Controversies over lesbian separatism also created tensions within the Women Against Pornography (WAP) group, whose founders in 1976 had included prominent figures such as Andrea Dworkin, Shere Hite, Gloria Steinem, and Adrienne Rich. Debates around pornography and prostitution, in turn, triggered major and bitter divisions among feminists, which became particularly intense during the 1980s. American […]

More generally, sexuality became one of the central issues of second-wave feminism. The sexual oppression of women came to be seen as a central — by some theorists, as the most central — area of male power over women. The new women’s movement thus adopted the slogan ‘the personal is political’, expressing the idea that […]

The women’s movements that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, generally referred to as ‘second-wave feminism’, put the politicization of sexuality at the heart of their agenda, but did so in an entirely different social context. Second-wave women’s movements emerged in societies whose traditional gender relations had been fundamentally transformed by the massive post-war entry […]

Not all feminists shared this binary view of female sexuality, however. Numerous prominent feminist thinkers participated in 19th-century radical sex reform movements which argued for greater sexual freedoms for men as well as women. Libertarian, anarchist, and communist thinkers attacked obscenity and anti-homosexuality laws, calling for access to birth control information, abortion, and ‘free love’ […]

Feminists who still sleep with the man are delivering their most vital energies to the oppressor. Jill Johnson, Lesbian Nation (1973) The double moral standard Female sexuality has been subjected to particular scientific and moral scrutiny throughout modernity. It has also constituted a central concern in feminist struggles. While the first women’s movement that emerged […]

Although most early sexologists primarily explored the peripheral sexualities, others, in particular Havelock Ellis, focused on ‘normal’ sexual behaviour itself. The study of normative sexuality led to the partial problematization of biological naturalness. Sex was still understood in terms of biological essence, but some 19th-century sexologists, such as Geddes and Thomson, could not help noticing […]

The politicization of sexuality was intensified in the 1960s, when Freudian Marxists such as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich argued that sex is a natural, positive force that is repressed by bourgeois capitalist society, and called for sexual ‘liberation’ which would transform the social order. Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian psychoanalyst who in […]

In addition to the biologization of gender differences, a further central feature of the biological model of sexuality was the assumption that ‘natural’ sexual behaviour included heterosexual acts and desires only. Heterosexuality was thus treated as the implicit norm, whereas homosexuality, in particular, came to be conceptualized as, somehow, an abnormal departure from the norm. […]

An important feature of this biological model was its biologization of gender difference. From the 18th century, the traditional idea of the ‘one-sex body’, which conceptualized women’s bodies as similar but inferior versions of male bodies (with female genitals being thought of as internal, much smaller versions of male genitals), started to be replaced with […]

In giving sex a special status by declaring it to be the original sin, Christianity placed sex firmly at the centre of Christian morality. The historian and social theorist Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality famously pointed out the irony of Christian ethics defining sex simultaneously as something shameful, which should not be spoken about, […]