Fantasy of a Demon Eros; or, Feminist Erotic Ethics of the Perverse Sort

Here’s what I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks.

Many thanks to the wonderful feminist theory class that gave me the freedom and stimulation to explore these themes with this kind of voice.

And dedicated to my Daddy, who puts up with a hell of a lot, and not just when I’m writing . . .

 

 

***
“What kind of fucking feminist are you now?”

 

She’s bent over the vanity stool, naked except for cuffs and chains and a heavy silver collar, the lock to which presses into the pocket of her throat. She tries to swallow it away, but it won’t budge. He stands behind her, still, except for the rocking motion she can sense, the slight breeze. Behind the blindfold race images, his hanging and pierced breasts, cane in one hand, flogger in other, eyes that burn, a caress of flame. She smells leather, anticipates the sharp and smooth edge of the cane, consistently amazed that such an ill-formed rod, unfinished but not rough, crooked but not bent, can create such a mixture of emotion and desire.

 

“I said,” his mouth at her ear, hand wrapped into her hair and pulling her head up and back slowly, “what kind of feminist are you now?”

 

The contract lays on the vanity, discussed, negotiated, compromised, satisfied, written and re-written, finally signed. Good for the next month. She begins to laugh, which she does when confronted with a deep joy inside herself, which is so much of a relief from what she views as her default emotion of tears. She begins to laugh, and he begins to laugh, she relaxes and breathes in deep, knowing it will come now. The arm with the cane draws back—

Here is our twenty-first century feminist heroine: ambivalent, doubtful, willing, curious, confused; at the same time, she is interested in ethics, in consciousness and self-awareness, in the interdependence of sex and imagination and power. Weighty concepts that lay on her tongue, sink down the back of her throat, rest full—sometimes unsettled, sometimes satisfied—in the gut. Here and for now she is female and feminine and submissive and masochistic. And, let us not forget, feminist. She struggles, sometimes, with these identifications. She resists. She persists. She bows her head and yields. But she is not weak.

This narrative, this fantasy of a contemporary feminist heroine engenders questions (“nagging” questions, to cite a relevant anthology) that have been circulating within feminist theory and activism for no short amount of time. How comfortable are, or should, we be with the power dynamics in our erotic relations? How comfortable are we with an image of female sexuality that is clearly masochistic and submissive, but also clearly consensual and pleasurable, and clearly part of a self-identified feminist subjectivity? What is the use of such paradoxes, such perversities? How in the world can we distill a feminist erotic ethics from the above image?

Our heroine is haunted by these specters of theories and debates, right and wrong, should and shouldn’t, split between the personal and the political. Split over how desire, when named political, is opened to celebration or refusal. One or the other, never or rarely a complex movement to and from, between, among, both/and, letting the joy and the critique revise and inform one another. Never a movement of ambivalence. This is a heroine who, at some point, perhaps, read a little in feminist theory and finds it invading the bedroom, her work, the kitchen, the bathroom, her walks through the park, and certainly her talks with “vanilla” friends. And play, of course play. The moment she is asked to submit and fights back, despite the fact that she has elected to be in a submissive scene. These questions, these debates, also continue to haunt social, cultural, and critical discourses, whether or not they bill themselves as feminist. Nevermind that the feminist “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s seem to have dissipated, seem to rest in an uneasy truce.

I have before me two texts representing the spectrum of feminist debates over sexuality: radical feminist Catharine A. Mackinnon’s “Sexuality” and feminist sex radical Carole S. Vance’s “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” I find clues in the very publication of the texts themselves. The former, heavily anthologized and cited, included in a mainstream anthology of feminist theory. The latter, the first essay in a collection generated from a conference on the pleasures and dangers of female sexuality—now out of print and incredibly difficult to find. My copy, an ex-library book ordered from an online used bookstore, has stamped in red block letters on the first page: WITHDRAWN. I wonder if from disuse or from offense. I fantasize the stamp as a marker of danger. I take up the text with reverence, as an artifact, as a testament to a persistent threat. There is something to value here, something for our new feminist heroine. Something pleasurable and dangerous. Dangerous in its pleasure. Pleasurable in its danger.

In the beginning there was the sex and the words, spinning out from and between their bodies and mouths, virtual and otherwise, across the moments and enclaves of the sprawling city, across the generations and races and classes, until the first meeting in person which lasted for nine hours, webbing them officially into the most perverse, deviant, complicated, ambivalent, paradoxical, loving, passionate, thorough, loyal, and deep interaction she had ever been webbed into. The familiar trope—normative, even—of falling in love held its own sort of perverse promise. Here came together a Daddy and a little girl, both at pivotal moments, both in need and want, both willing.

Now there is sex and words, their word to one another, and something called play.

 

By day she is a professional—in charge, in control, independent. She is the baby girl. She is the brat. She is the professional. She is the nasty bitch. She is the woman. She fights with and between them all. She is learning to bridge.

 

She thinks over the question asked her the other night. What kind of feminist is she now?

The feminist sex wars may be over on the surface—or we’re putting on a good face, or it’s the same war shifted to new terrain—but traces of their violences linger, evident, for example, each time a work by radical feminists is anthologized. I would like to be generous here. I would like to say I can take the middle road between these opposing groups of theorists. But the violences committed by many radical feminists seem much more damaging, much less balanced and thoughtful, much less interested in generating dialogue, and instead intent on perpetuating misrepresentation and demonization. In the words of Gayle Rubin, radical feminist rhetoric

presents most sexual behavior in the worst possible light. Its descriptions of erotic conduct always use the worst available example as if it were representative. It presents the most disgusting pornography, the most exploited forms of prostitution, and the least palatable and most shocking manifestations of sexual variation. This rhetorical tactic consistently misrepresents human sexuality in all its forms. (301)

Such a misrepresentation of variations of human sexuality—our feminist heroine might be one example— serves to perpetuate, according to Rubin, a violence through rhetoric. In other words, there is an important difference between the tactics of radical feminists and the tactics of feminist sex radicals, and these tactics hinge on the very thing we call ethics.

