1. Governing desire

Radical feminist approaches to desire have been an important influence upon and foil for Andrea Long Chu’s recent writing. Her discussions of desire are not confined to sexuality but extend to gender, which she invites us to regard as something which “expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire,” and thereby “a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants” (Chu Reference Chu2018, 59). This is a provocative shift of perspective, which abandons the ostensibly solid ground of inherent gender identity for the potentially more shifting sands of gendered desires. It is undertaken in full awareness that trans-exclusionary forms of radical feminism have been happy to occupy this territory, since it opens up the desires of trans women for criticism, and perhaps even the lurid charge of autogynephilia.Footnote ⁵ Chu herself confesses she transitioned for

Chu deliberately foregrounds desires that some radical feminists would rather suppress. Moreover, she considers the mordant possibility that trans women will never get what they really want: that, scandalously, the womanhood they desire will remain somewhat elusive, whatever the well-meaning mantra that trans women are women tells them (Chu Reference Chu2018, 61). But in wryly conjuring the spectre of trans women enchanted by a parodic femininity and courting desires that may go unsatisfied, Chu remains unflinching: each of us is allowed to want bad things, and our desires are not contingent on their achievability.

Chu’s reflections on gendered desire open up further questions about specifically sexual desire, and it is in this context that she looks back to separatist forms of radical feminism, including political lesbianism. For the political lesbian, the feminism of heterosexual women was caught in a contradiction: they would organize against patriarchal power in one part of their lives, only to channel their remaining energies to nurturing their enemy in the home, including in the bedroom. Such women were collaborators. Feminist solidarity demanded they withdraw from relationships with men and instead devote themselves to women and the wider women’s liberation movement. On Chu’s telling, this presupposed strict mental hygiene:

But this political lesbianism is positioned as a doomed project from the start: “nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle. You could sooner give a cat a bath” (Chu Reference Chu2018, 59). Why is that? Chu continues: “Desire is, by nature, childlike and chary of government. The day we begin to qualify it by the righteousness of its political content is the day we begin to prescribe some desires and prohibit others. That way lies moralism only.” This recalcitrance of desire has long been recognized by feminists, with Lynne Segal (Reference Segal1994, 104) speaking of the “often troubling, irrational or ‘perverse’ nature of sexual desire and fantasy, which may bear little relation to our conscious ideals and commitments.” A pithier formulation comes from Naomi Segal (Reference Segal and Porter1992, 35): “Desire is what we do not control.”Footnote ⁶ Even those keen to explore the construction of desire recognize that this is often unwelcome. As Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant2012, 5) notes, “there is nothing more alienating than having one’s pleasures disputed by someone with a theory.” Chu’s own appeal to the intractability of what we want serves her wider purposes by casting doubt on attempts to discipline desires—including the gender-affirming desires of trans women—so that they comply with political precepts. But these claims also gesture toward challenges a political critique of specifically romantic and sexual desire will face: that people’s attempts to deliberately change what they want will be fruitless or exact an unbearable psychological toll, with there being no acceptable criterion to make the relevant evaluations of desire in any case.

How do Chu’s claims fare when revisiting an earlier radical feminism? For some, no irresolvable conflict existed between desire and separatist tendencies in feminist politics, since “all women are lesbians, except those who don’t know it yet” (Pennebaker Reference Pennebaker1979, 22:45).Footnote ⁷ A more cautious line of thought is advanced by Adrienne Rich (Reference Rich1980, 637), who wonders “why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women’s total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men.” This leads her to ask “whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women,” in virtue of their role as primary caregivers. Lesbianism becomes the default erotic orientation for women rather than a hard-won political success. Those who, rightly or wrongly, took social and sexual separatism to be integral to feminist politics would therefore be pushing at an open door. However, this strategy for overcoming the tension between present desire and aspirant politics rests on highly speculative foundations. Without less anthropologically and sociologically tendentious support, the assumption of universal gynephilia begins to look like thinly disguised wish fulfillment among lesbian feminists.

Another route appears by returning to an influential pamphlet of the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group (1981 [1979], 5), “Political lesbianism: The case against heterosexuality,” which was co-authored by Sheila Jeffreys.Footnote ⁸ It defines the political lesbian in part negatively as “a woman-identified woman who does not fuck men.” While “woman-identified woman” is sometimes treated as a mere cipher for lesbianism in its more familiar sexual and romantic senses, feminists have usually understood such women as those whose activities and sense of self are not oriented toward the service of men, but are instead directed toward other women.Footnote ⁹ As the Radicalesbians (Reference Koedt, Levine and Rapone1973 [1970], 245) originally put the point: “Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors.” Against this background of being woman-identified, the “Political lesbianism” pamphlet demarcates political lesbianism negatively, in contradistinction to fucking men: the avoidance of a sexual practice rather than active sexual desire for other women.Footnote ¹⁰

The Leeds Revolutionary Feminists knew this non-collaborationist stance would be difficult for women who liked sex with men, but giving up some things you enjoy was taken to be a familiar part of developing a serious politics (something they indecorously compared to a boycott of Cape apples in order not to support Apartheid South Africa: Leeds Revolutionary Feminists 1981, 8). Furthermore, they recognized the need for practical and emotional support for women withdrawing from relationships with men. Significantly, however, the emphasis is not upon the pliability or mutability of desire, which might be made to conform to the exigencies of a separatist politics. Instead, the prescription is initially more ascetic: that some desires must be overruled, with help from fellow feminists, rather than being remoulded so that romantic and sexual relationships with women were now wanted. Continent abstinence, including celibacy for staunch heterosexuals, rather than a lesbian alchemy of desire, becomes the primary recommendation for those still drawn to men.

