PicoBlog

An edited extract from the introduction to my new book, Sexual Revolution, which comes out this week.

Sexual freedom doesn’t exist. Not yet. In most democracies,  most of us are legally free to love who we want, live how we like  and pursue pleasure however we choose – but only in the same  way that most of us are free to buy a Maserati,or a mansion, or an election. In practice, most people cannot afford sexual  freedom. Most women, and most LGBTQ people of all genders,  cannot afford sexual liberation – because the social costs of  simply naming their desires are still so high. Sexual liberation cannot be achieved while sexual power is  unequally distributed.

And right now it still is. In almost every society on earth, straight  men still have far more social, political and economic agency than women, girls and LGBTQ people. Patriarchy and white supremacy  are political systems that give men power over women and white people power over Black, brown and Indigenous people.

This isn’t  power that all white people and all men have. It’s not power that all of  them asked for. But it’s power they were raised to expect - power that  feels painful to lose. It is structural power, economic power, power that means that, as a whole, white people are richer, freer and more  independent than people of colour, and men are wealthier and more  independent than women. This means that women and queer people,  particularly women and queer people of colour, still negotiate for  sexual and bodily autonomy under conditions of inequality. 

And the best way to correct power imbalances in society is for the less powerful players to organise collectively. When women and girls come together  to argue, for example, for a change in the way rape is prosecuted, that is collective bargaining. When women begin to share stories of  sexual harassment at work and to demand that there be stronger  consequences for abusive employers, that is collective bargaining. When people who can become pregnant decide not to do so until the material conditions of parenthood improve, that’s collective bargaining, too.

That’s what the new sexual revolution is all about.  You can’t have a sexual revolution without addressing sexual  violence for the same reason that you can’t have an economic  revolution without addressing workers’ rights. A sexual ‘revolution’ that simply makes sex easier to access for people  who have more power is in no way radical. In fact, any sort of  revolution that preaches liberation while leaving the rich and powerful free to exploit, bully and abuse will inevitably begin to rot in the dark of its own unexamined contradictions This sexual revolution is different.

This sexual revolution goes  deeper, because it deals not just with sexual licence but with actual liberation. Itis not just about freedom from, but freedom to. It is  a fundamental reimagining of gender roles and sexual rules, work  and love, trauma and violence, pleasure and power.

The new sexual  revolution is a feminist one. And the most important thing to realise about this sexual revolution is that it is already happening.  

Here’s why it’s happening.

Not very long ago, power in most  human societies was organised around a strict gender binary, based roughly on observable reproductive sex. There were men and there were women, and men got to be strong and powerful and wealthy and clever and interesting, and women were patient and nurturing- or else. On the basis of bimodal sex, humans were shoveled into the roles of soldiers or victims in a strictly gendered power hierarchy. Half of humanity  was lumped into the political category of ‘womanhood’ - which meant that their bodies and desires were men’s to dispose of. Their role was to care for men and boys, to bear and raise children, and  to take only a decorative role in public life, unless they happened to  be a hereditary monarch.

The earliest political theorists explicitly  excluded women and children from the ‘social contract’ that is  the foundation of modern statehood - and the economic and social  structures of every modern culture were built on the bones of those  assumptions. 

All of us were born and raised in those structures. We learned to shape ourselves to their contours. We learned where the dark corners and locked doors and missing stair were. But over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, something changed. Advances in medical science meant that,  for the first time in human history, women were able to reliably control their own fertility. Safe medical abortion and advances  in contraceptive technology meant that women and girls could –  in theory – decide when and if they had children, which meant that the stakes of human sexuality and society changed for ever. It meant that it was no longer so easy to keep women and girls  shamed into sexual compliance and dependent on marriage. Not when they had other options.

The  consequences of this technological shift have been profound, and human societies have barely begun to cope with their implications. Today, despite the devastating impact of pandemics and  recessions on women’s employment, there are more women and  queer people in the traditional male workplace than there have  been for centuries; more women and queer people making art,  making laws, making history. Meanwhile, more and  more of us are boycotting marriage and motherhood. In fact, women’s increasing freedom has led to a demographic time bomb, as parenthood becomes an unsustainable choice in  developed nations that still refuse to pay for the work of care and childrearing.  

This is work that has, until now, been done mostly by women, mostly for free. But  as motherhood becomes harder and less  affordable, as governments refuse to pay for the work of social  care, and as women refuse to be bullied into making babies in  impossible circumstances, birth rates are plummeting across and  beyond the Global North. To put it another way, women and  queer people, particularly women and queer people of colour, are simply refusing to be held hostage to male fragility. They are refusing in numbers too big to ignore.

Misogyny and anti-feminism are the backlash to this sexual revolution – and nowhere is this backlash more apparent than in the election of ‘’strong men’  in and beyond the Global North.  From Britain and the United States to India and Brazil, self -serving narcissists coast to power on a swell of weaponised male resentment and racial supremacy, incoherently promising to bring  back a lost age of national greatness, of law and order and ‘family  values’, where women are forcibly returned to their traditional  roles as wives and mothers, sexually submissive and socially  sidelined. Most attention focuses, not without justification, on  the attacks by these regimes on designated ‘outsiders’ – whether they be immigrants, people of colour, LGBTQ people, Muslims or Jews. But a certain strain of revanchist sexism, with its promise to  restore a particular form of domineering patriarchy, is often the  point of entry to these movements – the underlying philosophy  that draws men and women alike to the new cause of ‘nationalist oligarchy’.  

It is overwhelmingly white men who vote for these neo-masculinist leaders, and part of the promise these leaders make  is a return to ‘traditional values’ – to a fi ctional past where men  were real men and women were grateful. The fantasy imagines a  restoration of the rule of fathers, of a society strictly corralled into  monogamous, heterosexual, Christian, largely Caucasian family  units, with women and children subservient to a male head of the  household. A vengeful entitlement to the bodies and affection of  women and girls is a common chorus in the new far-right song  sheet. It’s an explicitly violent sexual paradigm – but it refuses  to understand itself as sexually violent. Sexual violence  is reimagined as an outside threat - but in white supremacist patriarchy, the noise is always coming from inside the house.

For more of this extract, you could become a paid subscriber - or pick up a copy of the book!

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