Consent - is it a meaningful concept?

[Beachcomber]

On the recent ‘Invisible Men’ thread, the concept of consent came up and was discussed. I posted referring to the following quote from Catharine MacKinnon in which she questions whether consent in male female sexual relations, within the context of a patriarchal society which is founded on dominance /submission is a meaningful concept; and she concludes that it is not. Which is quite a statement.

Quite a few posters expressed an interest in having a thread on the subject of consent and MacKinnon’s analysis of it. I have been meaning to start the thread for a while, so here it is.

Here is the quote from MacKinnon. It is from her book “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”, specifically from the chapter ‘Rape: On Coercion and Consent’ which you can read Rape: On Coercion and Consent here (It does help to read the whole chapter which is a searing piece of feminist analysis from an utterly brilliant woman. )

"The deeper problem is that women are socialized to passive receptivity; may have or perceive no alternative to acquiescence; may prefer it to the escalated risk of injury and the humiliation of a lost fight; submit to survive. Also, force and desire are not mutually exclusive under male supremacy. So long as dominance is eroticized, they never will be. Some women eroticize dominance and submission; it beats feeling forced. Sexual intercourse may be deeply unwanted, the women would never have initiated it, yet no force may be present. So much force may have been used that the woman never risked saying no. Force may be used, yet the woman prefer the sex - to avoid more force or because she, too, eroticizes dominance. Women and men know this. Considering rape as violence not sex evades, at the moment it most seems to confront, the issue of who controls women's sexuality and the dominance/submission dynamic that has defined it. When sex is violent, women may have lost control over what is done to them, but absence of force does not ensure the presence of that control. Nor, under conditions of male dominance, does the presence of force make an interaction nonsexual. If sex is normally something men do to women, the issue is less whether there was force than whether consent is a meaningful concept."

Another text which was brought up in the discussion was the section on sexual intelligence by Andrea Dworkin in the chapter “The Politics of Intelligence” from her book “Right-Wing Women”.

Here is a link to a pdf of the book, I’m afraid the quality isn’t great. The relevant section starts on page 50 of the pdf (page 54 of the book).

www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Right-Wing-Women-The-Politics-of-Domesticated-Females-19831.pdf

I can’t select the text due to the format so have typed up a section from my copy of the book – please forgive any mistakes! The entire chapter and book is brilliant feminist analysis so I urge women to read it – it is one lightbulb moment after another and wonderfully written, Dworkin’s pace is incredible and her clarity of thought exceptional. (I have added some paragraphs in order to make it easier to read.)

“Sexual intelligence asserts itself through sexual integrity, a dimension of values and actions forbidden to women. Sexual intelligence would have to be rooted first and foremost in the honest possession of one’s own body, and women exist to be possessed by others, namely men. The possession of one’s own body would have to be absolute and entirely realised for the intelligence to thrive in the world of action. Sexual intelligence, like moral intelligence would have to confront the great issues of cruelty and tenderness; but where moral intelligence must tangle with questions of right and wrong, sexual intelligence would have to tangle with questions of dominance and submission.

One preordained to be fucked has no need to exercise sexual intelligence, no opportunity to exercise it, no argument that justifies exercising it. To keep the woman sexually acquiescent, the capacity for sexual intelligence must be prohibited to her; and it is. Her clitoris is denied; her capacity for pleasure is distorted and defamed; her erotic values are slandered and insulted; her desire to value her body as her own is paralyzed and maimed. She is turned into an occasion for male pleasure, an object of male desire, a thing to be used; and any wilful expression of her sexuality in the world unmediated by men or male values is punished. She is used as a slut or a lady; but sexual intelligence cannot manifest in a human being whose predestined purpose is to be exploited through sex.

Sexual intelligence constructs its own use: it begins with the whole body, not one that has already been cut into parts and fetishized; it begins with a self-respecting body, not one that is characterized by class as dirty, wanton and slavish; it acts in the world, a world it enters on its own, with freedom as well as with passion. Sexual intelligence cannot live behind locked doors, any more than any other kind of intelligence can. Sexual intelligence cannot exist defensively, keeping out rape. Sexual intelligence cannot be decorative or pretty or coy or timid, nor can it live on a diet of contempt and abuse and hatred of its human form. Sexual intelligence is not animal, it is human; it has values; it sets limits that are meaningful to the whole person and personality, which must live in history and in the world.

