Disputes over sexual behaviour often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social stress.
In this quote, from the first paragraph of “Thinking Sex,” Rubin defends the essay that follows. She acknowledges that some people might think that an essay about sex is superfluous when we could be reading essays about more “serious” issues like racism, poverty, and war. But Rubin argues that it is when debates around these other issues are the most heated that sex becomes a sort of scapegoat. American society polices sex or develops moral panics over sex in order to distract from other social anxieties. Thus, we need to study sex all the more, in order to ensure that it does not reproduce other forms of social harm.
A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.
In this quote, Rubin lays out her call for what “thinking sex” should mean and do, as well as what her own essay will begin to attempt. Of particular importance is that this theory of sex must relate to both “society and history.” Rubin thinks that the meanings we attach to sex, and therefore the ways in which we regulate and repress sex, change in each society and in each historical period. In order to really disrupt this oppression, then, we need a keen sense of the particular meanings a society at a given time creates, which in turn will shed light on the particular sexual hierarchies within that society. Activism is rooted in study: we need to study society and history in order to change the present.
All these hierarchies of sexual value—religious, psychiatric, and popular—function in much the same ways as do ideological systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism. They rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble.
In this quote, Rubin connects forms of sexual oppression to other forms of oppression more familiar to her reader. Think about white supremacy: we know that this is an ideology in which white people claim to be the superior race, thereby legitimizing their power and authorizing racism against people of color. Rubin argues that a sexual hierarchy works in the same way. In this case, married heterosexuals legitimize their hegemony by saying their form of sex is superior to others, thereby authorizing the oppression of people who have sex differently. Very many social institutions support this kind of sexual supremacy. Churches that call some sex immoral, psychiatrists that call some sex abnormal, and popular culture that calls some sex bad, all contribute to the hierarchy.
Most people find it difficult to grasp that whatever they like to do sexually will be thoroughly repulsive to someone else, and that whatever repels them sexually will be the most treasured delight of someone, somewhere. One need not like or perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that someone else will, and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or intelligence in either party. Most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that will or should work for everyone.
This quote summarizes Rubin’s claim that many people lack a concept of “benign variation.” Instead, they think that if there are differences in sexual preferences, those differences must be harmful. People have a hard time thinking that other people would want to have sex differently than they do. Afraid of this difference, they assume that if people do have different preferences, they are dangerous and bad. Instead, Rubin wants a society in which people can be different—and indifferent to these differences.
The only adult sexual behavior that is legal in every state is the placement of the penis in the vagina in wedlock.
One sign of what is at the top of a sexual hierarchy is what type of sex receives universal legitimization in the law. According to Rubin, the only sex act that is never criminalized is married heterosexual intercourse. As a result, we can see some of the things that society values: marriage, heterosexuality, and sex that can lead to reproduction. Any kind of sex that is missing one or more of these variables will be lower on the hierarchy and, in at least one state, illegal.
Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To assume automatically that this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other.
In this quote, Rubin begins to address the relationship of feminism and a “radical theory of sex,” which is what she is trying to create in “Thinking Sex.” What matters is the different “vectors of oppression” that feminism and a radical theory of sex attack. We don’t assume that feminism can, by itself, end racism, because racism is about oppression through race and feminism is about oppression through gender. That’s why we need both theories of race and theories of gender. Rubin argues the same is true of sex. Oppression of sex is different from oppression of gender. That’s why feminism, which focuses on gender, is not enough to end sexual oppression.
In the long run, feminism’s critique of gender hierarchy must be incorporated into a radical theory of sex, and the critique of sexual oppression should enrich feminism. But an autonomous theory and politics specific to sexuality must be developed.
In this quote, Rubin imagines the future development of a radical theory of sex and how it will relate to feminism. She thinks the theory of sex can’t be accomplished by feminism, because sexual oppression is distinct from gender oppression. The first step is thus to create a theory of sex separate from feminism. But she imagines that sexual liberation and gender liberation will eventually work together, in the same way that civil rights activists and feminists build coalitions. This is not a parting of ways, but a partnership.
