Sexual Empowerment in Patriarchy
It ain’t easy—that’s for sure
Sexual empowerment sounds nice. But with high rates of sexual assault, chronic bias against promiscuous women, a striking lack of mutual kindness in sexual culture, America’s Puritan roots, and patriarchal aims subverting good-faith attempts at honest sexual expression, it isn’t easy.
It isn’t even clear what sexual empowerment entails. Choice-based feminists might endorse OnlyFans, power-based kink, or dressing in a way that appeals to the so-called male gaze “for themselves.” Others—not so much. They question what it means to make choices in a world that only truly rewards a limited array of female expressions.
Thus, I ask: when are actions women attempt to take for themselves subverted to support purely male agendas? When, if ever, is choice genuine? When we seek sexual freedom, what is really being sought?
Embodied Feeling
When Lily Phillips slept with 100 men in a day, I was struck by the black-and-whiteness of the response. When she broke down in tears after-the-fact, most said, “of course.” Few people seemed to see her as an intelligent person who might have informative insight about her own experience. Still, at the end of Josh Pieters’ documentary focusing on her exploit, she said the following, disjointedly: “I think sometimes… I [was] feeling so robotic… by the 30th [person]… I’ve got a routine of how we’re going to do this… sometimes you dissociate… it’s not like normal sex at all.”
To act without feeling, dissociated from oneself—I suspect this is the source of quite a lot of sexual despair. Not sleeping with five men, or one-hundred (albeit, embodiment and mutual recognition may be more challenging under tight time constraints or gang-bang-esque arrangements).
In “The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde spoke about this beautifully. “To share the power of each other’s feelings is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us.” This—the pornographic—is put in contrast with the erotic. Lorde calls the erotic, “…a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” She elaborates:
“…the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness.”
In summary: if we know the joy our bodies are capable of, we can seek it out in all areas of life. This drives us, she argues, to expressions that challenge patriarchal norms. When we attend to what is bountiful for us, in a deep, embodied sense, we no longer tolerate the unacceptable. We become braver. This is a kind of power, both within the erotic, and on its account. “Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So, we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex,” Lorde adds. When the erotic is deemed trivial or relegated to the bedroom only, under darkness, we lose our potency.
Choice does not always involve going towards something from this sense of acknowledged feeling and embodied integrity. Sometimes, people make politically or economically coerced choices under hard circumstances—I don’t wish to deny these choices are a kind of choice. Nevertheless, a more substantial sense of empowerment likely comes when we are able to make choices that arise from the core of our beings, rather than mere survival—from what Lorde calls the erotic. The poet concludes:
“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”
Female Bodies
Sadly, most representations of “sexual empowerment” in the media do not include reference to a deep sense of embodied integrity.
Consider, for a moment, the beautiful onomatopoeia, “WAP.” Within the pop hit, Cardi B and Megan The Stallion express desire, which puts it above many depictions of female sexuality. Perhaps they state things they genuinely want. Perhaps they state things it would be marketable to want. Perhaps the pressures of marketability shift their genuine desires. In any case, they also brag about their desirability within our white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy:
“He bought a phone just for pictures of this wet ass pussy / Pay my tuition just to kiss me on this wet ass pussy.”
To desire and to be deemed desirable are not the same things, but under the umbrella of “female sexual expression,” these two things are often equated. Women are taken to express their sexuality when they show their body, even though the appearance of someone’s body might have little to do with their felt sense of want. In WAP’s music video, the camera traces the singers’ bodies. It does not show the shape of their desire.
In other words, female desire is talked about, but attractive female bodies are shown. Both the desire and the bodies are depicted, unambiguously, as something that might serve men.
There is nothing wrong with men being the beneficiaries of female sexuality. In an ideal world, everyone would be a beneficiary. I only mean to note that we chronically confuse exposing the female body with showing sexuality itself, as if the appearance of bodies has some objective magnetic pull, or some kind of intrinsic meaning. It does not. To show the desire of a woman might instead involve showing what she desires. Perhaps that thing would be the body of a man. Such inner sense could be conveyed through poetry, literature—and it has been.
Anaïs Nin wrote erotica—some of which involved women who gaze voyeuristically at men. In the short story “Marianne,” a young studio artist encounters a man who is aroused only by receiving physical admiration. As Marianne paints his form, she gains a frustrated kind of satisfaction from bestowing this admiration. Afterwards, she confesses:
“I looked at my drawings, and to one of them I added the complete image of the incident. I was actually tormented with desire. But a man like that, he is only interested in my looking at him.”