Even for heterosexual women who accepted the political wisdom of withdrawing from relationships with men, the stark injunction to simply restrain their desires could seem like an onerous road on which to embark. Some radical feminists offer us a more sanguine understanding of celibacy though: a tendency particularly prominent in writers associated with the Boston-based Cell 16 group. Theirs was a radical feminism that cleaved to a version of the primacy thesis, with founder Roxanne Dunbar (Reference Dunbar1969a, 108) telling her readers, “We do not say our oppression is greater than others; we say it is basic to all other struggles.” As early advocates of a strategic social and sexual separatism from men who did not actively support the women’s movement, Cell 16 pioneered a common radical feminist tactic. Rather than being a grim necessity, Dunbar would present celibacy as an attractive ideal of self-sufficient wholeness. Furthermore, she counted sex among our “conditioned needs,” which “can be unconditioned,” rather than being a true need (Dunbar Reference Dunbar1968; see also Densmore Reference Densmore1968, Reference Densmore1970). We find here not the transformation of sexual desire but its enlightened extirpation, based on an analysis which implicitly presupposes women’s sexual desires are wrought by tremendous social power.Footnote ¹¹

In the same issue of No More Fun and Games, Ellen O’Donnell (Reference O’Donnell1968, 14) gestured to dangers lurking in any sexual contact with another: “In reaching out in physical love there is still the desire to mold the other person’s energy under the guise of togetherness.” But another of the group’s founders, Abby Rockefeller (Reference Rockefeller1973, 32), would eventually give a more explicitly gendered analysis of the problems of sexuality, which she took to be rooted in men’s greater desire for sex than women: “Women now need most to find out (and insist on) how little they need and want sex—not how much.” Indeed, the emphasis within Cell 16 on “liberation from sexuality” rather than “sexual liberation” offered an obvious way to resolve the conflict between abiding heterosexual desires and separatist politics (Dunbar Reference Dunbar1969b, 50).Footnote ¹²

Rockefeller’s analysis is open to criticism on the grounds of its incipiently essentialist account of gendered differences in sexual psychology, which retraces the very stereotypes about women’s sexuality which many other feminists critical of rigid gender roles have tried to unpick. So too, for those not already inclined toward asexuality, Dunbar’s deconditioning of sexual need may be hard to distinguish from thoroughgoing sexual repression.Footnote ¹³ Audre Lorde (Reference Lorde1984, 49) warned in this respect of the confusion of self-abnegation with self-discipline characteristic of asceticism, stemming from a “false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong.” Nevertheless, Cell 16’s revaluation of celibacy offers an intelligible response to the problems that women’s desires, and their leveraging by others, could pose for individual women and the women’s liberation movement as a whole. In particular, there is a latent critical potential in their sensitivity to the contingent social determination of sexual desire.

Several alternative strategies for navigating the politics of desire are now apparent, arising from the specific case of the tensions between sexual desire and a feminist separatist politics. First, it might be demonstrated that the relevant desires and political commitments already align, or that there are strong tendencies for them to do so. That could be seen in practice in the somewhat implausible claim that all women are lesbians once they come to realize it, or that female caregiving produces a primordial inclination to seek love and affection from women in the absence of coercive male force. Secondly, tensions between desire and commitment could be managed by insisting on the capacity to act independently of politically counterproductive desires. Thus, even though it might be hard for certain women to foreswear relationships, sex, and cohabitation with men, some radical feminists believed that, when the necessary support was in place, these women still could and should do so. Thirdly, the politically recalcitrant desires might be partly or comprehensively extinguished. This approach found practical effect in a revaluation of celibacy for feminist separatists, as well as the claim that sexual need could be deconditioned. All three strategies have significant limitations as a response to the conflicts generated by a separatist politics. But taken at a formal level, they each plot a distinctive path in handling tensions between desire and political commitment, which increase the options for a politics of desire beyond the seemingly embattled project of forcing desires to take the shape demanded by an independent set of political principles. Moreover, we shall see that closer attention to the history of radical feminism provides resources for a more sympathetic reconstruction of even that latter mistrusted venture.

