This is a follow up from my post from here.

Whose Power Is It, Anyway?

In addition to taking long journeys into the land of the one-night stand, another strategy we've used is to question each and every assumption about women, men, sex, and power. And there are so many. Take, for example, Simone de Beauvoir's observation, in The Second Sex, that

"in birds and mammals, the [male] forces himself upon [the female], while very often she submits indifferently or even resists him."

Now, I don't mean to question Simone's extraordinary perceptive abilities, but what, exactly, does she think constitutes an "indifferent" bird? Seen from this angle, a girl can never come out ahead - even when she's giving head. A woman who gives a blow job is often said to be "servicing" a man, while he remains comfortable in control - disregarding the fact that there are few things more vulnerable than a man with his penis in someone's mouth. In deciding who's zooming who in the bathroom, men, women, and feminists alike are always bring their own biases along for the ride. Whenever they do that, the male always seems to come out on top.

It's this matter - of who's really in control when it comes to sex - that may account for some of the confusion surrounding the subject of date rape. Under the guise of increased sensitivity to women's needs, seminars are being given on campuses nationwide that are teaching men to ask their partner's permission for each and every sexual move they make. But turning sex into a game of "Mother, may I" only reinforces the idea that a man's place is in the driver's seat when it comes to sexual encounters. Just like in the '50s, the woman's only role is to play the part of the sex police. Do we still really believe what Mother has always told us - that men only want one thing? Because if you flip that coin over, you'll see that the other side says that women always want more than just sex.

Reducing the number of date rape incidents is not just about teaching the guy to take "no" for an answer - it's also about teaching women to be more vocal about what they want, and don't want, from their partners and from themselves. On this subject, Camille Paglia wrote,

"A woman who goes upstairs with a brother at a fraternity party is an idiot. Feminists call this blaming the victim. I call this common sense."

While Paglia, as usual, is overly harsh, I agree that the girl should be prepared to protest loudly and, if need be, violently, when that frat boys makes an unwanted move on her. But I also understand that this is not such an easy task for women, who have been taught from the get-go to be polite and make nice. Mary Gaitskill admitted that she was unable to do it when she was date-raped:

"I let myself be drawn into sex because I could not face the idea that if I said no, things might get ugly. . .I was unable to stand up for myself because I had never been taught how."

In the end, she concludes,

"I had, in a sense, raped myself."

Demanding that men obey a strict set of rules with us would mean putting the responsibility for our sexuality back into their hands. It would mean giving up the power and independence that have been so hard for us to win. As Gaitskill points out, it would, in a sense, be raping ourselves.

These days, guys are so afraid of being accused of dominating us that we have to practically beg them to act like sexual barbarians when we want them to.

"I say to men, 'Okay, pretend you're a burglar and you've broken in here and you throw me down on the bed and make me suck your cock," feminist Lisa Palac said in a 1994 Esquire article trumpeting the new "Do-Me Feminism." "They're horrified," she continued. "It goes against all they've been taught: 'No, no, it would degrade you!' 'Exactly. Degrade me when I ask you to."

Unfortunately, the past decades' sex wars have left the threat of "politically incorrect sex" hovering like a sword of Damocles over our beds, leading both mean and women to second-guess their own desires, and ruining everyone's fun. It's time to get away from this idea that power and pleasure make strange bedfellows: our generation of garter-belt feminists have found ways to use power to our advantage, and in ways never before thought possible. Like Lisa Palac, we can even manage to be aggresive about our desire to be submissive.

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