Read Online Loose Women, Lecherous Men by Linda Lemoncheck - Free Book Online

in fierce competition with their younger counterparts for still sexually attractive older men. For women who do choose marriage, the specter of a multitude of heterosexually active single women often represents not only a real threat to any hope of an emotionally stable and financially secure domestic life but also the threat of contracting their husband's sexually transmitted diseases. A single woman, not an errant husband, is most likely to be singled out for censure or abuse, since it is she who has historically been described as tempting men into sin. 4 In this patriarchal climate, a sexually promiscuous woman is regarded derogatorily by both other women and men as nothing more than a "slut."
At a time of often brutal and unpredictable sexual violence against women, the spontaneous or casual sex associated with promiscuity has made many women eschew sex with multiple partners as too risky to be worth any anticipated pleasure. The alarming frequency of acquaintance rape, in which the victim knows her assailant, has left many single women with little prospect of a safe sexual life. Yet many women, especially teenagers, feel tremendous peer pressure to have sex, in a post-Victorian society that still marks sexually reticent women as "frigid." Such pressure can lead to psychological turmoil when the emotional investment a woman may have made in her sexual relationship is not reciprocated. At its worst, resistance to such pressure can lead to rape. Combine such concerns with the fear of AIDS, which has everyone from sex educators to political pundits advocating abstinence as the only safe sex outside of marriage, and it is no wonder that promiscuity is regarded by many women as the pursuit of personal danger and sexual anxiety, not sexual pleasure and psychological well-being. 5
The issue of a woman's control over her own body has been one of the most important political platforms of the women's movement. To tell a woman that she cannot or should not be promiscuous seems to run counter to the feminist effort to secure sexual agency and self-definition for all women. Many feminists regard the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as its contemporary vestiges, as serving primarily the interests of men precisely because the movement made

 

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more women sexually available to men without affording enough women the economic and political tools to escape being sexually subordinated by them. According to this view, sexual liberation convinced women that sex without love or marriage was a good thing without giving women the opportunity to define what good sex is for women . Heterosexual and lesbian feminists alike have argued that truly liberating sex for women requires a fundamental reconceptualization and reevaluation of women's sexual exploration, pleasure, and agency. 6
Such reframing raises difficult questions, however: Should a feminist reconceptualization of women's sexual desire include a sexually promiscuous lifestyle? Or are promiscuous women simply appropriating a masculine sexual value that is ill-suited to our temperament as women? What exactly counts as promiscuous sex, and what, if anything, can promiscuity contribute to women's control over our bodies in an environment increasingly characterized by sexual violence, disease, and death? This chapter explores these questions from the "view from somewhere different" introduced in chapter 1, which characterizes women's sexual promiscuity as a contextual and dialectical function of both women's sexual oppression and our sexual liberation. From such a perspective, a woman's promiscuity is understood contextually, in terms of her particular social location ("What is it like to be her?") and in terms of how those who would question her behavior are perceived by her ("What is it like to be us in her eyes?") From the "view from somewhere different,'' a woman's promiscuity is also understood dialectically, as both encouraging her subordination by men