Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times

12. Changing the World One Orgasm at a Time: Sex Positive Retail Activism

240 | 12 Changing the World One Orgasm at a Time Sex Positive Retail Activism Lynn Comella When women talk about sex, it changes the culture. Our perspectives have been hidden or misrepresented; any degree of change in that situation registers on a cultural level. Women have been fostered through feminism and our fervid conversations about sex into activism. Carol Queen In May 2001, Babeland, the women-run sex toy company, held a rather unusual press conference at its retail store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Provocatively dubbed a “Masturbation Summit,” the event brought members of the press together with an impressive group of feminist activists and educators who had been invited by the business’s owners to discuss the benefits of masturbation and the importance of sexual freedom. In an effort to bring the topic of masturbation out into the open, a number of feminist sex toy businesses have joined together since 1996 in declaring the month of May a nationwide celebration of masturbation. Conceived by Good Vibrations in San Francisco, Masturbation May was created in response to the firing of US surgeon general Dr. Joycelyn Elders by President Bill Clinton in December 1994 after she suggested that information about masturbation should be included in sex education courses. Although Masturbation May began as a way to speak out about masturbation and educate the public about its benefits, it has since evolved into a highly successful public relations machine that helps promote women-run sex toy stores and the business of masturbation as a matter of both sexual consciousness-raising and commerce. Babeland’s Masturbation Summit kicked off a month of masturbationrelated events, including the release of the company’s Masturbation Nation Changing the World One Orgasm at a Time | 241 Survey Results, masturbation education workshops at their stores in Seattle and New York City, and the Third National Masturbate-A-Thon. With the catchy slogan “Come for a Cause” the Masturbate-A-Thon is described as the most “fun philanthropy around.” Similar to a walk-a-thon, the Masturbate -A-Thon is a fundraising event where participants ask their friends and coworkers to sponsor them for every minute they masturbate on a designated day in May, with proceeds going to various community-based organizations that promote women’s health. The fundraiser serves several purposes: it is intended to raise “masturbation consciousness” and money for organizations like the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers and generate press and publicity for Babeland and other participating businesses.1 I begin this chapter with a reference to Babeland’s Masturbation Summit because it provides a concrete illustration of how sex-positive retailers have used marketplace culture as a platform for advancing a feminist project of sexual liberation and education, one that combines second-wave feminism’s emphasis on social transformation with what Rosalind Gill describes as a “postfeminist sensibility.”2 As many feminist scholars have noted, postfeminist culture draws on elements of feminism, including discourses of “choice,” “empowerment,” and “freedom,” while simultaneously transforming these elements into a highly atomized, consumer-oriented politics of individualism , leaving feminism’s emphasis on collective politics and social transformation in its wake.3 The result is often an extremely contradictory, highly stylized, hypersexualized, and exceedingly commodified version of what Angela McRobbie views as a “faux feminism”4 —a politically neutered version of popular feminism that simultaneously acknowledges feminism’s gains while rejecting its seemingly “outmoded” and “strident” politics. Ariel Levy’s analysis of raunch culture is particularly illuminating in this respect. Raunch culture can best be described as a Girls Gone Wild style of sexual empowerment—a “tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality ”5 that resembles a “fantasy world dreamed up by teenage boys.”6 According to Levy, raunch is an essentially commercialized brand of sexiness, which has “diluted the effect of both sex radicals and feminists, who’ve seen their movement’s images popularized while their ideals are forgotten.”7 Despite her trenchant critique of raunch culture’s “neo-sexism,” Levy seems to indict all forms of commercialized female sexuality, suggesting they are intrinsically antifeminist and antiwoman—a claim I seek to challenge. I suggest we would be conceding too much political ground if we handed over wholesale the messy, contested, and contradictory terrain of female sexuality and commercial culture to postfeminism. By positioning feminist sex 242 | Community, Movements, Politics toy stores as cultural sites where feminism lives—and has lived for...