The Generational Divide in Feminism
Source: Library of Congress, Public Domain.
In the late 20th century, radical second-wave feminism revolutionised female sexual liberation, and the explosive sexual revolution. In 1960, the introduction of the Pill further refashioned the feminism which escalated dramatically in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. Women’s liberation, and feminist social protest became tied to casual sex, particularly a woman’s right to sex for pleasure. Challenges to traditional sexual roles migrated, from feminist unions, all the way to the patriarchal mainstream, and women globally began to challenge their previously entrenched exclusion from politics, the workplace, and pleasurable sex.
Women all over the world, many with access to contraceptive control and new levels of autonomy for the first time, also began to question traditional sexual roles. At the very heart of the sexual revolution was the concept, once highly radical, that women enjoyed sex, deserved positive sex, and had sexual needs of their own - just like men. A generation of second-wave feminists, the likes of Germaine Greer, asserted that single women should have the same sexual freedoms, and had the same sexual desires, as the men of society did. For radicalised feminists like Greer, the sexual revolution of the late 20th century was all about female sexual empowerment, and for social conservatives in opposition, the sexual revolution was a moral invasion, and an invitation for promiscuity. Second-wave feminists quickly clashed over the morality of female sexual liberation, and the newly available Pill was drawn into the debate.
According to an anonymous health professional in Ilam, “female contraceptives are a lot more accessible now. Years ago it was just the Pill, nothing else. Now there’s a huge variety and funding available”; and modern women have unprecedented control over their own fertility. But just 60 years ago, the Pill alone was profoundly radical, and remarkably accessible. Even now, for many New Zealand women long-term contraceptives like IUDs may cost upwards of $400. The unnamed health practitioner explains that prescribed IUDs are free for New Zealand residents, in cases of abnormal heavy bleeding or endometriosis, but as a regular contraceptive it remains financially inaccessible to many.
Female contraception has been tied to women’s liberation for decades, and a major part of the sexual revolution catalysed by second-wave feminism was determined by the new ability to have casual sex for pleasure and not conception, by the availability of the pill, and the autonomy and control it afforded women. However, modern feminist movements like the growing 4B campaign, whose radicalised proponents refuse to date men, have sex with men, get married or have children; like the modern, sweeping push for celibacy. Another movement, the MeToo movement of 2017, which rejected the the casual flirtation of men; have often been met with unfortunate disdain by older women and older feminists, such as polarising activist Germaine Greer, who famously accused young feminists of “whingeing” in 2018.
This divisive fourth-wave feminism began just after the late 2000’s, with a focus on sexual harassment, body shaming, and rape culture; polarising even amoung feminists. But the generational divide which still fissures women’s liberation is defined not by the women themselves, but by their disparate yet comparative experiences under patriarchy.
Greer’s contested analysis of fourth-wave feminism is rooted in experiencing a period in which female sexual liberation was an act of militant protest, and having casual sex and multiple partners, sex for pleasure not conception, and sex outside of marriage, were all acts in abject defiance of old patriarchal taboos. We tend to forget just how transformative the past few decades have been, and the passive sexual role of women was demanded by a patriarchal, constrictive culture; the right for women to escape sexual passivity, and the imperative to do so, caused a new wave of women’s liberation.
Those demands, for the right to sexual freedom, are at the heart of Greer’s 1970 manifesto, ‘The Female Eunuch’, where realised female sexuality acts as a militant act of revolt. The impositions on female agency at the time were enormous, especially within a marriage, and female sexual liberation was about defiance more than it was sex. Only in 1937 did American women gain the right to seek divorce. In 1961, the contraceptive pill gave women in New Zealand real control over their fertility for the first time, and not until 1965 did married women in France gain legal rights to work without their husbands’ consent. Marital rape was legal in Britain until 1991.
For feminists who survived those generations, it must seem like a regression, to have fought society tooth-and-nail for liberation, only to hear younger women embrace celibacy as protest, or loudly emphasise a wish not to be sexualised by men in their lives, and modern movement away from overtly liberated and casual sex has been dismissed by the likes of Greer as a kind of tinfoil hat feminism which restores passive sexual norms. Compared to the emergence of their generation, from socially-enforced sexual repression, where laws were designed to effectively culturally erase women’s sexuality, the modern rejection of sexual expression must seem repressive.
However, in our modern culture, “sexual freedom has become another realm of women’s experience for patriarchy to conquer”, as said by active Australian feminist Van Badham. Sexual liberation, casual sex, and sexual freedom is a sphere of the female experience which was immediately permeated and distorted by iron-clad systems of patriarchy; just as soon as older feminists had won sexual liberation for women previously cloistered by social norms, patriarchy reframed sexual liberation for women as sexual availability for men. Sex designed to be for women quickly became an entitlement to sex with women, and the empowering second-wave of female liberation led to a modern decade of male entitlement.
The only hard-and-fast rule of sex is ‘consent’, especially in a world of violent kinks, violent porn, and the mutual exclusivity of male pleasure and female pain. Men have been taught, explicitly or implicitly, that consent can always be begged or bartered for, because they are taught that women are always potentially sexually available - after all, that is what ‘liberation’ means. A liberated woman is free to have sex with whomever she likes, and often, men cannot understand she is also free not to.
Where patriarchal structures of culture were once highly censorious of women’s sexuality in life, film, and literature, now, modern depictions are explicit or hypersexualised, and the patriarchal understanding of ‘liberated’ seems to equal ‘available’. Ubiquitous female sexualisation has emerged as a pernicious distortion of sexual freedom, and young women find themselves in normalised, unwittingly sexualised situations regularly. According to Badham, “Young women are right to feel that destigmatised sex has enhanced their traditional patriarchal status as sex objects, not liberated them from it”.
Female sexual liberation has become a tool used to advance male entitlement, and even contraceptives like the Pill have morphed from empowering control and autonomy, to a social burden which places the major contraceptive responsibility on women and contributes to the entitlement of men who believe that birth control means a woman is available for sex. Women in New Zealand are also far more likely to bear the burden of STI testing, according to clinical research data, and anonymous health provider warns, “the more sexual partners, the more increased risk, but any change in sexual partner introduces risk for STIs: they can be contracted through intercourse with just one person. Birth control consultations are often opportune for discussing STI testing”.
The reality of the new sexual era is that female sexuality is often more constructive than it is liberating. Contraceptive care and STI testing have become points of burden or responsibility dominated by women, and often, the price of male pleasure is indeed the value of female pain. We live in a culture which considers female pain normal, and male pleasure a right, according to Katherine Rowland, author of The Pleasure Gap. PubMed alone has funded and published five-times as many clinical trials addressing male sexual pleasure, compared to female sexual pain. Erectile dysfunction, lamentable, but not painful, is the subject of 1,954 trials. Female dyspareunia however, the severe pain some women experience during sex: the focus of just 393 PubMed clinical trials.
Female sexual liberation remains no longer the shiny new sphere of empowerment that the generation of Greer fought to earn. Instead, it exists as a permeable facet of the female experience, which leads like a blazing arrow directly to male entitlement. The fourth-wave of feminism is revolutionary, not “whingeing”. Dismissing ubiquitous sexualisation is just as radical as the sexual revolution once was.