Ann Marlowe on sex and power

No intercourse, please -- we're enlightened. Brilliantly infuriating essay by Ann Marlowe at Salon (yeah, you'll have to watch a Flash ad to get the day pass) about sex and power, social equality and low-quality sex, oral sex vs. fucking.

I suspect that there's a connection between the collapse of masculine authority and the mainstreaming of S/M; neither gender is too good at distinguishing power and authority, and nostalgia for male authority can translate into fetishizing symbols of power. Women secretly want men with authority, but they fall for insecure passive-aggressive guys who view every aspect of life as a power struggle, or for cranky killjoys or petty sadists.

The collapse of the patriarchy was supposed to make women happy -- we were supposed to get more sex, freer sex, better sex, more loving sex and better relations between men and women. If you went to an Ivy League college in the last 20 years or had a professor who did, you probably heard something about this.

But instead men treat women worse than ever, women are retreating to 1950s notions that sex is something men like, and the nearly successful effort to stamp out gender contrast has made upper-middle-class American sex miserably dull, with or without handcuffs. Men and women are just too much alike stylistically now for much erotic energy to arise from their conjunction.

Posted on Wed, Oct 1, 2003 at 12:20 AM