Of course, Liza is right that I haven't read all the authors she cites. I can only speak about what I do know. But I agree that Alice Echols stuff on pornography was very good (but I think it dates back some time) and Ehrenreich's book The Hearts of Men is also pretty remarkable (but published in 1983).
I don't think there is any need to caricature feminism that so readily caricatures itself. I am thinking of Bea Campbell (Britain's Dangerous Places, read it and weep), Catharine Mackinnon (Only Words - I saw Liza Jardine in the papers today boasting of the way that feminism had raised the issue of rape crimes in Bosnia, one of the more grotesque pieces of war propaganda stirred up by Mackinnon), at the University of North London's Child and Women Abuse Study Group the argument of the continuum of male violence (you know the continuum, from paying compliments through rape to snuff films) with Liz Kelly and Jill Radford (see their 'Women, Violence and Male Power', with Marianne Hestor), or if you want to see a feminist argument against the pill, see Sheila Jeffries article in her collection The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism.
Of course there is a lot of very good writing and research in feminism - in one sense there is bound to be since this is the cutting edge of contemporary social theory. But good as the theorising is, the tendency is reactionary. So for example, I'd happily agree that Carole Pateman is one of the most important writers in political theory, but the truth is that her books on the social contract are well argued cases against democracy and freedom. Similarly, I thought Drucilla Cornell's book The Imaginary Domain was full of conceptual richness - but ultimately (and in spite of a powerful instinct against repression) she makes a tortuous legal argument for the regulation of sexual manners by the state.
Liza faults Roiphe for ignorance of debates that were taking place before she was even born. But the problem is rather as you state it, the alliance between feminism and liberation existed in an age when the powers-that-be were traditional moralists. Today's moralists are drawing upon feminism's own arguments. All of the liberationary trends are in works written in the 60s and 70s. That's what makes Roiphe's contribution original. She is analysing the repressive ideology of the present, not the one that was in place twenty five years ago.
In message <3.0.3.32.19990612130542.00724a38 at postoffice.worldnet.att.net
>, kelley <d-m-c at worldnet.att.net> writes
>as for katie rophie, oh dear jim i hope you're ready for an exchange with a
>sex positive feminist about just how utterly wrong i think you are.
I'm still waiting to hear the case against. Two arguments stand out from each of the books.
The first is that feminists broke down the definition of rape from forced sex, to sex regretted, because they saw all heterosex as violation, with rape on a continuum with heterosex. (The Morning After)
The second is summed up in an exchange with some students during a sex education lesson about AIDS. The students (young men and women 15-16, as far as I remember) were being taught the importance of quizzing your sexual partner about his or her past partners, about abstinence and so on. All were taking the message about the dangers of sexuality to heart. Roiphe asked them whether a cure for AIDS would release them from this arduous ritualisation of the dating game. As the records it they were perplexed, unfamiliar to the idea that sex could be anything but dangerous, and, ultimately, they said, all of this would be necessary, even if there were no AIDS. Her point, as I read it, was that the supposed dangers of sexual experimentation pre-existed AIDS, which served, in this lesson, as the justification for sexual conservatism.
>
>oh and tell me more about why you came to be familiar with les chantes de
>maldoror, comte de lautreaument.... thanks
>kelley
My father (a fan of surrealism) forced it upon me at an impressionable age (around 11, I think) along with De Chirico's Hebdomeros, the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, Eraserhead, Arcade, Metal Hurlant and other underground comics. It was a blissful childhood. -- Jim heartfield