2. Separatism and sociality

The political critique of desire is a risky endeavor. Some of its pitfalls have been outlined by radical feminists who were warier about how a politics of desire actually manifested itself in the women’s liberation movement. Ellen Willis (Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014d [1969], 14) had insisted on “the need for separate groups free from male bias and male control,” but she also aired concerns about “the development of feminist sexual orthodoxies that curtail women’s freedom by setting up the movement as yet another source of guilt-provoking rules about what women should do and feel” (Willis Reference Willis1982, 7). Many found themselves at the sharp end of these new orthodoxies during the “feminist sex wars”: women unable or unwilling to forego sexual or romantic relationships with men; sadomasochists deemed to be eroticizing women’s submission; sex workers and consumers of pornography; butch lesbians castigated for reproducing a “male style.” Of course, the substance of these criticisms can be questioned: for instance, asking whether a desire to be bound or spanked during sex is really as suspect on feminist grounds as its critics suggest. But the form in which political evaluation of desire finds expression can also be rejected, such as when it fuels a culture of intense shame or internalized self-hatred. Similarly, Chu (Reference Chu2019b, 75) warns that attempts to force unruly desires to conform to principles will be fruitless, while adding that desire will not bend to sheer command: “You simply cannot tell people how to feel, at least with the result that they start feeling the way you want them to.” However, a politics of desire need not be enforced by a punishing superego, moralizing community, or interfering state; nor must our desires necessarily be persuaded, commanded, or bullied into line.

While the Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group did try to paint lesbianism as an attractive solidaristic ideal free from the political compromises of heterosexuality, the core of their initial message was that women who still wanted relationships with men had to make sacrifices for the sake of the movement. Their immediate desires ought to be overlooked. But a richer understanding of desire within separatist movements appears in the later writings of Sheila Jeffreys (Reference Jeffreys1990, 312–13), who calls for heterosexual desire to be demolished. While reiterating the earlier proviso that liberation may not be easy, and that celibacy can be an honorable choice for women, she is optimistic about the “construction of homosexual desire” which would eroticize mutuality rather than subordination. Jeffreys (Reference Jeffreys1998, 57) remains sensitive to the social conditions for such a transformation, and emphasizes that “women-only spaces enable women to become lesbians. They provide examples of women being strong, capable and entertaining, for other women to admire and love.”Footnote ¹⁴ This provides a model of the transformation of desire which does not, in principle, depend upon a supreme act of will, the guilt-laden commands of conscience, or the hectoring judgment of political comrades. It recognizes that patriarchal societies set the scene for who is considered desirable, with men afforded greater opportunities to brandish their talents and occupy positions of esteem. Yet romantic and sexual feelings circulating within a male-dominated world need not be untouched once women find refuge in their own communities. Separatist enclaves, which not only facilitate the leadership, skills, and conviviality of women, but showcase these traits to others, can kindle new and perhaps unexpected desires.Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, on this way of thinking, it is no surprise to encounter those who credit women-only spaces with having “allowed thousands of us who were heterosexual to become lesbians” (McNeill in Jeffreys Reference Jeffreys1998, 60).

Separatism did, of course, have its own problems. Some of these were social and quotidian—for instance, reflecting on her nine years in an exclusively lesbian community in North Carolina, Kathy Rudy (Reference Rudy2001, 206) could find the atmosphere stifling:

The efficacy of separatism as a feminist practice can also be called into question, whether as a shelter from patriarchy or as a site from which to dismantle it in the rest of society. But other tensions could be even more obviously political still. Women-only spaces must eventually adjudicate who counts as a woman, which can sharpen disputes about the status of trans women (not to mention trans men and non-binary people). Jeffreys (Reference Jeffreys1998, 71–2) herself is known for a particularly intense and reprehensible trans-exclusionary politics, catalyzed in part by a preoccupation with policing access to women-only spaces. However, the radical feminist tradition as a whole has often been more trans-inclusive than its critics have allowed, such that hostility to trans women is not baked into even a radical feminist separatist politics.Footnote ¹⁶

Some radical feminists opposed certain forms of separatism for other reasons though. While the influential Redstockings (Reference Morgan1970 [1969], 534) group based in New York identified male supremacy as “the oldest, most basic form of domination,” they also “rejected sexual separatism as a political strategy, on materialist grounds” (Willis Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014a, 241). Not only was this separatism deemed ineffective, it was sometimes thought to be a missed opportunity to confront male power directly within personal relationships—what Alice Echols (Reference Echols1989, 147) later described as “withdrawing from the sexual battleground rather than engaging men in struggle.” The dominant approach among Redstockings combined this rejection of separatism in romantic and sexual life with a “pro-woman line” which cast doubt on psychological explanations of women’s oppression (Peslikis Reference Peslikis, Firestone and Koedt1970).Footnote ¹⁷ This form of materialist explanation had the attraction of denying that women were mere brainwashed dupes of patriarchy, rather than rational actors making difficult decisions about relationships, sex, and marriage in straitened circumstances. Yet, it tended to simply rule feminist critiques of desire out of bounds, at least where women were concerned.

