upression Judith Green offers a response to Jane Kelly's article Sex, Moral Panics and Capitalism which appeared in our last issue. The full versions of the original article and this response are on our website. All quotes not otherwise credited are from S,MP&C.
Sex, Moral Panics and Capitalism (hereafte ground: young people, sexuality and new technology and how they all relate to the society we live in. However Jane Kelly's article lacked what should have been a central focus on women's oppression. S,MP&C fails to acknowledge adequately the differences in the
situations of young men and young
women. We are told that "young
people, both female and male, are especially targets of ideology"
obscuring that this ideology targets
female and male in very different
ways and largely to the disadvantage of women. S,MP&C mentions two reports of "sexual
practices amongst young people",
It's Wrong But You Get Used To
It and the National Survey of
Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles.
27 However, both reports underline how sex is experienced differently by men and women, boys and girls. Describing rape (the statistic S,MP& C draws from the second report) as a "sexual practice" implies an agency on the part of the woman that is not there. It is almost exclusively male recipients (not disembodied "individuals") who use 'sexts' for sexualised bullying or 'revenge porn.' Are we really discussing "teenage sexual behaviour" or, in reality, what young men and boys are doing to young women and girls? The central question of S,MP&C is "How are the authorities able to use this fear of sex to attack our democratic right to know what governments are up to?" Yet in every case "this fear of sex" presented by S,MP&C refers to sexual violence and abuse. By conflating sexual violence and sex, S,MP&C reduces objections to sexual violence to mere prudery. Defining "moral panic" The article asks 'what lies behind this moral panic about sex and young people?' "Moral panic" has been a useful term in left and progressive politics. Stuart Hall's early use of Cohen's theory in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and
Law and Order (1978) armed antiracists and civil liberties campaigners with political tools with which
to defend black communities
against aggressive, racist policing. Since then, "moral panic" has
been used by campaigners in many
different contexts but they do not
always agree with each other about
whether a particular phenomenon
qualifies as a moral panic. It is obvious that use of the term alone is
not sufficient to demonstrate that
there is one.
Failing to define what one means
page 28 of the scan
28
Writing out women's oppression
by moral panic muddles political
analysis and allows sexual violence
to be rendered a state and media
construction akin to the New
Year's Day flood of Romanian
immigrants or David Miranda's
terrorism.
Economism and 'folk devils'
S,MP&C suggests it is alienated
young men especially who are
"seen as dangerous to the status
quo, a force to be controlled".
S,MP&C asserts (but does not
demonstrate) this 'folk devil' status
arises out of unemployment,
underemployment, zero hours
contracts and the high cost of
living, including housing. The actual 'folk devil' in this 'moral panic, Jane Kelly's article tells us, is not young men, who are mostly represented as "victims" , but the technology and medium of the internet itself. Understanding virgin/whore dichotomies? When S,MP& C talks about the inability of society to square the circle of restrictive sexual norms and the relatively unrestricted representation of sex in society, it alludes to a contradiction commonly described as the virgin/whore dichotomy. The division of women into "respectable" and "unrespectable" categories on the basis of their relationship to men has been part of class society from the very beginning. It is clear that throughout history and in different types of class society and family arrangements, men have asserted an asymmetric right to women's sexual fidelity. It is the exercise of this right that the category of "unrespectable" women has served
Women, feminism and the politics
of representation today
S,MP&C suggests a conflict between sexual representation and
decline of the traditional family on
one hand, and the primacy of sex
within marriage on the other. Yet,
outside of traditional religious
communities, sex outside of marriage is now entirely normal. S,MP&C points to the resurgence of sexist imagery in recent
decades, paralleling the decline of
the women's liberation movement. The proliferation of sexist
imagery is explained as rooted in
the needs of capitalism but no
explanation is given as to why
commercial nakedness is sexist. Indeed, the implication in S,MP&C is that the bodies of men may be similarly exploited - in which case, where is the sexism? It is not nakedness and semi-nakedness that are sexist, but that women's bodies are routinely represented as sexual objects, in ways that are seen as patently ridiculous for men. "Gender-flipping' cultural commentary devotes itself to demonstrating how sexualised sexist images rely on the naturalised subordination of women for its effects This works as an advertising strategy because, for all the changes in women's employment, legal and economic status, sufficient numbers of men and women find this sexism at some level an attractive ideology - it is one actively promoted from birth after all! Without analysis of the changing status of women and the fate of feminism the resurgence of sexist media is inexplicable. S,MP&C points out how feminists in the 1970s asserted that images of women in the cultural-ideological sphere both flowed from, and also reinforced, women's subordinate social position. What is not mentioned is that since then large
parts of the feminist movement, in
addition to opposing censorship as
a strategy to tackle sexist imagery,
have also repudiated those earlier
critiques of images and embraced
playful postmodern approaches to
these texts, seeing subversion
everywhere. This fracturing of
analysis of images has paralleled a
nore fundamental shift in whic
eminism' has become somethin
personal to each woman, defining
for herself what would constitute
her own personal freedom. 'Choice
feminism' - more interested in
individual empowerment than
collective liberation - has had a
significant afterlife in the wake of
the women's liberation movement,
now incorporated into neoliberal
'post-feminist' projects documented by Nancy Fraser and Angela McRobbie.