Women have found the development and exercise of sexual intelligence more difficult than any other kind: women have learned to read; women have acquired intellect; women have had so much creative intelligence that even despisal and isolation and punishment have not been able to squeeze it out of them; women have struggled for a moral intelligence that by its very existence repudiates moralism; but sexual intelligence is cut off at its roots, because the women’s body is not her own.

Okay. The OP is pretty huge so I will leave it at that and post my own thoughts in subsequent posts. This one is just meant to provide the material for discussion. I suppose this thread should really be in the feminist theory section of MN but I don’t really agree with the existence of that section so here it is in the regular feminist hang out!

Sorry to be thick beachcomber but what does ITA mean?

In total agreement.

Sorry! It gets used a fair bit on MN and it didn't occur to me it might not be familiar to some people. You are not being thick!

That's an amazing passage.

I fear this may sound a bit evo psych so feel free to pick as many holes as you can;
But I do think it is natural and innate for women to be much more circumspect and choosy about partners and numbers of partners. For millennia the consequences have just been too serious to fuck around with fucking. Which is not to say we don't have desires and wishes and all the rest of it, but we have the brakes which men don't have. On the whole, generalising, not everyone at all times etc. I don't think the Gatekeeper role is entirely imposed on us, I think there are good sturdy internal reasons for this, which translates to the emotional and psychological aspects of sex which are so often ignored.
I was talking an acquaintance who is back on the dating scene after the end of a twenty year marriage. One of the things she said was that sex is much more expected now, much quicker, and it's a total faux pas to expect it to have any meaning. She went on to say, for the zillionth time in the history of dating, that women can't help becoming attached afterwards. Sher made the point that it's women doing the compromising within themselves, not men who get a new sexual partner for a few weeks and tend to move on. Now she was just chatting and not presenting a thesis, so she was talking about her and her friends' experiences. I'm sure many people have different experiences. But many would identify with what she said.
The sexual revolution may have liberated us to say yes without fear of pregnancy, but not without fear of old fashioned 'broken hearts'. (Of course there are exceptions, anecdata etc) But, generally, casual sex while not immoral or anything like that of course, is more likely to harm women. But the emotional side of things is determinedly ignored as something women ought to just get over, irrelevant, some daft quirk or weakness that should be skated over. We know a little more about oxytocin and bonding now in both sexes so there is no excuse. Unless of course you had a particular reason for ignoring it.

(Beach I made a rambling comment way back at teh start which you asked me to clarify, I think it's a simple as acknowledging that men's view on reality is the view on reality, not v groundbreaking insight but just musing!)

Dworkin then goes on to discuss how the sexual revolution pushed a lot of women to become feminists.

Women realised that they had worked for men (in the realms of sexual 'liberation', civil rights movements, etc) and that they had got very little in return, indeed that had lost a lot and so, they directed their energies onto themselves and the liberation of women from male oppression. An oppression that did not end with the so called sexual revolution (which was no revolution at all unless perhaps an Orwellian one).

From Dworkin (page 90 of pdf and 95 of book) :

Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical
in counterculture terms—women who had been both politically
and sexually active—became radical in new terms: they became
feminists. They were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. They had
fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them
were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights,
and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and
lord knows, they had been fucked.

