Summary of Sections 1–2
Gayle Rubin begins “Thinking Sex” by answering the question of why we should think about sex. To most people, Rubin acknowledges, sex is a trivial matter, not rising to the seriousness of war, poverty, and other social issues. But Rubin argues that sex often absorbs the anxieties of these other issues. Faced with problems we can’t fix, like systemic poverty, we start to police other people’s sexuality. Moreover, this policing can produce forms of oppression that are on the order of other social ills, like racism and sexism. It therefore deserves special, not marginal, attention.
In the first section of the essay, “Sex Wars,” Rubin provides a history of some of the ways in which sex has been policed in United States history. She is particularly interested in historical periods in which sex rises to the level of a panic in American society. The first period in which she sees this happening is the end of the 19th century. At that time, a number of “moral crusaders” targeted prostitution, pornography (including nude paintings), birth control, and even dancing in public. Many sexual laws today are actually leftovers from this period of time. In particular, Rubin looks at “obscenity” laws that made publishing information about sex and sexuality illegal.
Another period of sex panic was the 1950s. Here, attention turned to two perceived sexual perversions: homosexuality and the “sex offender.” After World War II, many people had begun to form erotic communities, especially in urban areas. These were groups and spaces in which people could access the kinds of sexual pleasure they were seeking, for instance activities with the same sex or sadomasochistic practices like bondage. In society at large, these communities were perceived as perverted, and local, state, and federal governments conducted raids on sexual undergrounds and witch-hunts to identify the “perverts.” Unfortunately, this kind of witch-hunt continues into the 1980s (when Rubin was writing), according to Rubin. She cites a 1977 campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida. That campaign called for the outing and criminalization of gay people. Throughout the country, Rubin says that since 1977 there has also been an increase in prosecutions for prostitution and obscenity.
These sex panics are often defended, Rubin notices, by appealing to the need to protect children. Indeed, the motto of the Dade County campaign was “Save Our Children,” with the image of gay people trying to recruit and pervert schoolchildren. Rubin also discusses the case of Jacqueline Livingston, a professor of photography at Cornell who was fired and ostracized for her photographs of her nude seven-year-old son. Critics called this art photography a form of child pornography. In these cases and many of the other instances of a “sex hysteria,” the image of an innocent child needing to be protected from the evils of sexuality is actually used to police the actions of adults.
Rubin also notes how sex is policed in the name of patriotism or nationalism. During the Cold War, conservative commentators linked sex outside marriage to communism. Homosexuality was cast as a threat to national strength. If homosexual behavior were permitted, some argued, the United States would not be strong enough to fight the Soviets.
In the second section of the essay, “Sex Thoughts,” Rubin begins to more systemically theorize common principles underlying this set of historical sex panics. She wants a “radical theory of sex” that can “identity, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual oppression.” As a starting point, she turns to theories of “constructivism” that have combatted ideas of “sexual essentialism.” The idea of sexual essentialism is that sex is natural and independent of social and historical institutions. In contrast, constructivists show that society creates the meanings we attach to sex, including what we think is natural and what we think is unnatural. Looking at how society constructs sex is an important first step in social movements. The civil rights and feminist movements similarly began by showing that our conceptions of people of color or women as “inferior” is not natural, but man-made. It then becomes possible to confront, critique, and transform the system that makes some sex legitimate and some sex illegal.
Sexual essentialism is an “ideological formation,” which means it is a system of ideas that influences how we think about sexuality. In the remainder of this section, Rubin analyzes five other ideological formations that police sexuality. The first is “sexual negativity,” which is the view that sex is basically bad and dangerous. The second is “the fallacy of misplaced scale,” which overreacts to sex, for instance by punishing sexual acts out of line with more dangerous activities like theft and assault. Third, Rubin looks at the “hierarchical system of sexual value.” This refers to how some sexual acts are perceived as “good, normal, and natural” and some acts are perceived as “bad, abnormal, and unnatural.” Rubin thinks that religious institutions, psychiatric institutions, and popular culture all work together to create this hierarchy.