Must the price of rejecting separatism be the loss of such a feminist politics of desire? No. It is not necessary to endorse women-only spaces as either an organizing tactic or blueprint for entire communities in order to take on some of the theoretical lessons which were learned when feminists did use these approaches. The deeper philosophical insight which experiences in such spaces helped foster was that new social environments can generate different desires, where transformations in relations of power are reflected in who is wanted. Desires need not be altered through forceful imposition of political principles but can shift as a result of the cultivation of new habitats which draw out other patterns of feeling and thinking about others. But those are conclusions which can have wide application outside of feminist separatism, with its many potential pitfalls.

3. Forms of desire

Radical feminists have been sensitive not only to who is desired but also the tenor of romantic and sexual attraction. “We must destroy love,” the 1969 manifesto of the New York-based group The Feminists (Reference Feminists, Firestone and Koedt1970a [1969], 117) announced with characteristic boldness, since it “promotes vulnerability, dependence, possessiveness, susceptibility to pain,” and inhibits women’s self-development by redirecting energies to children and husbands. Heterosexual love, in particular, was dismissed for encouraging identification with men and their interests, while heterosexual sex was rejected insofar as “at present its psychology is dominance-passivity.” Likewise, The Feminists were sceptical of intercourse as the focus of sexuality—including foregrounding the genital area and especially the vagina—which they took to reinforce the identification of women with childbearing. They instead envisioned a non-exploitative sexuality outside the bounds of male oppression and the existence of sex-defined roles: “Physical relations (heterosexual and homosexual) would be an extension of communication between individuals and would not necessarily have a genital emphasis.” (The Feminists Reference Feminists, Firestone and Koedt1970a, 118). These claims emerged from a politics which insisted on the plasticity of desire and was animated by an enormous confidence in the ability of women to collectively remold it. Refusing to simply accept desires as given, they would not only “deal with what women want; we must change women’s ideas of themselves and in that way change what it is women want.” (The Feminists Reference Feminists1970b, 9).

Sensitivity to different forms of desire, intimacy, and sexuality was particularly strong among lesbian radical feminists. Rita Mae Brown (Reference Brown1970, 12), also drawing on the language of sex roles, advocated a more communicative mode of sexuality associated with women: “The male seeks to conquer through sex while the woman seeks to communicate.” But she emphasized the distinctive emancipatory potential of women sleeping with women within a sexist culture—idealistically characterizing the experience as one which allows women to confront the beauty and power of their own bodies without the strictures of a predefined sexual role. Likewise, Sue Katz Reference Katz1971, 8) contrasted a phallic orgasm-centric heterosexuality with a “radical lesbian sensuality” as a “creative non-institutionalised experience,” which “could be a genital thing or not.” Strikingly, she describes such sensuality as a collective practice growing out of political struggle, which she was not simply confronted with but was rather helping to create. Cultural feminists sometimes understood these differences in erotic style within a story appealing to “our felt experience of the biological difference between the sexes” (Alpert Reference Alpert1973, 29). But another common explanation appealed to patriarchal training or habituation: identifying a “male style” marked by “genital sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional noninvolvement, and coarse invulnerability,” rather than women’s supposedly “greater trust in love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment” (Morgan Reference Morgan1978b [1973], 181).

Other radical feminists warned of the dangers of embracing a “sanitized,” “neo-Victorian,” or “saccharinely romantic, nice-girl’s view of female sexuality as the proper feminist outlook” (Willis Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014b [1979], 98; Reference Willis1982, 7; Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014c [1981], 206)—what Gayle Rubin derided as “the missionary position of the women’s movement” (English et al. Reference English, Hollibaugh and Rubin1982 [1981], 44). Indeed, the criticism of a male style was turned against other women and even other lesbians: whether those drawn to sadomasochistic sex or butch-femme dynamics.Footnote ¹⁸ For instance, Jill Johnston (Reference Johnston1973) objected to butches on the grounds that they imitated the male style for their own gratification. The creeping essentialism—whether biological or cultural—of attempts to delineate distinct male and female modes of eroticism is a major obstacle to these criticisms of other women. There is much plausibility to the objection that some feminists were now reinscribing the rigid gendered norms which other feminists had rightly sloughed off: confining women to narrowly circumscribed forms of romantic and sexual life on the basis of dubious reasoning about the origins, reproduction, and nature of patriarchal domination, and an invasive moralism keen to police women’s sexuality in the name of upholding feminist “standards.” But radical feminist critiques of desire do not stand or fall with invocations of a sinister male style which feminists are obliged to oppose.

