Abstract
On June 15, 2021, a range of news outlets reported that Harvey Weinstein, the former Hollywood mogul found guilty of multiple counts of rape and sexual assault in New York, would be extradited to California, where he would face additional charges that he attacked five women in Los Angeles. 1 To many observers and activists, this news was a high-profile victory for the #MeToo movement, alongside the growing number of laws, sexual harassment complaints, and other sociolegal developments that have emerged in its wake. Lorna Bracewell’s sharp and incisive book, Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual Freedom in the #MeToo Era, is thus an important intervention that challenges readers to think critically about these events by situating them within the political struggles and conceptual transformations of the feminist sex wars.
Bracewell begins by trenchantly reminding readers that #MeToo sparked a backlash from conservative and progressive groups, raising alarms that the movement “is riding roughshod over due process rights and civil liberties” (3). Although these groups held very different sexual ethics, their shared concerns signaled #MeToo’s deeper attachment to the core tenets of classical liberalism—namely, individual rights, formal equality, limited government, and the rule of law. As a result, the movement has prioritized legalistic responses to issues of sexual violence “over goals like dismantling entrenched structural inequalities of race, gender, class, and sexuality” (4). The core goal of Bracewell’s book, then, is to explore how such a broad swath of the political spectrum in the contemporary United States came to embrace such “a narrow set of political possibilities for resisting the wielding of sex as an instrument of domination” (4).
To answer this very important and vexing problem, Bracewell traces contemporary sexual political debates back to the so-called feminist sex wars—the series of conflicts over sex and sexuality that embroiled the US feminist movement from the 1970s to the 1990s. The sex wars tend to be remembered through what she terms “the catfight narrative,” a straightforward clash at the 1982 “Scholar and Feminist” conference, at Barnard College, between “sex-negative feminists concerned primarily with sexual danger on one side and sex-positive feminists concerned primarily with sexual pleasure on the other side” (5). Bracewell’s central goal is to “explode the catfight narrative, and the narrow and debilitating feminist sexual politics it secretes” by excavating and critically analyzing “aspects of the sex wars that the Barnard-centric catfight narrative has occluded from view” (11). She conducts this examination by considering (1) the role of liberalism and its associated concepts advanced by various liberal jurists, philosophers, and activists who were not present at Barnard, but engaged in the sex wars in various ways, and (2) the contributions of feminists of color, arguing here that by articulating “their own distinctive analyses of pornography, S&M, and other sex-related issues [they] challenged the terms in which white feminists were analyzing these issues at the time and exceeding and confounding reductive pro-sex/anti-sex categories” (12). Altogether, her analysis reveals how the sex wars were in fact “a dynamic and multidimensional series of conflicts, relationships, and exchanges between several different parties” (14) that produced multiple visions of sexual freedom that, one may hope, will “fire feminist imaginations and fuel the vital political work of fighting for sexual freedom beyond the bounds of liberal convention in the present” (33).
To illustrate her arguments, Bracewell’s seamlessly organized book begins with an introduction that sketches the parameters of, and contemporary scholarship regarding, the “catfight” narrative, defines key terms, and outlines the remainder of the book. The first two chapters examine the relationship between antipornography feminism and liberalism. Chapter 1 shows how the antipornography feminism of the 1970s was actually born of a liberal project in the 1950s that sought to upend the legal regulation of pornography in the name of privacy and free speech. The chapter then richly describes antipornography feminists’ efforts to challenge this project and critically engage with liberalism. Chapter 2 turns to the relationship between antipornography feminism and liberalism, showing how prominent liberal political philosophers, legal theorists, and jurists challenged antipornography feminism to pioneer what Bracewell terms “an improbable ideological amalgam” (68): an antipornography liberalism that, in its simplest form, sought to reconcile civil libertarian concerns about the First Amendment and feminist concerns about pornography through measures such as regulating pornography.
Chapters 3 through 5 examine the dynamic relationship between liberalism and sex radical feminism. Chapter 3 shows how sex radical feminism in fact predated the Barnard conference by more than a decade, when sex radicals critiqued heterosexuality and defended those on the sexual fringes to rebuke the “narrow sexual politics of post-war liberalism” (107). However, as sex radical feminists mobilized to oppose various antipornography measures, many of their “most distinctive aspects did not survive liberal translation” (124). Chapter 4 centers Black and Third World feminists (as many nonwhite feminists referred to themselves in the 1970s and 1980s) to show how they “articulated their own distinct analyses of pornography, S&M, and other sex-related issues” (12). Although they were often sidelined within the predominantly white mainstream women’s movement, they presciently rejected a “monistic antipornography feminism” that insisted “that the sexual violence incited by pornography should be women’s top priority and that action on “other issues” should be postponed” (142). Chapter 5, the conclusion, reflects on the preceding four chapters and the implications of their analyses for contemporary sexual politics’ carceral turn, using the antirape SlutWalks, trigger warnings, and #MeToo as case studies.
