Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

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Preface to 2011 edition

I wrote Anticlimax in the late 1980s when it still seemed possible that the way people were having sex could change. Sexual pleasure and practice under male domination, I argued, were constructed around the eroticising of women’s subordination, and I hoped that this would be undermined as a result of the influence of second wave feminism and women’s increasing opportunities. However, in the book I expressed my growing concern that a developing pornography industry, and a backlash within feminism itself which supported the status quo, posed a serious challenge to the possibility of ‘eroticising equality’. But I still hoped that progress would be made.

As I write this preface in 2011, it is very clear that the opposite took place, not only an absence of positive change, but a further strengthening of the bindings that tied sex to eroticised power difference. This matters because, despite the considerable gains that women have made in the interim 25 years in rights and opportunities, an ever tighter binding of women to the role of sexual handmaiden to male power fundamentally undermines the possibility of women’s equality. It represents a most effective backlash against women’s advancement.

Why this book?

I began my brief heterosexual career in the late 1960s, at the peak of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of that time. I considered myself confident, self-actualising and rather progressive in my sexual practice, and a bit of a sexual revolutionary. As a loyal adherent to the ideology of sexual liberation I believed that I should demonstrate my credentials in sexual hijinks. Only after I became a feminist in the early 1970s did I come to see heterosexual practice in a different light, mainly as a result of reading Kate Millett’s still splendid Sexual Politics (Millett, 1970; see Jeffreys, 2011). Though, by good fortune, my own experience was not particularly oppressive, I recognised clearly that the sexual culture in which I was enmeshed was not fashioned around the interests of women. As I came to understand the way in which sexual practice and sexual pleasure functioned to maintain male power, I was keen to explain that the sexual revolution was a con. Women’s naked bodies and their sexual availability formed the currency of what supposedly progressive intellectuals called the ‘counterculture’ in the 1960s/70s (Dworkin, 1984). Women were not expected to be sexual persons in their own right, but to service the sexual demands of the men who came into their sexual dominion in the sexual revolution, and were able to accuse any reluctant women of having ‘inhibitions’, an unparalleled faux-pas for liberated women.

I wrote Anticlimax, and my first book, The Spinster and Her Enemies (1985/1997), to demonstrate that the ‘sexual revolutions’ of the 20th century liberated men by legitimising increased sexual access to women, rather than leading to women’s empowerment.

Sex as political

I explain in Anticlimax that sexual practice is culturally understood as natural and biological and not influenced by social construction or power relations. This idea, that ‘sexuality comes from the stork’, as Catharine MacKinnon puts it so well (1987, p. 130), is still current even in the face of the obvious influence of the pornography industry in the construction of sex today. It is still current despite the perfervid efforts of the sexologists, or scientists of sex, the sex therapists, marriage guidance counsellors, women’s magazine advice columnists and others to shape the appropriate sexual behaviour of girls and women. I examine the work of these sexologists and sex advice writers in this book, and analyse their very specific instructions about the way in which sex should be done to women, how women should respond, and how they should service whatever men desire.

The sex educators in the 20th century in general saw themselves as knights bearing the standards of sexual health into battle with the majority of women – estimated between 40 and 100 per cent – who were reluctant to engage in penis in vagina (PIV) sex, or who gained insufficient pleasure from this activity. The educators considered that the correct sexual response from women was enthusiastic submission and abandonment of personhood. As an influential sexologist quoted in my first book, The Spinster and Her Enemies, put it: ‘To be aroused by a man means acknowledging oneself as conquered’ (Stekel, 1926, p. 1). So women needed to permit men to do PIV sex and show appropriate enthusiasm not just because this gave men pleasure, but because it subordinated them. The work of the sexologists shows us that sex is very political indeed.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s added extra requirements. Not only were women to be enthusiastic about PIV sex, but they were to be sexually available outside marriage, and to accept more and more practices that were directed specifically towards men’s pleasure and potentially painful or degrading for themselves. The sex educators who were stars of the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s, such as Alex Comfort, mandated that heterosexual practice should take the form of PIV sex, usually in the missionary position i.e. with the woman pinned down on her back. But this could be spiced up, from the man’s point of view, with extras such as ‘buttered bun’, a practice now more generally engaged in by teams of professional footballers, where men penetrate women one after another, revelling in the fact that their penises are bathed in the semen of their mates. Most importantly, Comfort said women must accept that men like to express aggression in sex, and may wish to throw their partners on the bed on their way back from the shower, gag them, or tie their arms and legs to the four corners of the bed.

