The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

PREFACE TO 1997 EDITION
Blackman, Mary McIntosh, Sue O’Sullivan, Pratibha Parmar
and Alison Read say they will challenge the feminist
antipornography campaigns taking place in the UK at that time
which they accuse of having ‘grossly distorted the issues by
relying on a simplistic moralism and a crude essentialism’
(Blackman et al., 1990, p.2). This issue is the antidote. It
contains a piece by Mary Hunt, a sexual libertarian American
lesbian, entitled, The De-eroticisation of Women’s Liberation:
Social Purity Movements and the Revolutionary Feminism of
Sheila Jeffreys’. Hunt makes it clear that her main concern is
with the radical/revolutionary feminist critique of
sadomasochism as a sexual practice. She was an angry critic of
a speech I made at a conference in 1987 in Massachusetts on
‘Sexuality and Power’ which was entitled, ‘Eroticising women’s
subordination from Havelock Ellis to Gayle Rubin’. Her critique
here centres on my interpretation of nineteenth-century feminist
anti-sexual violence campaigners.
According to Hunt, my book reflects a tradition of
‘revolutionary feminism (or “radical feminism” as we tend to
call it in the USA)’ which defines ‘the vast majority of women
in the world as helpless victims who need to be saved’ (Hunt,
1990, p.24). The revolutionary feminist approach is ‘reductionist
and exclusionary’, ‘disturbing’, ‘uncritical’, ‘astounding’. This
was a surprise since I had done my best to complicate the
discussion of this period in the history of sexuality and sought
to show exactly what late-nineteenth-century feminists were
thinking. Some of their ideas could be seen as approximating
to traditional morality, whilst others constituted radical
transformations of thinking about sex; questioning all of men’s
prerogatives within marriage and without, questioning the
biological imperative and the double standard, and the authority
of fathers. An enthusiasm for pornography seems to inspire her
rage at my work. Some women, she says, ‘like and feel
empowered by pornography’ (Ibid., p.43). The revolutionary
feminist approach would ‘keep us tied to the most cautious,
conformist, guilt-ridden and rigid of personal, ideological and
sexual styles’ (Ibid., p.40). In the same year that her angry
critique was published, my second book, Anticlimax, developed
an even more detailed analysis of what was wrong with the
sexuality of dominance and submission and called for the pursuit
of ‘homosexual desire’ or a sexuality which eroticised equality
instead of the eroticised difference of power which was
exemplified in ‘heterosexual desire’ (Jeffreys, 1990). Since I was
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