Bracewell’s book is a fascinating, accessible, and instructive work that makes at least two invaluable scholarly contributions. First, the book thoroughly complicates the binary catfight narrative of the sex wars. As a scholar who has researched, written, and taught about public policy and political activism related to the sex industry in the United States, I have admittedly glossed over the sex wars in my own work, quickly summing them up as a historical “moment”—an internecine (mostly white) academic debate between pro- and antisex feminists. Bracewell’s book makes an impeccably researched and beautifully written case for why we need to rethink this catfight narrative by examining the wider historical context of and range of actors in these debates. Here chapter 4 is particularly enlightening and instructive. To my knowledge, predominantly white feminists and scholars have paid little attention to Black and Third World feminists’ diverse contributions to feminist debates about pornography—a tendency that aligns with a longer historical trend of marginalizing, if not silencing, their contributions to other era-defining feminist debates. And this trend continues to this day: to name just one contemporary example, the white actor Alyssa Milano was initially credited for the phrase “Me Too” in 2017, even though Tarana Burke, a Black woman with a long history of activism around sexual assault and harassment in the United States, coined the phrase in 2006. As Bracewell clearly shows, this marginalization has had significant consequences for feminist politics: because the white antipornography and sex-radical feminists failed to heed Third World and Black women’s calls for more intersectional analyses of sex and sexuality, they “smoothed the way for the liberal appropriations and co-optations described in chapters 2 and 3” (132).
Bracewell’s second major scholarly contribution is to rethink how we understand “carceral feminism,” which, broadly speaking, describes gender justice in terms of criminal justice, where criminalization, prosecution, and incarceration are integral to women’s liberation. Whereas scholars tend to portray carceral feminism as “primarily a product of the confluence of feminist and conservative energies” (182), Bracewell shows that while this description may be true to an extent, carceral feminism has deeper roots. In fact, feminism’s current “carceral thrust” derives “not from some latent conservative impulses or ill-advised conservative alliances, but from consummately liberal commitments” (185). Here Bracewell’s discussion of the SlutWalk movement is particularly instructive, showing that instead of promoting a deeply anticarceral message, the movement has placed “virtually all responsibility for sexual assault on individual perpetrators and figures the carceral state as the guarantor of women’s sexual freedom” (188), thereby indicating the movement’s deeply liberal roots in and commitments to privacy, freedom of speech and conscience, and limited government.
Yet as a scholar who studies sex work, I was a bit puzzled that Bracewell did not consider in more depth how sex workers and the sex worker rights movement figured in to the sex wars’ discursive milieu. Although the book considers so-called sex radicals’ activities, and it mentions the contributions of “scholars, artists, and activists” (131) in chapter 4, Bracewell does not discuss sex workers and their activism specifically, in any depth or detail, even as their activism ascended with the sex wars. Of course, Bracewell had to delineate the scope of her project, and her focus on pornography and the prominent feminist and legal scholars and activists who debated this is understandable, as the sex worker rights movement in the US is more commonly associated with prostitution and efforts to decriminalize it. However, it goes without saying that many antipornography feminists also opposed prostitution, and so sex workers of all stripes have long been key interlocutors in the sex wars’ multidimensional conflicts. To name just one example, in the early 1980s, antiporn feminist Kathleen Barry refused to appear on television with any prostitutes or ex-prostitutes prior to a conference on “female sexual slavery” because she believed that their histories of violence, abuse, and poverty prevented them from speaking objectively. 2 And in another example, since the late 1990s, antipornography activists featured in Bracewell’s book such as Laura Lederer shifted their focus to prostitution, conflating it with sex trafficking and supporting more carceral responses thereto from within the second Bush administration. 3
Hearing more from those who worked in the sex industry—and in the pornography sector specifically—would enrich the book’s discussion and complication of the catfight narrative and its liberal roots. While sex worker rights activists have certainly pushed for liberal-legal solutions to violence in the sex industry, such as changes to criminal laws, they have been particularly attentive to intersecting issues of labor, health, and race. In fact, since the early 1970s, the pioneering sex worker rights group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) pushed for states to decriminalize prostitution and it worked to protect sex workers’ health and safety in all sectors of the industry. These efforts continue to this day and include efforts to unionize sex workers in legal sectors of the industry such as pornography and dancing. 4 Therefore, hearing more about how antipornography, sex radical, and liberal-legal scholars responded to these sex worker–led efforts, if at all, would help to show the broader, more structurally intersectional set of possibilities that the catfight narrative missed, and that the #MeToo movement could embrace going forward.
Even without explicit attention to sex worker rights activism, Bracewell’s book remains an incredibly important work. Not only does it question and complicate what many of us thought we knew about the sex wars and carceral feminism, it also pushes us to conduct and engage more interdisciplinary research. Bracewell’s deeply researched and clearly written book demonstrates how political theorists may also produce rich works of political history that inform contemporary feminist and other debates. For all of these reasons, Why We Lost the Sex Wars is a must read for scholars of liberalism, feminist political theory, and sexuality and politics.