Some of the most sophisticated approaches to desire coming from those who had been involved in radical feminist activism sought to do justice to two broad goals which could sometimes seem to be in tension. Ellen Willis (Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014c [1981], 208) held that it was “axiomatic that consenting partners have a right to their sexual proclivities, and that authoritarian moralism has no place in a movement for social change,” but also that a truly radical movement always needed to ask, “Why do we choose what we choose? What would we choose if we had a real choice?” In the much-contested case of lesbian sadomasochism, Willis (Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014c, 206) cast doubt on simplistic attempts to attribute such practices to “heterosexist brainwashing,” and reminded us that bigots are inclined to condemn whatever they do not understand. Yet, at the same time, she asked whether the entanglement of sexual pleasure, pain, and humiliation—such as in fantasies of degrading others or being degraded—really had nothing to do with living in a patriarchal society in which gendered relationships of rule and servitude abounded. Two hazards were to be avoided in this respect: “If self-proclaimed arbiters of feminist morals stifle honest discussion with their dogmatic, guilt-mongering judgments, sexual libertarians often evade honest discussion by refusing to make judgments at all.” (Willis Reference Willis and Willis Aronowitz2014c, 206; see also DuBois and Gordon Reference DuBois, Gordon and Vance1984, 43). A sound critique of desire, so understood, would eschew moralistic dogmatism while preserving the imperative of judgment.Footnote ¹⁹

Even some of the most sophisticated radical feminist theorists could subsequently fail to do both. Consider the critique of desire prosecuted by Catherine MacKinnon, for whom “the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality” is the origin of the social division between women and men, where such sexuality comprises “the social process that creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire” (Reference MacKinnon1987, 49). The social shaping of desire is thereby foundational to the production of sexual difference. More specifically, “the erotization of dominance and submission creates gender” (Reference MacKinnon1987, 50) and thus should be the focus of feminist theory. Women are socially positioned as continually sexually available, in accordance with the demands of a demeaning male desire. Furthermore, women can often derive some measure of erotic satisfaction from their servility, with a double movement occurring: “Hostility and contempt, or arousal of master to slave, together with awe and vulnerability, or arousal of slave to master” (Reference MacKinnon1989, 136).

MacKinnon’s theory of the erotization of dominance and submission is frequently insightful about how the gendered dimensions of desire might be thought to uphold the objectification of women. But its normative upshot was often surprisingly crude, such as in MacKinnon’s familiar suspicion toward sadomasochism and butch-femme roles (Reference MacKinnon1989, 135–36 and 142), which she could only understand as reenactments of the basic structures of masculinist social relationships, rather than ways in which such relationships might also be denaturalized, subverted, or reimagined. That people could, on their own terms, restage social dynamics echoing aspects of the gendered societies which had wounded them, without this being little more than a reassertion or capitulation to male domination, is not countenanced in her thought. In flatly dismissing counterexamples to the eroticization of male dominance and female submission as nothing more than parodies or negations of the primary phenomenon—such as in “gender reversals (dominatrixes) and inversions (homosexuality)” (Reference MacKinnon1989, 144)—MacKinnon also risks an airless circularity. Likewise, the understanding of male desire which informs the account suffers from an unfortunate literalism, such as in the claim that pornography merely “shows what men want and gives it to them,” namely, “women bound, women battered, women tortured, women humiliated, women degraded and defiled, women killed” (Reference MacKinnon1989, 138; see also Dworkin Reference Dworkin1981). We should certainly ask, in the spirit of both Willis and MacKinnon (Reference MacKinnon1989, 136), why the depiction of eroticized power, discipline, degradation, and even controlled violence finds such a large audience, and whether this reflects or reinforces an endemic misogyny. But a genuinely open exploration of such questions is foreclosed rather than facilitated by MacKinnon’s didacticism.

4. Diagnosing desires

Many other radical feminists recognized that women’s desires could be distorted by systemic asymmetries in power, resources, and status emerging from patriarchal oppression. A desire for a domineering male partner, marriage, family life, perhaps even sexual relationships themselves, might all reflect a women’s subordinate social position. More compelling in this respect than unease about sadomasochism or butch-femme roles has been the effect of harassment and violence against women. Desire might seem to be a marginal aspect of this enormous problem, since the starkest cases of rape and other forms of sexual assault occur irrespective of women’s desires, or in deliberate contravention of them. However, not only do women’s desires at times figure in vulnerability to violence, the threat of this violence can also shape these desires.

Consider Marilyn Friedman’s (Reference Friedman2004, 175) observation—commenting on Machiavelli’s famous pronouncement that it is better for rulers to be feared than loved—that “love can sometimes be grounded on fear.” Drawing on the language of “adaptive preference formation,” Friedman (Reference Friedman2004, 185) supposes that women may renounce desires which male dominance prevents them from satisfying, including the desire to resist sexual harassment and domestic abuse.Footnote ²⁰ For instance, if the threat of violence makes it risky to attempt to escape an abusive relationship, the inclination to flee will sometimes not be thwarted but rather extinguished, with emotional attachments to abusers capable of remaining strong. Habituation or acclimatization to threats of violence can clear a path for continued desire, however ambivalent, for abusers: even love, of sorts, grounded on fear. Thus, the problem posed by the violence which can underpin men’s power is not simply that women’s desires can be ignored, but that they can be contorted in light of their own relative powerlessness. In addition to underlining the urgency of reducing the incidence and threat of such violence, these considerations suggest desires formed under these conditions should be treated with caution.