As Marge Piercy wrote in a
1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:
Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of
what passes for common practice in many places. A man can
bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and
remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for
no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up,
or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a
ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for
no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent
with her. If a macher enters a room full of machers, accompanied
by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that
anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence.
The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant. 5

Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and
he’s our friend. And dangerous. ”6 Acknowledging the forced sex
so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture,
Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock
or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if
she didn’t want to be raped. ”7 These were the beginnings: recognizing
that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as
any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded
women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used
women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing
that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brotherlovers—
they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing
that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually
exploited women within the movement. “But surely, ” wrote Robin
Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize
that it is really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’—
supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order
to replace this vicious one under which we live—turn around
and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper
or wash his socks—he's talking now. We’re used to such attitudes
from the average American clod, but from this brave new
radical? ”8
It was the raw, terrible realization that sex was not brother-sister
but master-servant—that this brave new radical wanted to be not
only master in his own home but pasha in his own harem—that
proved explosive. The women ignited with the realization that they
had been sexually used. Going beyond the male agenda on sexual
liberation, these women discussed sex and politics with one another—
something not done even when they had shared the same
bed with the same man—and discovered that their experiences had
been staggeringly the same, ranging from forced sex to sexual humiliation
to abandonment to cynical manipulation as both menials
and pieces of ass. And the men were entrenched in sex as power:
they wanted the women for fucking, not revolution: the two were
revealed to be different after all. The men refused to change but
even more important they hated the women for refusing to service
them anymore on the old terms—there it was, revealed for what it
was. The women left the men—in droves. The women formed an
autonomous women’s movement, a militant feminist movement, to
fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and to fight
for the sexual justice they had been denied.
From their own experience—especially in being coerced and in
being exchanged—the women found a first premise for their political
movement: that freedom for a woman was predicated on, and
could not exist without, her own absolute control of her own body
in sex and in reproduction. This included not only the right to
terminate a pregnancy but also the right to not have sex, to say no,
to not be fucked. For women, this led to many areas of sexual
discovery about the nature and politics of their own sexual desire,
but for men it was a dead end—most of them never recognized
feminism except in terms of their own sexual deprivation; feminists
were taking away the easy fuck. They did everything they could to
break the back of the feminist movement—and in fact they have
not stopped yet. Especially significant has been their change of
heart and politics on abortion. The right to abortion defined as an
intrinsic part of the sexual revolution was essential to them: who
could bear the horror and cruelty and stupidity of illegal abortion?
The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of a woman’s
right to control her own body, in sex too, was a matter of supreme
indifference.

ReviewsOffers, sorry X-post with your one. Am not posting huge tracts of Dworkin in answer to your post! It is a brilliant passage isn't it. The whole book is amazing.

There is a lot in your post, a lot to think about. I have some stuff to do and will come back in a bit with my thoughts.

Thanks for the clarification on earlier comment - IMO it is a revolutionary thought to acknowledge that men's reality is imposed on women.

Men and women's realities do fundamentally differ don't they, even from a young age. Take periods for example, they change a girl's life a lot in the sense that they have something new and potentially very embarrassing and painful to manage every single month. The only thing vaguely comparable in boys is wet dreams and they're not really similar in terms of incovenience etc.

Also it really struck me how mine and dh's realities differ when I was pregnant with our first child. We were both having a baby but his life changed very little whereas mine was totally different. It actually pissed me off quite a lot because he didn't really acknowledge how much harder the having a baby process was for me. I had always emphasised equality in our relationship but I did feel I deserved special consideration when pregnant simply to take into account the physical strain I was going through. He seemed to think that me relaxing my housekeeping standards (due to exhaustion)

Sorry phone being weird ...was a signal that he could also take it easy when in fact what I wanted him to see was that I needed him to pick up the slack. It took a screaming argument to get the point across but he did improve.

Dh really is a good man but understanding more about feminism has highlighted to me that he like all men does have a sense of entitlement. He listens when I call him on it and has changed his attitude an incredible amount in the last 12 years but it still pops up now and again in small but significant ways.

I know what you mean Cailin. Mine's alright as well, in fact probably as close to unconsciously feminist as you can get, but he doesn't "get it" at all. He read something out to me the other night, I won't repeat in detail, but it was a list of phrases that women's sexual attackers had said to them. He read it out in total confusion, because although some of them were horrible and obviously so, some of them were (to him) completely baffling and he couldn't understand why a rapist would say those things.