In drawing a “line” between good and bad sex, American society also adopts a “domino theory of sexual peril.” This is Rubin’s phrase for the belief that if something from the bad side crosses the line, all chaos will break loose and society will crumble. This is the fourth ideological formation Rubin discusses, and it is related to the fifth, which is that we lack a “concept of benign sexual variation.” This is the idea that it doesn’t matter if other people have different sexual desires than we do. In Rubin’s understanding, people tend to think that the sex they enjoy is the sex everyone should enjoy and, conversely, no one should enjoy the sex they don’t enjoy. This is where policing comes into play. People universalize their sexual tastes, saying everyone should be like them and that difference is dangerous.
Analysis of Sections 1–2
“Thinking Sex” begins with a historical survey of sex panics in section 1 and proceeds to theorize a sex hierarchy in section 2. This movement, from history to theory, is an important part of Rubin’s method. She believes that understanding the meanings society has attached to the past better elucidates the current state of affairs. This is for two reasons. First, reading the past lets us discover patterns. In this case, Rubin notices a pattern of hierarchically arranging sex acts, and this hierarchy recurs throughout history. Second, reading the past helps us understand what is unique and strange about the present. Sometimes, what we take for granted today is actually socially constructed and contingent. For instance, as Rubin will discuss latter, our tendency to think of sexual behavior as an "identity" is a recent development; before the nineteenth century, these kinds of identities did not exist.
At the same time that Rubin is recounting a history of sex panics, she is also participating in a history of activism and sexual liberation. To better understand her position, it helps to place Rubin in relation to other social movements she will discuss later, including gay rights and feminism. As Rubin writes, in the 1950s homosexuals were aggressively prosecuted. As a result, this was also a decade in which gays and lesbians began to mobilize for their rights and safety. The Mattachine Society, for instance, was founded in 1950; it was one of the first gay rights organizations. Organizations continued to develop over the next two decades, especially to protest the kinds of witch-hunts Rubin describes. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots erupted, in which members of the LGBT community in New York fought back against abuse by police. The 1970s carried this momentum forward with such organizations as the Gay Liberation Front.
Rubin clearly draws from this history of activism and resistance, and her critique of sex panics is enabled in part by a long history of fighting back against homophobia. At the same time, she is writing in a period in which gay liberation was fighting another massive obstacle: the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, which disproportionately affected gay men and devastated the community. Many activists argued the United States government was neglecting the crisis, in effect allowing thousands of gay men to die. Thus, the stakes of sexual oppression were particularly high when Rubin was writing. There is a sense of urgency, as well, in her writing. This is why she starts her essay by showing that sexuality is not a trivial issue, but can be one of life and death.
The other social movement with which Rubin is in dialogue is feminism. We will have more to say about feminism when it becomes a direct object of critique in Rubin’s essay. For now, it is useful to know some of the basic context of feminism in the United States. Around the same time that gay liberation took off also saw the resurgence of what has come to be called the second wave of feminism. If the first wave of feminism was primarily interested in legal rights like suffrage, the second wave expanded its focus to include social and personal issues, including the ways in which women are subordinated through heterosexual relationships, sexual abuse, and domestic violence. Rubin joins this tradition of thinking about how power and oppression can operate in everyday life, not just through the law. Although she will critique feminism later, she would agree with one of feminism’s mottos, “the personal is political.” That means the issues people face in what might seem their private lives—such as gay men’s access to safe spaces to have sex free from abuse and surveillance—are also political issues dealing with discrimination, segregation, and disempowerment.
One of the prescient patterns noted in this section is how sexual panics foreground the image of children who need to be protected from sex. The queer theorist Lee Edelman, in his book No Future, has argued that, in American society, politics always organizes around “saving the children.” Whether Republican or Democrat, politicians argue that their policies are in the best interest of children, who are “our future.” No one is against children. But one consequence of this framing is that politics can only imagine sex and sexuality that produces children. People who have sex in ways that aren’t reproductive are in a sense outside politics. It is this arrangement that Rubin is arguing against.
