Who's Read Macho Sluts (Clare Whatling)

Who’s Read Macho Sluts? (Clare Whatling)

In some way I found this article quite interesting and relatable.

By drawing from examples of the book Who's Read Macho Sluts, Whatling focuses on the debate around consensual lesbian sadomasochism. One side says that it is a construction and effect of patriarchy and that it reproduces and condones many power imbalances while the other argues that it is more an imitatation of patriarchal relations as parody and occasionally deconstructs them.

She also speaks of "the notion of moral purity of one group of women (vanilla) is problematic where a hierarchy of values is set up in our society which makes of one practice the norm and of the rest scales of deviance from." (419)I have issues with this idea that everything that falls out of the norms of sexual behaviour is wrong. What is considered normative in sex is usually man and woman, man experiencing pleasure, woman perhaps (if she’s lucky), woman being passive, man being aggressive; this is not always the case obviously but it is the general idea. Or even the assumption that sex between woman and man is out of love and is consensual. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

What I found most interesting in this piece is her discussion on women's relation to violence and sadism as it has been theorized in feminism. Feminism has worked with the idea of violence as the prerogative of men and as the abuse of women. This way of thinking is to Whatling a fundamental one to a certain moment within feminism but argues that this focus on men and violence has ignored other power relations. I think that we have to recognise the power of women in relationships and sex, women are not only victims of abuse but perpetrators of it as well. This ties in to the what Whatling says about what we think is the non-existence of female sexual sadism but that in reality it is rendered invisible by its cultural suppression. "Women are not believed to be sadistic because they are not seen to be, at least if they wish to remain “womanly"."(421) What is the definition of "womanly"? I see this attitude as a refusal or denial on the part of feminism that there is a possibility that patriarchy is not to blame in this case. Since patriarchy has held most of the blame for so long, it seems that feminism might find it difficult to part from it.

The author is also arguing for a way of reading "which allows women access to a multiciplicity of subject positions and thus multiple viewing-pleasures, whereas beforehand only one was theorized, namely the masculine."(423) This made me reflect on the fact that we very often or almost always hear or are forced to hear the stories of male fantasies but very seldom hear of women’s fantasies. It's always about a what men desire (ie: threesome, woman/woman) and women having to hear about it or made to feel guilty about not engaging in these activities to fulfill fantasies. I found it interesting when she gave the example of a lesbian woman giving fellatio to a man and experiencing pleasure as her own. The idea that she’s not doing it because she feels obligated to do so like in some cases of heterosexual relations where a woman is performing the act as a way to satisfy man's desire and/or respond to norms of foreplay.

Another crucial idea in this text, in my opinion, is that feminism allows for fantasies of "Amazons and vampire to our heart’s desire, as soon as fantasy enters the realm of the explicitly sexual, a totally other standard pertains and we are required to police our thoughts for signs of political reaction."(423) It also involves issues of guilt from these fantasies. I always wondered that if one like myself who has a feminist identity fantasises about events or actions that in reality are against what whe are fighting for or believe in, should feel guilty. Whatling argues that we cannot assume that "although fantasy isn’t real, it is culpable because it imitates actual events, in other words, that someone’s fantasy is someone else’s reality."(425) We have to remind ourselves that there is no active relation to what torture means in reality. There needs to be exploration of the pyschological relation between fantasy and desire. At the same time, Whatling explains that desire does not have to be confined to one’s active sexual preference, that sexual identity does not necessarily have to do with the one you take on in your fantasy, which in the end, allows for more freedom of self identification. It allows for choices basically.