"Do-Me" Feminism and the Rise of Raunch

By Andi Zeilser, Seal Press. Posted October 16, 2008.

From the book Feminism and Pop Culture by Andi Zeisler. Excerpted by arrangement with Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2008.

Constructing a politics of pleasure has been key to third wave feminism. Thanks to their brave and often unsettling analyses of sexual power structures and the connections between pornography and a larger system of male dominance, feminists of the 1960s and '70s had gotten roundly tarred as being antisex, antiporn, antiheterosexual, and just generally prudish. In part to address this stereotype, the interest in feminist theories of sexuality and the development of a prosex politics became one of the strongest threads of feminism throughout the 1990s and the 2000s. Feminists have debated age-old virgin-whore dichotomies, have called for representations of alternative sexualities and of heterosexuality as experienced by people of all colors and abilities, and have offered controversial-but-compelling perspectives on the power dynamics of everything from butch/femme to S/M. That said, promoting pleasure for women has been as frustrating as it is crucial, thanks in large part to a media and pop culture that still depends on -- and overwhelmingly presents -- a limited view of female sexuality riddled with moralism, judgment, and classic double standards.

Take the phrase "Do-me feminism," coined by journalist Tad Friend in a 1994 Esquire article called "Feminist Women Who Like Sex," which name-checked the likes of Susie Bright, Naomi Wolf, bell hooks, Pat (now Patrick) Califia, and Lisa Palac, writers whose work was concerned with, among other things, creating a broader, more inclusive sexual paradigm. Some of these authors had written previously about feeling that their interest in sex, especially heterosexual sex, made them outsiders in a feminist world that ostensibly believed "Not all rape is intercourse, but all intercourse is rape" (a sentiment falsely but repeatedly attributed to famed antipornography activists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon). Wolf famously wrote in her book Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century that she finds shelter and solace in the male body, and that "there is an elaborate vocabulary in which to describe sexual harm done by men, but almost no vocabulary in which a woman can celebrate sex with men."

Friend's piece picked up on these quotes to construct a straw- woman argument against the dogmatic, antisex profile of second wave feminists and to subsequently champion the women who were supposedly "beating their swords into bustiers" and expressing their feminism one amazing blow job at time. The article's title said it all -- in identifying "feminist women who like sex," Esquire implied that, as a rule, feminist women don't like sex. And ultimately, the piece was service journalism, not so much intended to open an informed dialogue about sex as to convey via heavy breathing that, Hey guys! Hot feminist women want to have sex with you! And thus, a new feminism entered the mainstream -- leading with its breasts -- and became a key example of why feminism just couldn't be easily translated into mainstream media formulas.

This idea of do-me feminism as the dominant identity of the third wave extended to a rekindled interest in the intersections of feminism and sex work. The idea that sex-based economies could grapple with and engage in feminism was not a new one; it had been limned in the mid-1990s by the likes of On Our Backs magazine and in the thoughtful work of authors such as Bright, Califia, Palac, Carol Queen, and Annie Sprinkle. The 1997 anthology Whores and Other Feminists offered a bracing look at how the worlds of peep shows, stripping, prostitution, domination/submission, and porn professionals interact with feminism in both theory and practice. The book's editor, Jill Nagle, was inspired to collect such stories by a roundtable on the sex industry in a 1994 issue of Ms. magazine that featured only one participant who had actually been involved in sex work -- the notoriously rigid, if impressively impassioned, Dworkin. In an interview with the online literary magazine Beatrice, Nagle clarified why she so badly wanted the book out in the world:

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