It was immediately obvious to me. Also, he didn't get that just hearing terms of sexual violence was pretty upsetting for me - I've never been a victim of rape, but I have experienced enough that the words triggered memories, thoughts and feelings which were uncomfortable. For him they were just words, horrible, but totally unrelated to his life in any way.

Although through the mumsnet relationship boards and feminist boards I've come to realise that men are just people and not anything special or awful or alien, I've swung back the other way a bit I think and realised that there are so many differences between the way men and women think and experience the world because of, well, patriarchy! It makes me wonder if perhaps that is why men and women seem to be so "alien" to each other and the way that each of them think is so incomprehensible at times - because men grow up being unconsciously aware of their privileged position, and women grow up being unconsciously taught they are not as important as men. Of course that's going to colour the way that you think, experience and perceive things.

I am intrigued by the Dworkin passage about the real agenda behind the sexual revolution of the sixties and by ReviewsOffers' anecdotal evidence that suggests some women are not as able to walk away emotionally unscathed from casual sex as some men are (at least, that's my reading of your post, Reviews, - apologies if that is wrong!). Dworkin also seems to be saying that the women involved in the sexual revolution were exploited into having sex - which seems to imply, again, that sex is something women ought realy to be witholding from men.

Do men and women experience sex in a fundamentally different way? Is it, really, all about an orgasm for men and getting as much sex as possible whereas for women it is more of an emotional experience? Have women been made the gatekeepers of sex not only to prevent pregnacy, but to prevent emotional distress to themselves too? I think that is an old stereotype which I'm not sure I agee with.

Is that a possible implication behind Dworkin's analysis or am I reading it all wrong??

BUT, if I'm on the right track with that line of thought - how does this idea link to consent? Because if women and men have a fundamentally different experience of sex - then what is actually being consented to could be poles apart. Couldn't it? Please help me, Wise Women, to think this through, love from Confused of Tunbridge Wells

Wow, just wow Beachcomber total light-bulb moments here!

I have been particularly interested lately in the abortion issue in the USA, and how many states, while unable to repeal Wade Vs Roe in state senates, are doing everything they can to make it impossible for ordinary women to access abortions, on demand or otherwise. I had never really equated it to the issue of consent, but of course, 'allowing' women to have abortions on demand almost negated the need for consent. The man's thought process being 'If I knock her up, she can always get rid of it', and therefore having even less regard to consent from the woman, active or otherwise.

The whole rape myth about women who have 'really' been raped not being 'able' to conceive, and therefore not needing access to abortion is almost like the way witches were tried in the middle ages. If you didn't consent, and it was real rape, you can't conceive, if you have conceived, then you weren't really raped. If you have conceived, you must have in some way consented, and therefore 'deserve' to be pregnant.

When men controlled, or believed they controlled the decisions about abortion, then abortion on demand was an acceptable thing to have, even a boon to men, because they could have all the sex they liked, without any responsibilities. Even more so when the concept of birth control is added to the argument. Plus, it enabled men to absolve themselves of any responsibility, by saying that he had asked (or assumed) about contraception, and then offering to pay for an abortion, he had fulfilled his role. It's only in recent years when women have identified abortion on demand with ideas of true liberation that men have decided that abortion needs to be controlled, even eliminated. Nice girls don't consent, and so can't get pregnant, bad girls not only consent when they want sex but 'cry rape' when they didn't want sex and so can become pregnant, and should be punished by being made to carry the foetus to full term. So slut shaming begins, rape myths continue and women have no active choices left open to them.

So it's not even about whether a woman has consented anymore, it's also about what kind of woman does consent, and whether that kind of woman should be allowed to have bodily autonomy, up to, and including ever being able to withdraw that consent from any man who chooses to have sex on her.

I hope that's making some sort of sense, please critique away, I'm more thinking aloud than coming with any crystalised theories!

I'm finding this thread brilliant on so many levels - the mixture of personal reflection and being talked through some really challenging theory is amazing. I'm not really up to adding much on the theoretical level, but a few things have really rung bells on a personal level.

Cailin Dana's point about the pill and loss of libido really resonates with me - the only reason I've ever felt I should take it was to keep a man happy, because it sure as hell didn't make me happy -crashing depression and loss of sex drive.