Parallel to the problem of desires formed under the threat of violence is desire within relations of economic dependence. The gendered division of labor leaves many women especially materially vulnerable in this respect, with capitalist societies having “remunerated ‘reproductive’ activities in the coin of ‘love’ and ‘virtue’, while compensating ‘productive work’ in that of money.” (Fraser Reference Fraser2016, 102). The economic dependence of women upon male partners—under the long shadow of the history of marriage—can profoundly influence their desires or ability to satisfy them.Footnote ²¹ Sometimes this will be entering into a romantic or sexual relationship despite the lack of strong desire, whereas at other times it may take the form of an intermingling or confusion of need and desire for someone, such that the latter would not be felt in the absence of material vulnerability. Sexuality, in particular, can also come to be characterized by the logic of economic exchange, so that it becomes labor for women: “Sex is work for us, it is a duty,” records Silvia Federici (Reference Federici2012 [1975], 90–91), while moreover, “we must enjoy it as well, something which is not expected of most jobs for a bored performance would be an insult to male virility.” That demand is not confined to a mere performance of satisfied desire, but a moralized pressure to actually enjoy, and a feeling of failure when desire is absent, muted, or disappointed in a sexual encounter.Footnote ²² Again, desires formed under these conditions can be more questionable from an emancipatory perspective than those arising without economic vulnerability in the background.

We saw that radical feminists were also sensitive to how social power shapes attraction. Patriarchal societies tend to deny women opportunities to develop and evince their talents, vitality, and wit. When men no longer monopolize these socially mediated occasions, women can more easily find something to admire and love about each other. Despite her own rejection of outright separatism, Audre Lorde (Reference Lorde1984, 54) also stressed that erotic connections can not only emerge from community with women but can revitalize feminist struggles by opening up new possibilities for acting together. It would be natural to suppose that such claims about the politics of desire are not easily extended beyond the confines of the women’s movement, especially when advanced by radical feminists sympathetic to the primacy thesis, which supposes there is something exceptional about the oppression of women. But attention to other cases of interaction between desire and oppression suggests a wider scope for some of these lessons.

Disability is one such case. While some people with disabilities do not encounter challenges with respect to desirability, many are routinely dismissed as potential romantic partners, or subjected to a thoroughgoing desexualization in how their lives, desires, and needs are understood (Emens Reference Emens2009; Shakespeare et al. Reference Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells and Davies1996). When no longer confined to the margins of our societies—excluded, patronized, stigmatized, and underestimated—but occupying roles which foster respect, esteem, and affection, it is reasonable to expect them to elicit greater desire. Although the forms of marginalization and oppression experienced by disabled people can have their own distinctive inflections which depart from or modify the specifically gendered subordination of women, some of the diagnoses and remedies relating to desire remain salient. For instance, concern with the social conditions of desirability recommends a broader egalitarianism, under which everyone is able to acquire and showcase traits that underpin desirability—one which speaks to compulsory heterosexuality and ableism alike.

Another strategy does not focus on more equitable opportunities to demonstrate desirability according to predominant standards but rather scrutinizes and challenges the content of those standards themselves. This may involve revising the cultural schemas that help determine which traits are considered desirable: for instance, the presumption that attractive heterosexual men be tall, muscular, assertive, and wealthy. The strictures on desire that these norms reinforce can be strengthened when they interact with other cultural frames, such as those which lead many Asian men in Western countries to be read as weak and passive, and so less attractive within mainstream heterosexual culture (Shek Reference Shek2006, 383–86; Wilkins et al. Reference Wilkins, Chan and Kaiser2011). But these cultural lenses are not fixed, such that we can tell new stories, engage in other kinds of education, or build different social institutions, which unsettle assumptions at the heart of heterosexual culture or pervasive narratives about Asian men. If these men focus on the former rather than the latter goal, they may even find otherwise-unlikely allies among radical feminist critics of the eroticization of women’s subordination and men’s possessive dominance.Footnote ²³

Feminists are themselves no strangers to challenging hidebound social norms, including the many demands made upon women who hope to be regarded as desirable within the dominant culture (Wolf Reference Wolf1990). That activity can include creating alternative spaces or communities in which prevailing norms are suspended—where, for instance, desirability is not a function of highly gendered grooming habits or forms of deference. While separatist communities have been fertile ground for these transformations in desire, other social settings with an oppositional ethos, including radical political groups or subcultural formations, may also support the cultivation of a more critical orientation toward what traits are regarded as attractive. Such projects can be more ambitious still in seeking to transform the standards of desirability within the hegemonic culture itself. Among the routes for achieving cultural changes of this kind are interventions in education, art, media, and politics, as well as shifts in the norms of interpersonal interaction. As we saw though, specifically cultural interventions are not the only possibilities, with economic circumstances also being important to transform. These considerations point to some degree of cross-pollination of strategies across gender, race, and disability, even if not all approaches will make sense in all cases of contested desire.