None of this comes from the stork. Comfort’s book, The Joy of Sex, is well recognised as the very apogee of sexual revolution literature. All of the sexological literature I examine in Anticlimax makes it clear that the ‘sex’ of the ‘sexual revolution’ was constructed by the scientists, advice writers and pornographers to conform to the eroticisation of male power and women’s subordination. No other model is in evidence.

Second wave feminists reacted against this model of sex, as I outline in Anticlimax. They pointed out that women’s sexual pleasure originated in the clitoris, rather than the vagina, so PIV sex was a bit beside the point. They argued that women’s sexuality should be ‘self-defined’ and about women’s pleasure rather than just directed towards pleasuring men. They imagined and practised what a very different kind of sex could be like. They questioned the way in which women were trained to experience sexual pleasure, in the form of masochism and taking satisfaction from their subordination. And they used humour to deal with this quite difficult issue. They argued that women should have the right not to do PIV, or engage in any genital sex, if they did not want to. This was truly revolutionary, and the industry of sexology and sex advice, as well as the pornography industry, has been dedicated to burying this argument, and any other threatening feminist notions.

In Australia, the sex advice writer Bettina Arndt, who in the 1970s was the editor of the Australian version of the sexual revolution magazine Forum, and derives her ideas from that time, has had two recent books published by a reputable academic publisher telling women that, whatever age they are, however unwelcome or painful this might be, they simply must service their husbands sexually. They must ‘just do it’ (Arndt, 2009; 2010). Women, it seems, particularly those who are post-menopausal, are getting uppity, and engaging in resistance, refusing to fulfil their duty. There is an extra problem in men acquiring newly erectile penises, fuelled by Viagra. They are demanding that their older wives, who are quite likely to find PIV sex painful, once again open up their vaginas for penetration. Needless to say, Arndt’s books gained a great deal of positive publicity. Such venturing by some women into the expression of their own agency, by saying no, had to be nipped in the bud.

The backlash

Since Anticlimax was first published, there has been a considerably increased cementing of sex around women’s subordination. This has occurred particularly in three areas, the development of the global sex industry, the ‘sexualisation’ of girls and women, and the ‘sexualisation’ of culture. I must say at this point that I am no fan of the word ‘sexualisation’. Since sex is potentially something delightful, the term ‘sexualisation’ could have positive connotations. That is not, however, what it means in current usage by critics, where it more closely resembles what feminists call ‘sexual objectification’ i.e. the reduction of girls and women to objects for the sexual delectation of members of the dominant sex class, men, and the extinguishment of their human status. I shall use the term ‘pornification’ of culture here, to describe the ways in which girls and women are subject to the requirements of the sex industry, both in representations in popular culture, in the clothes they wear, and in what they do in bed.

The global sex industry

In the last two decades the sex industry has expanded exponentially both in its scale and intensity, within national boundaries and internationally (Jeffreys, 2009). This expansion has been powered by the sexual liberalism spawned by the ‘sexual revolution’ that I discuss in Anticlimax. I argue, for instance, that the success of publishers in the 1960s in defeating attempts to censor publications such as Lolita and Lady Chatterley’s Lover through arguments as to the artistic merit of these works opened the floodgates for the developing pornography industry. The censorship regime that these early ‘literary’ pornographers overcame was based upon the argument that pornography was immoral. There was no recognition at the time that there was a problem with the way in which women were represented in these texts. But, of course, the theme of the decensored novels of the 1960s, like the hardcore pornography of the present, is the degradation and brutalisation of women for men’s pleasure. Once the moral argument was defeated, and in the absence of any recognition of harm to women, the pornography industry was able to expand with no holds barred. The development of new technology, such as video recorders in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s, enabled the industry to blossom. Organised crime groups were able to use their economic muscle to challenge the courts and create powerful distribution networks (Poulin, 2005). The feminist opposition to this ideological challenge to women’s equality, and to the severe harms suffered by the women who are abused in the making of the materials, was defeated in the 1980s through an alliance of ‘sex liberal’ feminists in support of the industry. I show in this book how ‘sex liberals’ argued that porn was just ‘sex’ and would serve to liberate women.

