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 Is feminism on the side of sexual candor? Sure, sometimes. Feminism is on the side of women, one way or another -- I guess we shouldn't be surprised at how many different forms that takes. Being sex-positive myself, I find it difficult to be patient with what I see as sex-negative feminism. But I try to remember that the motive is probably more the same than different: helping to free women from oppression. We just see oppression in different ways. Strange bedfellows! I'm forty -- radicalized in the '70s by Betty Friedan, Our Bodies, Ourselves, the women's clinic movement, Betty [Dodson]'s marvelous labia paintings and my own endless itches. This was a time I think of as "earth-mother feminism": the body is a groovy place and sex is good and if you don't feel that way, you need your consciousness raised. No room for doubts! It was sexually "liberated" but extremely oppressive in its own way. I became sexually active the same year abortion was legalized -- and I quickly discovered how unfriendly to women the sexual revolution was. That it was about men getting to fuck you when they wanted as much as it was about everything else, and it paled fast. But I was equally disillusioned by gay "liberation" and its absolute dismissal of bisexuality. I have always been -- in Susie's charming acronym -- a LIBSWM, a lesbian-identified-bisexual-who- sleeps-with-men (and women, how do we say that, Susie? LIBSWMAW?). But until the last few years, there's been no community for the many women like me -- not feminism, not the gay community, not swingers, not the nuclear family unit. I always thought feminism would be that place, that women-identified-women would, simply, welcome other women-identified-women without demanding certain hairstyles, clothing, voting patterns or sexual behavior. Instead, I find self-identified feminists of every stripe all too ready to claim that only their version counts. But it's a young movement, as history goes -- and we're not done yet. 
- Betty's response to Sallie |
Question 1 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 2 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 3 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 4 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 5 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 6 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale |
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