Pro-Sex Feminists
Second Wave Feminism was a resurgence of feminism through the second half of the 20th century that focused on how women are subordinated in everyday life, not just through the suppression of legal and civil rights, like not having the right to vote until the 1920s. For instance, access to birth control and abusive relationships with men might keep women in a position of powerlessness, regardless of their legal rights. In the 1980s, when Rubin is writing, this second wave of feminism fragmented in what has been called the “sex wars.” The pro-sex feminists argued that the liberation of women required sexual liberation. Women’s access to sexual pleasure, in whatever form women desired, needed to be supported. Rubin seems to align with this group of feminists, because she attacks any and all repression of sex.
Anti-Pornography Feminists
On the other side of the pro-sex feminists in the sex wars were the anti-pornography feminists. These feminists, led by radical thinkers including Catherine MacKinnon and Andrew Dworkin, were skeptical of sexual liberation because it tended to look like liberation for men. Moreover, if sexual liberation was about men, it actually hurt women. Men wanted more access to women’s bodies, leaving women vulnerable to rape and assault rather than protecting them. Pornography was often the case in point for these feminists. Pornography objectified and sometimes actively attacked women, putting their bodies in tortured positions, all just to please men. Whereas pro-sex feminists thought pornography could be a vehicle of sexual liberation, anti-pornography feminists thought it perpetuated the subordination of women and should be censored.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a vastly influential French philosopher whose work is frequently cited throughout “Thinking Sex.” Among Foucault’s many contributions to social theory is his 1978 History of Sexuality, which argued that what we think of as natural and universal in sex actually has a socially constructed history. Foucault was particularly interested in how Western societies had treated homosexuality. He discovered that until the end of the 19th century, homosexual behavior—men having sex with men—had different, and sometimes benign, meanings. But at the end of the 19th century, it started to become an identity that was policed, and homosexuals came to be thought of as a group of people to be ostracized. For Rubin, this is the taking off point for understanding the modern system of moral panics and sexual hierarchies.