The result of this defeat of the feminist challenge was the development of a form of pseudo-feminism in the 1990s which defended men’s traditional model of sex and said that women’s enthusiastic embrace of it could be empowering (Johnson, 2002). Pseudo-feminists proclaimed that they were pro-sex, unlike the terrible prudes who had said that sex was political and questioned what sex meant for women. This development has been called, by some, ‘third wave’ feminism, but in fact a movement so dedicated to the defence of male domination should not be considered any kind of feminism at all. Its greatest success lay in eliminating the work and ideas of those pesky second wavers and women’s libbers, from women’s studies course materials, and from public consciousness. Radical feminist theorists such as Andrea Dworkin and myself were traduced and accused of all sorts of sins against ‘sex’. This backlash ‘feminism’ embraced pornography as useful to teach women about sex, and stripping as a way for women to express agency and sexual freedom. The sex industry went from strength to strength, defended against the possibility of feminist criticism by the women’s auxiliary of male domination, the pro-sex, fun feminists (Jeffreys, 2011).

The chickens have now come home to roost. In the present, as a new generation of feminist campaigners against pornography are demonstrating (Dines, 2010; Tyler, 2010 and 2011; Tankard Reist and Bray, 2011), mainstream pornography comprises the vicious punishment of women on a scale that could not have been imagined by feminists like myself who campaigned against it 30 years ago. Mainstream porn has become increasingly extreme in its harms to women, focusing on anal sex, double vaginal and anal penetration, simultaneous vaginal and anal penetration, ATM in which women have to suck a penis previously used in their anus, and bukkake, in which up to a hundred men ejaculate on a woman’s face. Gagging, choking and slapping of women are ordinary practices in these movies. The reviews and promotional material about them on the website of the US industry, Adult Video News, proclaim just how painful and degrading these practices are in triumphal fashion, and tell men that their desires for revenge against women’s increased equality will be satisfied thereby (Tyler, 2010).

The seat of women’s sexual pleasure, the clitoris, does not figure in pornography because it is not about women’s pleasure, but the massage of men’s penises in the various orifices of women who are often drugged to help them dissociate and deal with the pain. D.H.Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover as well as novelists of the 1960s sexual revolution were obsessed with anal intercourse as a way to humiliate and show mastery over women, as I show in this book. Anal sex is now a staple of the majority of the pornography publicly on sale. The womanhating that the practice symbolises is a leitmotif of the sexual culture of the 21st century.

In Anticlimax I show how the famous sexologists of the ‘sexual revolution’ used prostituted women as teachers about the ways in which men should be sexually satisfied. Sexology and the sex of prostitution were intertwined in the sexological understanding of what sex was and should be. Today, sex advice writers and sex therapists use pornography to train couples who are concerned about their sex lives (Tyler, 2008). Pornography has become the very model for healthy sex. There is no space for rethinking the sexuality of eroticised women’s subordination and creating an alternative vision. The economic and cultural clout of pornography has taken over any space that might have existed to imagine sex differently, that is, outside a model of men plugging women’s holes with zeal, or even with cruel glee at the pain and degradation their victims experience. In the two decades since this book was written, not only has the pornography industry expanded exponentially, but all aspects of the sex industry have mushroomed, and new forms have developed. Men’s attitudes to women as objects for sexual use have been nurtured by the development of the strip club industry. Strip clubs have been normalised through the appellation ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ and through the patronage of businessmen and corporations. They are franchised across the world, usually through organised crime links (Jeffreys, 2009). Male users of strip clubs are educated in the commercial sexual use of women, and enabled to make the transition to becoming male buyers in prostitution.

Neo-liberal economic ideas and policies have spread the notion that prostitution should be legalised or decriminalised and allowed to find its natural place in the market (Sullivan, 2007; Jeffreys, 2009). Neo-liberalism requires governments to believe that markets must be opened up to unregulated capitalist endeavour, and not subjected to the restraints of ethical considerations. Governments such as those of most Australian states, The Netherlands and Germany have created profitable legal prostitution industries in their states, and much larger illegal industries have flourished in the atmosphere of tolerance for this form of violence against women that legalisation creates. Tolerance of prostitution has enabled prostitution industries to grow considerably even in states where the industry is not officially legal, and the result has been a massive growth in the trafficking of girls and women into the sex industry.

Trafficking is one aspect of what I call the ‘outsourcing of women’s subordination’, a process in which poor and vulnerable women and girls from countries impoverished by colonialism and the threats to subsistence created by global capitalism are transported or provided for the use of rich, mainly white, men. These men buy the right to subordinate women which they fear is being endangered in their own (westernised) countries where women have more opportunities. They use these impoverished women not just in brothels in their own cities, like Melbourne, where they have been trafficked in from China, Korea and Thailand, but in prostitution tourism and the mail order bride industry, and through webcam sites on which Filipino women are provided for their use in real time. Through these means, male buyers are offered a compensation for the perceived reduction in their domination of women.