5. Creating better environments

While accepting the foundational importance of security against sexual violence and profound economic dependence, some feminists insist on the need for a broader approach to women’s sexuality: “simultaneously to reduce the dangers women face and to expand the possibilities, opportunities, and permissions for pleasure that are open to them.” (Vance Reference Vance1993, 290). Other feminists have likewise criticized academic tendencies that “amply nourished a theory of sexuality as dependency and danger at the expense of a withering positive theory of sexual possibility” (Franke Reference Franke2001, 208). Ellen Willis has been the most prominent thinker in our narrative so far taking up this project. While passing through the crucible of radical feminism—initially endorsing the primacy thesis and an organizational but not sexual separatism from a male-dominated left—she would eventually reject the notion that male domination was uniquely primary. Never entirely comfortable with orthodox Redstockings disdain for psychological explanation, she retained the belief that feminists could avoid overbearing moral policing of one another while still asking searching questions about the basis of their desires. We saw how that found expression in wondering whether cultural feminism had restricted women’s sexual possibilities by promoting a gentle saccharine romanticism as the only eroticism fit for feminists.

Amber Hollibaugh also came to a painful realization in the late 1960s that organizational separatism was now needed for feminists in the United States, such that “we had to leave the Left to create a women’s movement” (Reference Hollibaugh2000a [1979], 108). She would fall in love with another women, but their relationship took place under the shadow of some of the radical feminist standards we have seen: “we talked about celibacy—we were real big on that!” (Reference Hollibaugh2000a, 109) But she came to roundly reject a decentering of sexuality or attempts to purge it of all traces of lust, ecstasy, or even power. There was no need to hold with a “lesbian Cinderella-ism” which would associate abundant passion and genital sexuality with a pathological heterosexuality (English et al. Reference English, Hollibaugh and Rubin1982, 41). The sexual essentialism of many lesbian separatists also came into conflict with Hollibaugh’s incredulity at appeals to “‘natural’ womanhood or ‘normal’ genders” (Reference Hollibaugh2000b, 264). Always a communist within the feminist movement, and increasingly disillusioned at the class dynamics of feminist separatism, her often-conflicted feelings toward radical feminism would lead to a growing distance from it. Like Willis, she found herself chafing at radical feminist strictures on permissible desire.

How then might thinkers with a more ambivalent relationship to the radical feminist tradition help us to rethink desire’s relationship to romantic and sexual possibility? One place this can be seen is the relationship between imagination, desire, and sexual agency, where introjected prohibitions may act as a constraint on what can be countenanced and pursued: “Much is forbidden even to women’s imaginations. We are deprived of the most elementary right to create our images of sex. It is a hard truth that far too many women come up blank when they are asked what their sexual fantasies look like.” (Hollibaugh Reference Hollibaugh and Vance1989, 404). Those limits are understood as curbs on sexual agency, insofar as “most of our ability to act on our desires rests in the possibility of imagining the feel and smell of the sex we want.” (Reference Hollibaugh and Vance1989, 405). Gendered social prohibitions are not the only obstacles to a capacious sexual imagination though. There can also be a lack of positive resources which would spark welcomed desires, such as depictions of a range of potential sexual partners, less familiar sexual practices and settings, or different affective orientations to sex. Similarly, this imaginative scaffolding can also support new desires within romantic life more generally, whether that is music which foregrounds lesbian relationships, documentaries which explore polyamory, or non-fetishizing literature which depicts love affairs with people with physical impairments. There is no presumption here that breadth or novelty of desire is ultimately better, nor that every desire is valuable, but rather that some avenues should not be blocked precipitously by sheer censoriousness or ignorance of the possibilities as grasped in vivid imaginative anticipation.

In addition to imagination, romantic and sexual exploration in relation to desire is facilitated by the capacity to experiment. For example, being able to test the waters of a romantic relationship without thereby being pressured into marriage and children; to date people of different genders or social backgrounds without suffocating disapproval from one’s parents or community; to have an opportunity to explore different sexual styles, practices, or partners and reflect on what one likes or dislikes. John Stuart Mill (Reference Mill2003 [1859], 122) famously recognized a need for different “experiments of living,” with various modes of life being able to prove their worth in practice. Those same considerations apply to our desires: probing whether they sit well with the individual when acted upon, but also providing an exemplar to others as to what they might feasibly want themselves—something with the potential to be especially powerful due to the mimetic character of much desiring (Girard Reference Girard1965; Angel Reference Angel2021, 39).

Imagination and experimentation ought to take place in an environment in which informed discussion of desire is also possible. Hollibaugh (Reference Hollibaugh and Vance1989, 409) insists upon a “right to discuss openly the shapes and images of our own desires,” paired with the “need to educate ourselves with the best available information about all aspects of human sexuality,” and an “obligation to use, then go beyond, personal insights and histories to create a body of sexual theories as complex as each one of us.” The fora for discussion of desires might vary: from consciousness-raising groups and political debate to media representations and informal chats with friends under conditions relatively sheltered from repression and shame. This scrutiny of desire can be rooted in the narration of individual experience as well as expansive social reflection in which the knowledge and experiences of others figure too. Discussions of this nature are not intended as idle talk without impact on our affective orientations. Instead, how people speak about what they want and why they think they want it will shape how discussants feel and act today, while creating a context for how others might come to experience their desires in the future.

