New Millennial Sexstyles, and: Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982 (review)

The two books under review, Desiring Revolution: Second-Wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920-1982 by Jane Gerhard, and New Millennial Sexstyles by Carol Siegel cover overlapping time periods, but take different analytical directions. Siegel delves into the youth culture to conjure up a response to sex and gender issues that will perplex anyone not familiar with rap, punk, and heavy metal groups like W.A.S.P. (We Are Sexual Perverts), Nine Inch Nails, Afghan Whigs, and others whose performance art includes music about sado-masochism, "the Curse," bondage, dramatization of victimization, and abuse.

She addresses the generation gap through her informal interviews of people between the ages of 13 and 25. But who are the young women in this sample she describes who "forcefully assert their refusal to be duped by romantic love or dominated by males" (101)? Who populates the women she calls her generation, those who "see heterosexual activity as a competition in which women can only attain pleasure if they manipulate men into acting affectionate by withholding the sexual pleasures men seek" (100)? And, did I miss something growing up, like having "oral sex in the back row of a movie theater, a common practice of youth for at least the last fifty years" (101)?

This is the latter part of the book, which some may decide to forego. If we go back to the beginning, Siegel provides a useful perspective on sex and gender change. Here she becomes a situated speaker by introducing the reader to herself--her thoughts, her life, her feminism. She describes herself as a feminist who has experienced irrational and uncontrolled love for men. She wants to write about heterosexual love and sex as a challenge to the ways these terms have been vilified, and also because of her awareness of the "radical changes in American culture surrounding representations of sexuality, love, and gender" (3). Interestingly, it was this awareness that coincided with her alienation from academic feminist discourse.

As she sees it, feminist theory provides only two options for heterosexual women: demand a committed relationship in exchange for sex or give it up to selfish men. She recognizes early feminist desire for unrestricted sexual pleasure, but considers it naïve since feminists were seen as anti-sexual by the 1970s. Rather than resolve these opposing views, Siegel says they became more entrenched during the 1980s. She suggests we all "come out" and speak about our lives in order to allow the full range of sexualities to build our feminist praxis. For example, she describes her desire to feel "completely nurtured and absolutely free," what she later defines as non-complicitous heterosexuality (21).

Heterophobia she describes as the fear of too much and too strong erotic feelings. Conversely, she points to the legal battle to privilege and protect traditional marriage, including the acceptance of the medication Viagra. Can anyone forget the woman smiling adoringly at her now virulent man with wedding rings shining on both their fingers?

She provides a catalog of cultural messages in films and finally into the music scene mentioned earlier, all describing the changed experiential world people live in that, according to Siegel, academics have yet to discover. I found the early chapters to be important but wonder, perhaps, if before writing her book, Siegel had read Gerhard's, she might not have been so hard on academic feminists and activists in the women's movement.

Gerhard, like Siegel, is interested in heterosexual women's sexual lives; but, unlike Siegel, she credits second-wave feminism with giving women the right to make decisions about their bodies and, most...