The model of sex that the sex industry in all its forms teaches is the sexuality of prostitution and pornography, i.e. the use of all women’s orifices, such as the mouth, vagina and anus, for penetration, and the skin, for ejaculation, in the pursuit of male excitement whilst women dissociate emotionally from their bodies, take painkillers and numb themselves with drugs and alcohol to survive the violation. The girls and women used in the industry are required to dress and comport themselves to continually sexually stimulate the male buyers, through garish makeup and showing large parts of their bodies. Both this presentation of self and the sex that the women are required to endure for economic survival have now become the basis of ‘femininity’ and attractiveness for young women. In my book Beauty and Misogyny (2005), I call this requirement the sexual corvée.

The sexual corvée

The corvée in medieval serfdom was the unpaid labour the serf had to perform on his lord’s land in order to earn the right to farm land of his own. As a result of the impact of the global sex industry, girls and women are now required to perform a particularly arduous sexual corvée to keep the men, whose expectations have been trained by the sex industry, constantly gratified. The sexual corvée is promoted through the fashion industry which has been a major vector of the values of prostitution and pornography to the women in its thrall. Girls and women are required to wear ‘slut pumps’, as cripplingly high heels are called in the sex industry, and adopt a ‘slut’ look in their clothing, showing lots of leg, breast, stomach, buttock and toe cleavage. This unpaid work in the creation of constant male satisfaction is the price women must now pay for the ways in which they threaten men’s domain in the workplace, in politics, in public space. Men get compensation for their threatened supremacy, not just through the subordination of women in pornography and other aspects of the sex industry, but in everyday life as women perform their sexual corvée on the streets, in the workplace and in entertainment venues. Women, as feminist theorists have pointed out, must represent sex, they are the sex that is sex (Wittig, 1996; Guillaumin, 1996). Men, however, have more than full human status, they are the pashas that may take satisfaction from women’s sexual performance in the harem of everyday life.

One part of the sexual corvée is the work that women and girls must do in relationships to perform the sex of prostitution. They must suppress their desire for sexual pleasure and constantly monitor the extent to which they are exciting and satisfying their pasha. Lynn Phillips, who interviewed students of women’s studies about their sexual experience, describes how this works: ‘Participants reported repeatedly that their decisions about how to present themselves physically, how and when to make noises, and how to move their bodies were determined far less by their own bodily sensations than by their mental calculations of what men would want them to do’ (Phillips, 2000, p. 108). As part of this continuous struggle to please the man in sex, women, in the age of mass pornography, must be prepared for men to demand the use of women’s bodies on and in which to practice what they have learnt, such as anal sex and ejaculation onto a woman’s face (Paul, 2005). In the 1980s when Anticlimax was written, feminists were just beginning to document the way in which men groomed women with pornography to meet their sexual demands (Everywoman, 1988). Now research shows that many women are involved in their male partners’ use of pornography. In an Australian survey of porn users, of whom 80% were male, 46% of the respondents said that they used the materials with their partners, and 59% of respondents said that they had applied something they had seen in pornography in their own sexual lives (McKee, Albury and Lumby, 2008, pp. 34, 36). Pornography forms the basic sex education of both men and women. The possibility of realising the eroticisation of equality that I write about in Anticlimax seems much further away in 2011 than it did in 1990.

Pornification of culture

The pornification of culture has gone further than the imposition of an extreme form of sexual corvée upon women. Sex industry ideas about women and sex have spread into many aspects of culture. The music and entertainment industries now feature porn, porn stars and stripping poles in videos and venues. Porn star and Playboy T-shirts are now sold for children as well as adult women, and Playboy branded pencilcases and other equipment is marketed at schoolgirls. Girls and women are branded by pornography at earlier and earlier ages (Tankard Reist (ed), 2009). The normalisation of the sex industry means that generations of children are raised to see the warehousing of women for men’s sexual use as ordinary. In my city of Melbourne there are legalised brothels and strip clubs on public display in main city streets, and whole areas of the city are given over to men’s sexual playtime. Sex industry advertising summons male buyers with photographs of real live women who are for sale. Men visit strip clubs and brothels on work outings, for product launches, to entertain other businessmen, for birthdays and buck’s nights. This use of women as sexual playthings can be discussed in polite conversation, and women who object are called wowsers (an Australian expression for killjoys). Ariel Levy calls the pornified culture ‘raunch culture’, and has written persuasively of the way in which this now forms the context in which women come to maturity and understand their bodies and themselves (Levy, 2005).

