“Thinking Sex” is Gayle Rubin’s classic 1984 essay about erotic hierarchies and sexual oppression, particularly in the United States. It theorizes the role sex plays in moral panics and political anxieties, and it contributed to important debates about the relation of sex and feminism.
The essay begins by considering a history of policing sex and sexuality in the United States. In particular, Rubin notices three periods in which there was intense scrutiny of sexuality in the United States. In the late 19th century, Americans criminalized and policed homosexuality and prostitution, as well as pornography and birth control. In the 1950s, the policing of homosexuality in particular was intensified by a series of witch-hunts by local, state, and federal officials. In the 1980s, in which Rubin is writing, a series of campaigns against “obscenity,” including discrimination against gay people, continued to unfold across the country. That grew as well into a panic over AIDS, which rather than turning into an effort to help gay people, has been used to further marginalize them as diseased and unworthy of social integration.
Rubin thinks that throughout this time period, from the late 19th century to the present, there has been a sexual hierarchy. Society deems some sex “good” and some sex “bad.” The only sex that is consistently good is heterosexual intercourse within marriage. All other sex can, at some point, be seen on the other side of the imaginary line dividing good from bad. People police and stigmatize the bad sex out of proportion to any perceived damage it can cause society. This is in part because people have difficulty imagining how anyone could have or desire to have a different sex life from their own. We tend to outlaw what we do not understand.
To correct this, Rubin calls for viewing sex as a “vector” of oppression alongside other vectors like race, ethnicity, and gender. People are discriminated against and marginalized by their sexual activities in the same way that people might experience oppression on account of the color of their skin, their nationality, or their gender. In order to end sexual oppression, we have to address it as a unique form of discrimination that does not reduce to another kind of discrimination, including gender discrimination. That means, in the end, we need a “radical theory of sex” that is independent from feminism, according to Rubin. Feminism studies oppression based on gender, but the oppression of sex is not reducible to gender. Therefore, a new radical theory of sex is needed.
