How Orgasm Politics Has Hijacked the Women's Movement: Why has the Big O seduced so many feminists -- even Ms. -- into a counterrevolution from within?

HOW ORGASM POLITICS HAS HIJACKED THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT: Why has the Big O seduced so many feminists-even Ms.-into a counterrevolution from within?

THE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1995 issue of Ms., cover-lined HOT UNSCRIPTED SEX, showed a close-up of an African American woman licking her lipsticked lips. Despite all the feminist work that has been done in the last quarter-century to critique and challenge the male-supermacist construction of sex, none of the four articles inside made connections to the whole of the rest of women's lives and status. Set in display type above one was a line from Barbara Seaman's 1972 book, Free and Female: "The liberated orgasm is an orgasm you like, under any circumstances." To judge from this issue of Ms., and from the shelves of women's "erotica" in feminist bookstores, an unreflective politics of orgasm seems to have won out.

In the late 1960s and early '70s, it was widely believed that the sexual revolution, by freeing up sexual energy, would make everyone free. I remember Maurice Girodias, whose Olympia Press in Paris published Story of O, saying that the solution to repressive political regimes was to post pornography through every letterbox. Better orgasms, pro-claimed Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, would create the revolution. In those heady days, many feminists believed that the sexual revolution was intimately linked to women's liberation, and they wrote about how powerful orgasms would bring women power.

Dell Williams is quoted in Ms. as having set up a sex shop in 1974 with precisely this idea, to sell sex toys to women: "I wanted to turn women into powerful sexual beings.... I had a vision that orgasmic women could transform the world."

Ever since the '60s, sexologists, sexual liberals, and sex-industry entrepreneurs have sought to discuss sex as if it were entirely separate from sexual violence and had no connection with the oppression of women. Feminist theorists and anti-violence activists, meanwhile, have learned to look at sex politically. We have seen that male ownership of women's bodies, sexually and reproductively, provides the very foundation of male supremacy, and that oppression in and through sexuality differentiates the oppression of women from that of other groups.

If we are to have any chance to liberating women from the fear and reality of sexual...