The women's liberation movement
of the late 1960s and 1970s, disillusioned by the unfulfilled promise of the countercultural sexual revolution, articulated discontent with sexist media, sexual objectification, and the relationship of these to a wider culture of male sexual entitlement and aggression. Perhaps we have come full circle as women once again engage in organised criticism of the endless stream of retro-sexist, neo-sexist, ironic-sexist and just plain sexist representations that we are meant to laugh, nod or masturbate along with, to demonstrate that we are neither humourless nor prudes, but "liberated women". Although S,MP&C posits some connection between (ungendered) "teenage behaviour" and the cultural ubiquity of sexualised sexism, it is insistent that porn makes no contribution to ideas on women, sex or anything else. Yet, one does not have to argue that porn causes rape' to understand that it likely influences ideas about sex, in
page 29 of the scan
particular about what is pleasurable in sex for men and tor women. What is the material basis for "sex is good for you"? Having conflated sex and sexual violence, and dismissed concerns about sexual violence as morallypanicked 'fear of sex', we are told that socialists, should make it clear that, like eating your greens or an occasional glass of red wine, "having sex is good for vou!" In real life it is obvious that what we call 'sex' can sometimes be experienced as ecstatic, transcendent, joyful, comforting, enlightening, but also as mundane, unsatisfying, alienating, or worse, brutal, horrific, traumatising. Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a "fuck you" can appreciate that sex is sometimes intended to be hostile. Socialists cannot proclaim "sex is good for you!" without willfully erasing the experience of many people, disproportionately women, for whom sex is a much more troubled arena. Rather, socialists should assert that sex is never "sinful" (though some sexual acts, such as raping someone, are clearly unethical or immoral) and that it ought to be a good experience for all participants. We need to advocate for the material conditions that make these good experiences easier to come by. These
would include freedom from sexual
violence and the fear of sexual
violence; freedom from unwanted
pregnancy and motherhood;
prevention and effective treatment
of sexually transmitted disease;
decentering of coitus to ejaculation
as the primary sexual act; reclaiming our bodies from anxiety-producing self-objectification promoted by commerce; challenging
pervasive cultural scripts of female
passivity and male dominance. The sex positive movement of the 1980s resigned itself to the sure' ape culture are, in part, sayin hat they won't put up with tha pessimistic compromise. Internet filtering and censorship S,MP&C correctly states that socialists should oppose recently introduced restrictions on internet access, but it does so almost entirely for the wrong reasons. While it would be absurd to imagine that a single image straightforwardly "in and of itself" produces distorted ideas about women and sex, it is equally absurd to imagine that pornography is some special sphere outside of ideology and therefore rendered without influence at all. "Abuses of young children for sexual gratification" are not in most cases prosecuted, despite the existence of legislation against it, so the idea that the recording of child sexual abuse and rape will be prevented purely by use of existing legislation rings hollow. The oppression of women is indeed reproduced by many things, but surely far less today by direct legal and economic restrictions than was the case in the past. In the context of this greater formal freedom, pervasive cultural sexism, not just in the representation of sex, but also and particularly in childhood socialisation should be understood
not so much as "lagging behind'
women's advances in economic and legal spheres, but as a countervailing backlash to them.
State control of internet access does
overly restrict access to information
and ideas and should be opposed
on that basis. Internet censorship in
the form of ISP filtering has had
entirely predictable effects. Moreover, there was never any recommendation for internet censorship
29 *Feminism via ISP filtering or otherwise in the report that the government has used to leverage this change. Meanwhile, the clear recommendation made in the report for a different style of relationship and sex educa tion has not been taken forward b the government, and a recent proposal to expand the focus of sex education beyond biology to include information about same-sex relationships, sexual violence, domestic violence and sexual consent has been defeated in the House of Lords. One tool we have to hand is to compare the government's propaganda and actions with the recommendations of the researchers they have so ill-used. But this requires that we engage with researchers into internet pornography in good faith and not dismiss them in principle. We should not allow opposition to state censorship to reduce our solidarity with women opposing sexual violence and sexual objectification. Having read S,MP&CI was none the wiser as to what solidarity if any, we might offer these women. Nor was I clear on what position would be taken towards the 'Yes Matters' campaign
to expand relationship and sex
education
What kind of solidarity to women
resisting sexism?
It is wrong for socialists to cast
concern about sexual violence and
objectification as rooted in a "fear
of sex" or as merely a moral panic.
This is, to coin a phrase, "prude
shaming". Socialists should state
that sex ought to be good for
everyone, while recognising that in
sexist societies this is unfortunately
not always the case. Socialists
should actively identify and
campaign against the wide variety
of material conditions that prevent
sex always being good for us.