Picking up on Reviews and Rosabud's points, I wonder if the truth is a mixture of biology, properly understood (with an eye to the variance of the populations as well as the means) and cultural conditioning. I certainly recognise myself in Review's friend: one dose of oxytocin following orgasm and I bond no matter how crap the prick on the other end of the prick is! Been celibate for many years now, but it was a big problem in my 20s and 30s. On the other hand, I have female friends who do feel comfortable with casual sex (and some who have persuaded themselves they're okay with it), and male friends who are only interested in sex within a loving relationship. But these individual differences are washed out by patriarchal culture which reduces complicated and variable behaviour to stereotypes. Women who like casual sex are painted as sluts and men who want love are dismissed as unmanly. And the whole travesty serves as a rapist's charter, where if women aren't gatekeepers (and sexually inactive) they're seen as eternally available.

The Dworkin Beachcomber quoted really chilled me - because she's writing about the period when someone close to me became sexually active, and got royally screwed over (she once told me that she'd had over a 100 sexual partners by the age of 20, which would be fine if it had been her choice, but it hadn't, not in any meaningful sense - she told me she sometimes had sex because it was easier than saying no). I felt so sad for her.

Lots of interesting stuff here. I've caught up on all the new posts and have had a think about some of the stuff that has come up. Am going to try to get my thoughts out clearly.

Don't mean to derail but all this brings me back to the point I made early on. How is it some women don't internalise a self destructive attitude?

I can only give my personal experience as someone who was in her teens and 20s through the so-called liberated 60s. I had access to the pill from the mid 60s, so technically no fear of pregnancy yet I never saw easy sex as liberating or something I ought to do or at least not make a fuss about or this easier than saying no thing.

Thinking back I don't think I was unusual among my female friends. None of us had any fear of saying fuck off, not interested. It wasn't an issue.

Yet none of us were in any way special and we came from all sorts of backgrounds.

But clearly something must have been different. But what? Upbringing, self-esteem, self-confidence (don't remember us being any more self-confident that women of later decades)?

Maybe we were just more influenced by de Beauvoir, Frieden etc. than those who only came to feminism in the late 60s/early 70s.

It's a huge puzzle.

Okay, on the emotional thing. I think it is impossible for us to know how much of what people feel about sexual relations and sexuality is socialized and how much of it is human nature. So we have to work with what we know to be true. One of the things that we know is that PIV is much riskier for women than it is for men. It is riskier due to pregnancy, due to disease and potentially death, and it is riskier due to socio-cultural stigmatization.

PIV sex is an entirely different experience for women and men; both physical and socio-cultural. It therefore seems logical that we approach it in different ways and feel about it in different ways. PIV is potentially life changing for a woman in ways it is not for a man. A man retains his bodily integrity throughout both the act of PIV and any potential consequences; a woman does not. PIV is political for women in a way it is not for men (reproductive rights, abortion, virginity, motherhood, prostitution, etc).

When a woman agrees to have PIV with a man she is putting her life, her livelihood, her safety, her freedom, her bodily integrity, her physical health, her lifestyle, her independence, her earning ability and her mental well-being on the line. And that list is by no means exhaustive.

Thus it would seem sensible and self-respecting and self-loving on the part of the woman to take PIV somewhat seriously. (Which is not intended to be a judgement of women who engage in casual sex.)

Now, there is a paradox in male dominated society. Men want to have PIV, and plenty of it, so they sort of want women to be free with it. On the other hand men want to control women's reproductive capacities so they don't want the women to be too free with the PIV. And so men separate women into two subclasses; mothers and prostitutes. Both subclasses come under the main heading of the sex class 'woman' and both subclasses are dominated for sex and via sex. Mothers (or potential mothers) are exploited for their reproductive capacities and wifework, prostitutes are exploited for kicks and for money. Both groups of women are financially exploited, both groups of women are expected to provide PIV (and ignore the risks it presents for them) and both groups of women are being oppressed by male conceived institutions.