Transgenderism

In another respect, too, Anticlimax examines a troubling development of the 1980s, transgenderism, called transsexualism at the time, without realising how this would burgeon as a harmful cultural practice and human rights violation in the next two decades. In Anticlimax I analyse transgenderism in the context of my critique of how gay liberation had, by 1990, squandered its radicalism to the extent that male gay theorists were prepared to mount defences of such harmful practices of male domination as transsexualism and sadomasochism. I could not have imagined that in 2011 the transgendering of children at younger and younger ages would have become normalised by the medical profession and the justice system. Presently, children as young as 10 in Australia, with the connivance of the Family Court, are being put on pubertydelaying drugs as a result of being diagnosed with ‘gender identity disorder’, with the expectation that they will be moved onto cross sex hormones at 16 and receive surgery to amputate their sexual characteristics at 18 (Owens, 2011). The UK government agreed in April 2011 to enable an experiment administering pubertydelaying drugs to children from 12 years old (Reporter, 2011). I did not envisage, when I wrote Anticlimax, that the chemical castration of children who are identified as transgressing the rules of gender, such as playing with the wrong toys, would become an accepted practice in a new century. Gender is a social construction, composed of the accepted forms of behaviour of rulers and subordinates i.e. masculinity is for members of the male sex class, and femininity for the female sex class. I thought the enforcement of these rules would be loosened as a result of a feminist revolution. But in fact a new hypermasculine ideal of muscular footballers with tattoos and hyperfeminine girls representing an extreme and pornified femininity became the role models of an increasingly gendered culture.

The burgeoning practice of transgendering adults and, now, children is an aspect of the regendering of western culture that has taken place in response to the onslaught of feminism. Back in the early 1970s, when I was involved with my first feminist group, Women and Education, in Manchester, UK, I was part of a campaign to abolish sexist reading material for children in schools. We were utterly committed to eliminating sex role stereotyping, as we called it in those days, or ‘gender’ as it is known today. I don’t have a ‘sex role’ or ‘gender’ as I, like most feminists from those days, have been a conscientious objector, not aspiring to the behaviour of domination or subordination. We expected that sex stereotyping would be lessened, not increased to the point where ‘gender’ was to be carved onto the bodies of schoolchildren with hormones, and, as soon as they reached 18, surgery. ‘Gender’ is seen now as so unquestionable that everyone must have one. If someone has problems fitting into the rules for ruling class gender, or masculinity, then they must be cut up to fit into subordinate class gender, or femininity. This is sexual politics at its most gruesome and torturous. It is the very opposite of the project of eliminating ‘sex roles’ or ‘gender’ that is the foundation of the feminism I grew up with.

As the sex industry and the industry of transgender treatment have grown in the last two decades, influential lobby groups have been developed via the Internet composed of the victims of the harmful cultural practices of male domination, prostituted people and those who have been transgendered. These sex-work activists and transgenders have much invested in defending these practices because they have already been considerably harmed, and have spent much of their lives in thrall to them. They demand the allegiance of feminists, saying that we should defend prostitution as ‘sex work’ and campaign for the rights of transgenders. They have influence because, unlike feminists, they support the interests of male domination, i.e. the rightness of men’s commercial sexual violence, and the essentialism of ‘gender’. They are fierce campaigners against those feminists who are critical of these practices, such as myself, and seek to prevent critics from speaking at public venues and having their ideas discussed, whilst mounting savage attacks upon us online. We are called ‘whorephobic’ and ‘transphobic’, i.e. suffering from an irrational fear, when in fact we have developed cogent political critiques. These issues divide those interested in feminism, and many become confused by claims that the defences of prostitution and of the surgical and pharmaceutical construction of ‘gender’ are revolutionary and progressive. Prosex work and pro-transgender ‘feminism’ are in fact elements of the backlash against feminism.

