- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Identity Crisis
- Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?
- Nature’s Revenge
- Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution
- The Last Unmarried Person in America
- Peace in Our Time? The Greening of Betty Friedan
- Marriage on the Rocks
- Putting Women Back in the Abortion Debate
- Looking for Mr. Good Dad
- From Forced Pregnancy to Forced Surgery
- Sisters Under the Skin? Confronting Race and Sex
- Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism
- Feminism Without Freedom
- Rebel Girl: What De Beauvoir Left Us
- Escape from New York
- The People’s Picasso
- Sins of Confession
- Ministries of Fear
- Exile on Main Street: What the Pollard Case Means to Jews
- The End of Fatherhood: Family Plots
- Andy Warhol, ?-1987
- In Defense of Offense: Salman Rushdie’s Religious Problem
- Beyond Pluralism
- Now, Voyager
- The Drug War: From Vision to Vice
- The Drug War: Hell No, I Won’t Go
- Coming Down Again
- Epilogue: The Neo-Guilt Trip
- Permissions
- Index
- [UNTITLED]
Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?
Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?
- Chapter:
- (p.3) Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?
- Source:
- No More Nice Girls
- Author(s):
Ellen Willis
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
This chapter examines whether the women’s movement is pro-sex. To those who believe that an understanding of sexuality is crucial to a feminist analysis, what is especially disconcerting is that feminists are as confused, divided, and dogmatic about sex as everyone else. If feminist theory is to be truly based in the reality of women’s lives, feminists must examine their professed beliefs and feelings with as much skepticism as they apply to male pronouncements. Otherwise they risk simply replacing male prejudices and rationalizations with their own. In one form or another, sexual conservatism still permeates the feminist movement. Ethel Spector Person, a psychoanalyst, argues that sexual activity and orgasm are indispensable to men’s mental health, but not to women’s; specifically, men need sex to feel like men, while in women “gender identity and self-worth can be consolidated by other means.” This chapter considers the issue of sexuality within the context of feminism by focusing on two anthologies: Women—Sex and Sexuality and Heresies.
Keywords: women’s movement, sexuality, sex, women, sexual conservatism, Ethel Spector Person, orgasm, feminism, Women—Sex and Sexuality, Heresies
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Identity Crisis
- Lust Horizons: Is the Women’s Movement Pro-Sex?
- Nature’s Revenge
- Toward a Feminist Sexual Revolution
- The Last Unmarried Person in America
- Peace in Our Time? The Greening of Betty Friedan
- Marriage on the Rocks
- Putting Women Back in the Abortion Debate
- Looking for Mr. Good Dad
- From Forced Pregnancy to Forced Surgery
- Sisters Under the Skin? Confronting Race and Sex
- Radical Feminism and Feminist Radicalism
- Feminism Without Freedom
- Rebel Girl: What De Beauvoir Left Us
- Escape from New York
- The People’s Picasso
- Sins of Confession
- Ministries of Fear
- Exile on Main Street: What the Pollard Case Means to Jews
- The End of Fatherhood: Family Plots
- Andy Warhol, ?-1987
- In Defense of Offense: Salman Rushdie’s Religious Problem
- Beyond Pluralism
- Now, Voyager
- The Drug War: From Vision to Vice
- The Drug War: Hell No, I Won’t Go
- Coming Down Again
- Epilogue: The Neo-Guilt Trip
- Permissions
- Index
- [UNTITLED]