With the so called sexual revolution, the lines between these two groups became a little blurred (the women in the 'mother' subclass engage in PIV with multiple partners for 'fun' and the women in the 'prostitute' class are presented as liberated women with agency who freely choose to use a 'fun' activity to make money) but the exploitation and social control of women as a class remained the same.

And women felt that they had been betrayed, and they were right, they had.

grimbletart maybe it is about how much a girl or woman manages to retain a sense of self, of individuality. Of herself as her, a person, not as being mainly identified by the label and role of 'woman'. I think how that happens is arbitrary and immensely varied. Sometimes it only takes a small event for an inner lightbulb to be lit. A sort of personal butterfly effect IYSWIM.

One of mine for example was reaching into my parent's bookshelf and pulling out and reading 'The Women's Room' at an impressionable age (probably about 14). I'm not even sure that either of my parents had read it (must ask them sometime...).

I'm trying to catch up, so much to read

I found Right wing women on Ebay and have just bought the book. So look forward to reading it.

I'm really interested in the civil rights movement so this will be useful. I don't agree with all of Dworkin's analysis here about left wing men. Not to say that ordinary young men of a more liberal attitude did not want women liberated to engage in more sex, I'm sure they did.

Marxists (at least those that are read) would say that there is a base and a superstructure. The base structure is the mode of production, here that is capitalism. The super structure is the culture, politics, religion, gender relations, media, literature etc, Gramsci developed a theory "Cultural Hegemony" and proposed that those who hold the social power (under capitalism this is through wealth) dominate mainstream discourse, through media, politics, literature. They seek to build and maintain the consensus of everyone else, so that there is no antagonism to their world view.

With this in mind I don't believe that the left was in the driving seat during the latter part of the civil rights movement. I believe that liberalism is a product of cultural hegemony pushed by the interests of the dominant class.

If you think about how medical research calls upon both state and private capital investment I would argue that right wing men were pursuing the advances that led to the pill.

The civil rights movement originally was in league with the communist party, this was about more than just race and gender but class emancipation. The biggest threat to the capitalist class, is of course class struggle. Far easier to concede ground to blacks and women, lesbians and gays than take on the left.

The sexual liberation of women would have been stoked up in the mainstream culture despite the middle aged conservatives dismay, music and magazines which as we know are corporate owned, privately funded to make money for the capitalist class, don't blindly follow where we lead, but are used to lead us. Just as the Ex-Factor and trash TV, pop lyrics and sport are used to dumb down the young less they become too radical now, culture would have been used to dumb down the young people of the 60/70s.

Lenin said that women would never have equality under capitalism. He told the women to stop discussing sexual liberation, until women had been liberated from the bondage of slavery to house and home, until women had social power, political power and equality economically with men, then men would still view them as the "sex class" I agree with this because I think this has been proven to be correct.

Something that has caused some fairly serious issues between me and dh is this sort of scenario: I'll suggest something fairly big such as moving in together, he'll say no it's not the right time for various reasons,which I'll accept, then a couple of months later he'll suddenly say he's decided now is the right time (no discussion) and I'll be expected to hop to it as though suddenly changing things makes no difference to my life. I explained to him that that behaviour betrays a belief that our life is actually his life and he's the one who dictates its course. He got it and he stopped doing it for the most part although he has had a few slips, which he's owned up to.

Sorry my last post was a late addition to my earlier post mentioning dh's sense of entitlement.

Lenin said that women would never have equality under capitalism. He told the women to stop discussing sexual liberation, until women had been liberated from the bondage of slavery to house and home, until women had social power, political power and equality economically with men, then men would still view them as the "sex class" I agree with this because I think this has been proven to be correct.

This sounds to me like a man trying to get women to stop fighting for themselves and to put their energies into what a man wants and believes.

Whilst I agree that capitalism and women's liberation are contradictory, women will never achieve liberation of any kind until they are liberated from sex based oppression. Women as a class cannot achieve social, political and economic power until they have achieved sexual liberty. Some women may achieve those things, but not women as a class (this is where liberal feminism and radical feminism part from each other IMO).