Politicized discussion of desire comes with perils though when it emboldens caustic social judgment. Much like other feminists worried about a censorious climate, Hollibaugh (Reference Hollibaugh and Vance1989, 403) wondered, “Are we creating a political movement that we can no longer belong to if we don’t feel our desires fit a model of proper feminist sex?” The list of those threatened with shaming and exclusion is long:

Hollibaugh combines a recognition of the importance of examining sexual desire with an opposition to forms of stigmatization and repression emerging from a hardline feminist politics. Again, the underlying problem with the latter could be located in the content of critiques of desire: the notion that penetrative sex must be degrading for women, or that sleeping with femmes is reinforcing heterosexist roles. But the complementary problem is a wider concern about overbearing social policing of desire in itself, which fuels guilt, self-hatred, and a flight from feminist communities.Footnote ²⁴

How should we respond to the threat of social judgments of intimate desires which are felt to be intrusive and excessive? The prohibition of evaluation of desire would be an abdication of political and intellectual responsibility. As we have seen in the context of feminist, anti-racist, and disability politics, there is a real need to identify patterns of desire which reproduce harm, injustice, or subordination, as well as thinking seriously about how to unpick or mitigate them. The solution does not consist in soft-pedaling answers to questions about why we want what we do, or in rejecting normative assessment of those desires. But judgments of these kinds can be made without them functioning as a suffocating standard which individuals are berated, shunned, or shamed for not meeting. Instead, they can be used to guide a set of cooler and more impersonal political interventions in the social life of desire.

Radical feminists concerned about the creeping moralism of judgments about sexual practices and proclivities were also worried about their use as a litmus test for feminist purity and their propensity to harden into formal or informal requirements for remaining in the women’s movement. But political judgments around desire do not have to take these punishing interpersonal and organizational forms. For instance, they can instead be used to inform attempts to remake different aspects of the environments in which desires are formed. Just as some looked to women-only spaces as settings within which to recalibrate desire—however problematic this could be in practice—other social determinants of desire might be changed to produce less politically objectionable results. Some interventions would be relatively neutral in their substantive political commitments, relative to disagreements about radical feminist politics. For example, ensuring we live in a culture in which desires can be discussed openly, and that there is some scope for romantic experimentation and sustaining a rich sexual imagination, does not necessarily privilege a polymorphous sex radicalism over the separatism of some radical feminist lesbians.

Other interventions in the social formation of desire would presuppose a stronger normative stand on the propriety of certain desires. Yet these need not necessarily lead to individualised social policing which fuels guilt and shame. Take judgments which many feminists are inclined to make about others rather than among themselves: say, regarding older men strongly inclined to want to date women in their late teens or early twenties. Depending on the circumstances, it might make sense to shame these men in the hopes that they will begin to reevaluate their appetites, and to marginalize those who show no signs of changing their ways. But opposition to problematic desires on feminist grounds might also be less vituperative than explicit attacks on these men’s characters or moral conduct, even if we suppose there is indeed something predatory or objectionably creepy about those desires and that these men are culpable in indulging their inclinations to seek young women as partners. As feminists have recognized in the case of misogyny, individual moral censure can sometimes provoke a counterproductive defensiveness or simply prove ineffective in bringing about social change (Manne Reference Manne2017, 127). Structural rather than individualized interventions are available though, such as modifying dating apps so that heterosexual men cannot consistently search for potential matches among dramatically younger users, or reconsidering the commissioning of media so that the romanticization of age-gap relationships is less prominent.

Similar lessons apply to intra-feminist disputes about desire. For instance, instead of strident interpersonal criticisms of women who sleep with men or who are turned on by fantasies of domination or submission, the emphasis might instead be placed upon creating a broader environment that does not reproduce compulsory heterosexuality or implicitly eroticize profound power differentials. That could be a matter of ensuring that lesbianism, bisexuality, pansexuality, and celibacy are all live options in terms of social approval and economic survival; or seeking a more egalitarian politics with respect to wealth, the workplace, parenting, and so on. Whether or not people should actually agree with those radical feminists opposed to present heterosexual relationships or sadomasochistic dynamics, there are advantages to promoting interventions into the infrastructure of desire formation rather than rancorous cycles of highly moralized condemnations of the intimate life of other women. That shift toward structural and environmental action will not eliminate all ill-feeling among those conscious that their desires may be considered suspect. But it would go at least some way to curtailing the centrifugal forces which lead some feminists to be separated from the wider movement: those who “have found ourselves outside ‘feminist standards, political integrity and moral authority’ and have grown silent in our meetings, CR groups, and feminist journals and papers” (Hollibaugh Reference Hollibaugh and Vance1989, 403).