The feminist debates over the SlutWalks are just the latest episode in the ongoing discussion within
feminism about the role of sexuality in women’s liberation. For earlier generations of feminists, the key
issue at hand was to get the larger society to acknowledge that women are sexual beings with desires of
their own. For example, as discussed in chapter 2, when “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” was first
distributed in 1968, many of its female (and feminist) readers were shocked to learn about the role of the
clitoris in female sexuality. Up until this point in history, women’s bodies and women’s desires were
defined almost exclusively in male terms. One of the most important gains of the women’s liberation
movement of the 1960s and ’70s was its challenge to cultural norms around women’s sexuality: women
were encouraged to pursue their own pleasures and desires, including with other women, and to see
themselves as sexual agents as much as men are. Although feminists of that period disagreed mightily
about what sexual liberation meant for women—intensely debating such issues as pornography, sex work,
censorship, sadomasochism, and other sexual practices, as well as what constituted “good” feminist sex
—they passed on a legacy of speaking frankly about female sexuality and female pleasure that carried into
the next generation. This legacy can be seen in everything from the career of pop icon Madonna—who
famously sang that she felt “like a virgin,” suggesting she was clearly not one—to the success of the
television series Sex and the City to the fact that over half of women today own a vibrator and female
masturbation is no longer the taboo subject it once was.
Since the early 1990s, feminists have become increasingly concerned with how women can pursue
their own desires and assert their own agency within a highly sexualized culture where women’s bodies
continue to be commodified and exploited. As pornography has become widely accessible and acceptable
within U.S. culture—what’s been termed the “pornification” of sexuality—the representation of women as
sex objects is ubiquitous. At the very historical moment when women have more economic, social, and
political power than ever before, they are still overly represented as sexualized and subservient beings—
and nowhere is this more evident than in pornography, the vast majority of which is still made for and
consumed by heterosexual men. When the second-wave anti-pornography movement began in the 1970s,
pornography was itself quite different. In order to see a pornographic film, one needed to go to a movie
theater where such films were shown. Pornographic images were primarily distributed through magazines
sold behind the counter. As in so many other areas of life, technological changes since 1990 have
dramatically changed the pornography industry. The digitalization of images moved pornography from the
seedy porn theater of the 1970s to the privacy of one’s home and laptop, as most consumers of
pornography now access porn through the Internet.
Those who have come of age after the Internet revolution have lived their entire lives in a media-
saturated society, where sexualized images of women are everywhere. Porn has had a dramatic impact on
how boys and girls, men and women, learn about human sexuality and human desire. Porn’s representation
of gender relations and sexuality is now everywhere, including advertising. Women are all too often
depicted as nothing more than sex objects for male viewers, just as they were in the mid-twentieth
century, and some argue that the situation has only gotten worse. As one commentator noted: “Despite the
massive gains we’ve made, thanks to our feminist foremothers, we’ve barely dented the veneer of sexism
in our culture. . . . Some forms of sexism have actually worsened since the second wave. There is more
pressure than ever on women to starve and despise their bodies in mimicry of a false, fantasized ideal.”^86
In short, women still face the same pressure to conform to a male fantasy of womanhood, only the fantasy
has shifted: it is no longer the virginal “good girl” who is the ideal, but rather the porn-star-like “bad
girl” who is. At the same time that this hypersexualized image of “female liberation” is being touted as the
new goal, young women in the United States receive little in the way of comprehensive sex education,
they have the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, and they risk being called “sluts”