstances not of their own making_ (hence their emphasis on saying no and opposition to abortion). _________
Charles: Between this phase and the 60's there was a wave in John Reed's period in Greenwich Village as one focal point. This is portrayed in the movie Reds. In fact , the Movie Reds portrays the sexual feminism of Elizabeth Bryan (?) and Reed on the same level almost of the Communist Party /Russian Revolution story. Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman are also portrayed as leading feminist thinkers in the Village. This phase is more radical and Marxist than the Woodhull group. Of course, elsewhere Inessa Armand was critiquing Lenin's position on free love and living with him and Krupskaya ( I don't know whether it has been definitely established that it was a menage-a-trois).
Yoshie: Both the first Free Love movement and the 60s sex lib were much more complicated than your posts allow. ________
Charles: Yea, I didn't mean to say that those posts were comprehensive discussions. I was speaking more specifically of the 60's sex lib movement, and of the dimensions that don't seem to be discussed anymore. It's like they have been silenced or tabooed. People don't even talk about it. It is an amazing example of sexual repression and thorough counterrevolt.
Yoshie: (See _Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America_ for more info on this. If you don't have enough time, read at least "Part III. Toward a New Sexual Order, 1880-1930.") _________
Charles: Yes, I would like to try to get this reference. A lot of my data on the period is from direct "interviews", discussions, etc. with people who were actually doing it. I don't want to exactly say I wasn't doing it. But what I mean is I had lots of friends, .. you know how the grape vine works, the movement has its own spontaneous social science especially in the universities where it was really big. It was part of the whole hippie ethic: Peace and Love. I remember I had a button "Make love, not war". You know the whole flower children scene. The Beatles. Yoko and John in bed in front of television cameras. Aretha Franklin singing "Respect" and "Doctor Feelgood" when she came out of the church. Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing". That whole trip.
Yoshie: When our contemporary critics use the term heterosexism, the word is not meant to stigmatize those who are heterosexually inclined having sex with members of the so-called opposite sex. On the contrary, without social pressures to adopt the vaguely defined but nonetheless implicitly present and sometimes violently enforced heterosexual norms (which refer to not only sexual acts + fantasies but also how you talk, how you walk, etc., since gender norms have been tightly wound up with norms of sexuality), sex life of all--whatever preference, disposition, etc. one might have--would most likely improve.
Just as the abolition of racism would liberate many from 'whiteness,' the abolition of pressures to become heterosexual would liberate not only 'same-sex' love & sex but also 'different-sex' love & sex from the material/ideological repressions that must be reproduced to create and maintain separate sexual identities. _________
Charles: Yes, I think these dimensions of sexual liberation are thoroughly discussed by contemporary commentators. However, I think what they leave out is the direct liberation of heterosexuals. I don't hear anybody talking about that, except me. Of course, a lot of people are just doing something about it and not talking about it. The objective movement is going on whether it has theoreticians or not. It's a real rank and file controlled movement.
Yoshie: There is no reason why one's chromosome, choice of dress, demeanor, sexual object choice (in what you actually do, what you dream about but don't get to do, what you fear but also find fascinating, etc.), 'lifestyle' (the word that many pejoratively use but Foucault thought of as potentially liberating and at least promising), etc. should neatly line up along the developmental lines plotted by the very limited range of normal scripts of heterosexual romance.
Charles: Yea, romanticism is one of the banes of sexuality going way back to what , St. Valentine ? Or at least how that myth has been appropriated by the dominant ideas. You know, Romeo and Juliet commit suicide, yuk ! The lover on the Grecian Urn NEVER has sex, is always reaching for it, and Keats uses that as the ideal of romantic love. Lack of fulfillment is the defining characteristic of love for one of the main romantic poets. On the neat line up, I agree there is a lot of sloppy, good sex.
Yoshie: get laid & stay laid-back,
Charles: Be my Valentine. Just kidding !
:>)
Charles