This surprised me—within pornography, female voyeurism is a rare motif. But why is it rare? How could we be so chronically blind to what it might mean to show female desire or attraction, even within feminist circles?
My unsubstantiated sense is that women still need desirability to express desire, with a passing level of acceptability. Women deemed beautiful are punished for their expressions, and women deemed un-beautiful are punished all the more (possibly through sexual violence, or the threat of it). I hardly ever hear from women deemed un-beautiful, about their desire, in the public arena. This is a shame, since desire is a crucial part of being a person, rather than a thing.
In “On Having No Head,” D.E. Harding describes what it is like to live fully in one’s sensory experience without projecting the narrative of selfhood—history, appearance, abstract traits—onto oneself. People cannot see, from their own eyes, that they have heads. In some ways, this seems the preferred way of experiencing eroticism: facelessly. Sex, from this perspective, is not a way to validate beauty, but to destroy it, to forget how you seem, completely. To eliminate the invisible camera you put on yourself as you walk down the street, and to instead look out at the trees.
Power-to and Freedom-from
I’ve discussed Lily Phillips, Audre Lorde’s sense of the erotic, WAP, female voyeurism, and what it might mean to show genuine female desire rather than merely female form. Women might find humanity in celebrating their own subjectivity, their own joy, their own pleasure.
None of this answers my original question about empowerment. Naturally, empowerment ought to mean to come into power or to be granted power. But power is a bewildering business. When we say, “women should be sexually empowered,” we generally don’t imagine the impossibility of absolute power—we don’t imagine women who control the weather, or the stars, or who can shape-shift at will. Instead, we imagine something much more limited.
In “Rethinking Power” (1998), the philosopher Amy Allen usefully distinguishes between power-to and power-over. Power-to is the capacity for an agent to complete an end. Power-over is the ability of an agent to alter another body—another person, environment, structure, institution, or the self, I might add (though Allen does not). To this roster, freedom-from, or the tendency for one’s actions to not be unwillfully manipulated by a specific external agent or structure, is a natural inverse.
As Allen points out, concepts like power-to and power-over intersect in practice. They express relations rather than absolute states. To have the power-to for toast-making, I must have power-over the toaster, the bread, my hands, the air around my body, etc. Nevertheless, I find Allen’s taxonomy allows for more easeful distinctions.
I do not reckon it is possible to have complete freedom-from the cultural forces we find ourselves in, for example. People view promiscuity negatively, and this will impact what someone is able to disclose while receiving acceptance in certain forms of employment or neighborhood barbecues. I can’t imagine that away—nor can any other single individual.
As a general thing, human beings require a cultural backdrop to develop. The notion of a baby who grows up both unwounded and unenabled by “society,” in a perfect “natural” state, is an impossible dream. Who we are—who we really are, how our authentic desires formed in the first place—was built on our history, a history that touches inequality, and structural limitation from innumerable angles, over time. History leaks in through genes, through chemicals in the womb, through what we see. There is no neutral default. There is no ultimate escape.
Preliminary Conclusion
I do not wish to pretend that individuals can simply opt for full empowerment, as pop feminism sometimes slips into. Yet, within cultural restrictions, there are choices, or ways in which power-to is available. I can go to the local coffee shop, or not. I can choose substantial aspects of my own diet. I can look at this, or that—I can alter the direction of my own gaze. I can talk, and people may or may not give a shit. I can fuck, or not.
The range of power-to depends on the individual, but it is always present to at least a limited extent. This is where embodiment returns. We can use whatever power-to is available to us for actions that are, as much as possible, grounded in erotic integrity. With difficulty, we can choose to prioritize our own direct experience over sexual self-objectification, and to make choices from this centered place—or, we can try, at least. This is the kind of sexual empowerment available to the individual, or what we ought to mean when we talk about a “sexually empowered woman.”
However—this empowerment is limited by both the physical world and culturally coercive forces. I cannot leap to the moon, and many women are sadly in conditions in which either the use or the restraint of their sexuality is required for a basic standard of living. Consider many sex workers, women who rely on their husbands for sustenance, and those deeply embedded in religious institutions. Under the lens of freedom-from, these conditions do not exemplify the social condition of empowerment.
In any case: perfection is impossible, but perfection is not required for “much better.” There is no particular set of behaviors it is sensible to call “empowered”—instead, what seems to matter is both the embodied integrity of a choice, and the degree to which that choice is coerced by limiting conditions.
So, dance to WAP, if you want to. Use power-based kink influenced by hundreds of years of patriarchal control, if it helps you to find your sense of subjectivity and genuine eroticism. Alternatively—don’t.
The world is inescapable, but perhaps you can live in it.