Sexual Panic
A sexual panic is a social obsession with a particular sexual act or representation. A culture invests a lot of energy in talking about, identifying, and punishing a sexual act it perceives as a threat to its social order. Sexual panics are a theme throughout American history, because they keep recurring. Rubin looks at three major periods of sexual panic. In the late 1800s, America experienced a sexual panic that was primarily focused on prostitution and obscenity, or representations of sex in images or text. In the 1950s, America’s sexual panic over homosexuality resulted in a series of witch-hunts and raids on establishments thought to be frequented by gay men. In the 1980s, an ongoing panic dealing with protecting children continues to be a reason for the oppression of both sex workers and gay men. Although the targets of the sexual panic are different, they are thematically similar because of the hierarchies of sexual value that are at play in how American society legitimizes some types of sex and criminalizes others.
Deviant Sexuality vs. Children
In most cultural representations, sexual panics usually deal with children. In the 1970s, for instance, a campaign to re-legalize discrimination against gay people in Dade County, Florida, had the motto “Save Our Children.” The idea is that children are asexual, and need to be protected from sex and sexuality, especially a sexuality that is deemed as immoral or abnormal. This theme recurs throughout discussions of sex. Adults invoke children in order to outlaw other adults.
Sexual Hierarchy
The major theme of “Thinking Sex” is that American society always organizes sexual acts into a hierarchy. That means it values and legitimizes some sex, usually heterosexual intercourse in marriage. Any sex that is different than this is lower in the hierarchy, and the more different it is, the lower it goes. For instance, homosexual sex that is in a committed relationship will be higher on the hierarchy that homosexual sex that is casual. Unfortunately, progressive movements also create hierarchies in order to legitimize themselves. Thus, gay rights activists that advocate for a higher spot on the hierarchy might commit to a form of “respectability politics” in which they hold up some kinds of gay sex as being better than others. Sadomasochism, for instance, might be stigmatized in order to make "caring" sex within a committed relationship look better by comparison.
Feminism vs. Sex
Gayle Rubin was writing as a feminist and to feminists in a period of intense feminist discussion about sex. The relationship between feminism and a radical theory of sex is a primary theme of her essay. On the one hand, she considers how feminism has already thought about sex. Some feminists, which she considers part of the anti-pornography camp, have contributed to sexual hierarchies by arguing that some sex is worse than others. But even feminists who are not in this camp may not be able to produce a radical theory of sex, Rubin argues. This is because feminism is primarily about gender oppression, and sexual oppression is a separate thing, just like racism is separate from sexism. Rubin calls for an autonomous theory of sex that can work with, but not be reduced to, feminism.