CailinDana, I think you are right that all men have a sense of entitlement. Some more than others, but they all have it.

No this is not about a man wanting anything, I'll try to explain why. Lenin was ambivalent about marriage and the nuclear family. He believed that relations would evolve and that the left wing women shouldn't force the issue of sexual liberation until changes happened in the base structure which emancipated women economically. The reasons he believed this is because he was using historical materialism to understand how all revolutionary change happens.

People can not make huge leaps in their thinking because their thinking is derived from their material existence and their understanding of this mediated through the super structure which is influenced by cultural hegemony/bourgeois domination. Men will not alter their behaviour towards women just because that is what is demanded today if the requisite revolutionary shift doesn't also occur in the base/economic sphere. This seen with the hiving off of women into to classes at the time of agricultural surpluses being realised and the invention of marriage/nuclear family. See below.

And so men separate women into two subclasses; mothers and prostitutes. Both subclasses come under the main heading of the sex class 'woman' and both subclasses are dominated for sex and via sex. Mothers (or potential mothers) are exploited for their reproductive capacities and wifework, prostitutes are exploited for kicks and for money. Both groups of women are financially exploited, both groups of women are expected to provide PIV (and ignore the risks it presents for them) and both groups of women are being oppressed by male conceived institutions

I agree with everything here. But marriage came about because of private property relations and the need for men to be assured of their progeny. This happened because of evolutionary/technological advancements in the base structure. Various cultural changes happen around this time, such as the overthrow of mother right being reinforced through religion. I'll apologise here as I don't want to cause offence, religion has material foundations, god is a manmade construct so that man could say that man created new life...so give it up lady! a cultural shift occurs that maintains and makes sense of what is happening in the material base. Prostitution is the flip side of marriage and a throw back to an earlier time of sexual liberation for all, where men still want their sexual liberation but require their wives to be chaste. Culture is used to justify the prostitution of some women/although the reasons are material. Those material class relations must be maintained and cultural reinforcement used to ensure this is so, not just to subordinate women but to advance the creation of wealth/the creation of the state/and all social-economic hierarchies, ie patriarchy.

With the so called sexual revolution, the lines between these two groups became a little blurred (the women in the 'mother' subclass engage in PIV with multiple partners for 'fun' and the women in the 'prostitute' class are presented as liberated women with agency who freely choose to use a 'fun' activity to make money) but the exploitation and social control of women as a class remained the same

Yes and this has led to some women having economic emancipation ,freeing her to pursue a life without fear, she can afford to leave an abusive partner, she won't have to prostitute herself to feed her children, she won't be living on a dollar a day. This is a product again of liberalism, liberal feminism is a lame duck. (sorry if that offends) but the breakup of the nuclear family, the economic liberation of some women and the further vulnerability of other women is created by capitalism and class inequality. This class inequality between women prevents women as a class from acting as a class. Middle class women have nothing to gain from the economic emancipation of their sisters. The culture that feeds our conception of self, the consensus that is sought from all of us, is that women have already been emancipated if only they would accept it. But the class differences between women also benefit men because working class women are exploited in pornography and prostitution. And this constitutes the clearest evidence yet that the civil rights movement was subsumed into the the capitalist hegemony and liberalism is the tool that was used and still is.

And I agree with you Beach that the sexual liberation of women hasn't liberated women, it simply makes more women available to more men.

Oh, just wanted to add that I agree that PIV is different for women because of the socio-economic risks and obv risks to health. However I am inclined to think that the socio-economic risks could be reduced but only in a very different society, one that isn't capitalist. I'm sure that in some far away, tucked away little corners of the globe those risks don't exist because looking after new life and providing for the material needs of people is a communal responsibility. If anyone knows of such a place I'll pack my bags now.

I bet radical feminits would have said to Lenin to stop discussing economic class and focus on sex.

Only by ending male dominance could a classless, free, fair, equal, humane society be achieved.

That's my gut reaction.

It's late where I live so I'm off the bed now but will give a more considered response to your post tomorrow.