Conclusion

Instead of progress towards a sexuality constructed around equality, the pornography and prostitution industries have expanded to such an extent that they can now be understood to be constructing not just how sex is done to women, but how women should dress, move and understand themselves. The girls who are prostituted in these industries are coming to be seen as role models for a new generation of young women. I could not have imagined, more than 20 years ago, what has come to pass. The ‘eroticising of women’s subordination’ that I analyse in Anticlimax as forming the framework for the sexological and pornographic construction of sexuality in the 20th century has come, in the next century, to form the bastion of the maintenance of male domination against all the considerable advances that women have made in the intervening period. Women now play a much more considerable, though by no means equal, role in public life, but they must do so in ‘slut pumps’, whilst revealing large areas of their bodies to placate the male gaze. Women at work and play must struggle to survive within a much more aggressive and publicly expressed male dominant sexuality, exercised through men’s patronage of ‘gentlemen’s clubs’, and Internet pornography, and through the pornified fashion, music and entertainment industries. Rather than the slave sexuality of the sex industry becoming unimaginable as women have moved forward, the porn model and the poledancer have become normalised as ideal types that women can aspire to in sex, relationships, exercise and appearance. The socially constructed differences between the sexes that second wave feminists rejected are now imposed on children at young ages by gender identity clinics and courts.

But this is not a time to despair. A new wave of feminism is arising now, a true third wave that rejects pro-sex ‘feminism’ and is critical of ‘gender’ and, therefore, of the transgendering of children and adults. This wave has much to fight against, particularly the way in which sex as the eroticised subordination of women is creating the culture in which they live and seek to thrive. The problem that Anticlimax addresses presents an even clearer obstacle to women’s liberation today than it did in 1990, and I hope that this new edition will give extra strength and determination to those who are now entering the struggle.

Sheila Jeffreys,

June 2011

References

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INTRODUCTION

Historians of sexuality see the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s as a very positive development for women. They accept the sexological view that the ‘sexual liberation’ offered by that supposed revolution was a necessary component in the liberation of women. This ‘sexual liberation’ was the freedom for women to take pleasure from their own eroticised subordination. Sexologic, this book is designed to show, is the idea that sex is and should be a way of expressing and maintaining male dominance and female submission. The sexologists of the twentieth century have been the high priests who have organised the worship of male power.

Anticlimax takes a very different approach to the sexual revolution. In my first book, The Spinster and Her Enemies, I showed how the sexologists before the Second World War believed that they would ensure women’s subordination by eliciting a sexual response to men.¹ Compulsory conscription into heterosexuality and the performance of the orgasm with a man were seen to ensure woman’s submission to her husband and the death of feminism, lesbianism, manhating and spinsterhood. A Freudian psychoanalyst of the 1920s made this clear when he wrote: ‘To be roused by a man means acknowledging oneself as conquered.’² Throughout the history of sexology the focus of concern has been the resisting woman. The incitement of women to respond sexually to men continued after the Second World War. This becomes clear in a consideration of the politics of sex in the 1940s and 50s, when the future of male-dominant marriage was seen to hang on curing women’s frigidity. At this time sexologists showed no self-consciousness about asserting the connection between woman’s sexual response and her subordination.

In the 1960s women were enjoined to respond in more varied positions and situations and single women were conscripted into active heterosexual sex. The language of liberation was so loud in connection with the new sexual prescriptions for women that commentators have assumed some obvious relationship between the ‘sexual revolution’ and progress in women’s condition. There is no good reason to suppose that the sexologists changed step and started believing, contrary to all their previous ideas, that women’s sexual response to men would actually liberate women. As we shall see, the rules of sexologic remained unaltered. Behind the baloney of liberation, the naked power politics of male supremacy were being acted out. The high priests of sexologic, helped by the pornographers, progressive novelists and sex radicals, continued to orchestrate woman’s joyful embrace of her oppression through the creation of her sexual response. Sexologists have for a hundred years dedicated their lives to eliciting orgasms from women in order to prevent our liberation. The 1960s was a period when greater opportunities were open to women and the ‘sexual revolution’, rather than being liberating, helped to defuse the potential threat to male power.

Anticlimax is a study of the works of the sexologists and therapists, the pornographers, novelists and sex radicals who took part in the construction of heterosexual desire in the period since the Second World War. Their views of sex and women will be carefully examined so that the political function of sex in maintaining the oppression of women can be clearly understood. Heterosexual desire is defined here as sexual desire that eroticises power difference. It originates in the power relationships between the sexes and normally takes the form of eroticising the subordination of women. In heterosexual desire our subordination becomes sexy for us and for men. Heterosexual desire can exist also in same sex relationships, because women and men do not escape the heterosexual construction of their desire simply by loving their own sex. We all grow up in the political system of heterosexuality. A large section of Anticlimax is devoted to showing the extent to which the eroticising