Our heroine is enmeshed in such differences in the representation of her particular desires, which are perverse not only because they bring, to the surface and consensually—and often at the sake of reproductive and normative sex, as well as radical feminist politics—such decidedly un-sexy, un-erotic themes, themes in fact often viewed as antithetical to desire or the erotic. Her desires are perhaps even more perverse precisely because of their dangerous proximity to traditional female gender and sexuality norms. This proximity is the dead-end of the feminist debate over sadomasochistic practice—particularly when it comes to female masochism and lesbian sadomasochism. It is her seal of doom, her failure, her inevitable reiteration, something over which to agonize and self-flagellate, subject to the lashes and stings of her own guilt. Mackinnon’s voice is but one of a contingent of voices in our heroine’s head:

The relational dynamics of sadomasochism do not even negate the paradigm of male dominance, but conform precisely to it: the ecstasy in domination (“I like to hear someone ask for mercy or protection”); the enjoyment of inflicting psychological as well as physical torture (“I want to see the confusion, the anger, the turn-on, the helplessness”); the expression of belief in the inferior’s superiority belied by the absolute contempt (“the bottom must be my superior . . . playing to a bottom who did not demand my respect and admiration would be like eating rotten fruit”); the degradation and consumption of women through sex (“she feeds me the energy I need to dominate and abuse her”); the health and personal growth rationale (“it’s a healing process”); the anti-puritan radical therapy justification (“I was taught to dread sex . . . It is shocking and profoundly satisfying to commit this piece of rebellion, to take pleasure exactly as I want it, to exact it like tribute”); the bipolar doublethink in which the top enjoys “sexual service” while “the will to please is the bottom’s source of pleasure.” And the same bottom line of all top-down sex: “I want to be in control.” The statements are from a female sadist. The good news is, it is not biological. (169)

The logic is relentless. Our heroine is on her knees and in leather cuffs, positions and paraphernalia that render her both calm and safe, that both excite and frighten her, in highly complex ways. Subject to the voice and logic of Mackinnon, she is simplified, decontextualized, reduced to the lethal binary of rights and wrongs. Paraphrased and summarized, her voice dissected and dismembered. Morality is another kind of shackle.
Mackinnon offers a snapshot of the surface of a life, of subjectivity, of choices and autonomy, of the ability to revise Power. There is depth, paradox, complexity, particularity. There is a particular ethics, a peculiar erotic ethics, a perverse feminist erotic ethics.

This is not to say that feminist sex radicals, as well as advocates of BDSM, do not also commit their own sorts of rhetorical errors. Our heroine cannot be played for dumb. And so the critiques that her desires are simply a reiteration of patriarchal ideologies, or simply a reiteration of “the old libertarianism of ‘anything goes’” (Whatling 427) she dismisses precisely because they are presented with such simplicity. She knows that her desires are anything but simple. Still, she takes seriously the other, perhaps more valid, critiques. That BDSM practitioners tend toward “the reification of S/M as a practice . . . whereby the sexual act is overburdened with the fiction of total identity” (Whatling 418); toward wanting to compartmentalize BDSM practice into the bedroom and/or into the sexual, which contradicts the “claim [to] . . . enhance the quality of ongoing real relationships” (Bartky 367); toward a practice that “glorifies the life of fantasy to the point where the public realm all but disappears,” resulting in a “playing-out of sexual fantasies as if the historical and the political world did not exist” (Butler 171-2); and toward “naïve” and “liberal” notions of consent, autonomy, free will, sexual freedom, and choice (Butler 172-3, among many other contributors in Against Sadomasochism).

Her nude figure wrapped in leather and steel, blinded, trembling, laughing, crying, is a repository for these contradictory, ambivalent, paradoxical viewpoints, politics, desires. I would like to give her a chance to accept these desires. To welcome them. To explore them and always view them as a process, as subject to critique and revision. I would like to open our feminist heroine to the possibility of her desire being recognized in ways Judy Butler warns may be precluded by the tendency of BDSM to assume a “nonreflective attitude toward sexual desire,” which she finds particularly evident in the non-critical way in which the concept of “consent” is deployed (172). I would like to explore, with our feminist heroine, how BDSM desires are similar to the way Butler describes desires in general:

Giving consent to something is not a technique or a simple act. In sexual intimacy, the task of learning how and why we consent is for most lesbian-feminists a constant struggle. Sometimes we say yes, not wanting to, and other times we say no when our insides are screaming to say yes. But most of the time our desires are not so straightforward. They are, I think, complexes of things, fears, hopes, memories, anticipations. They arise from our concrete situation and are colored by the ambiguity of our experience. Consent can only be as complex as desire itself: consent is not a simple act, but a project, a skill we have constantly to learn. . . . Our desires can only be as sure and as free as we are. It is not, then, the free expression of desire, but, rather, the dialectic of choice and desire that is the crucial task . . . How to make our desires truly our own, how to choose them for ourselves. How to make “the free expressions of sexuality” truly free. (172-3)

These struggles extend beyond the sphere of lesbian-feminists. They eat away at our heroine. They, too, structure her desires and her subjectivity.

The Demon came to her tonight, the Demon Eros, part god, part human, possessing the terrifying ability to bridge.

 

She is in the shower and on her knees, sobbing, letting the water serve many purposes: memories of her mother, masks for the tears, cleansing and sluicing. This is not her preferred masochism. She wants to drown. No one ever told her it would be easy. But sometimes she doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t know how to let go and submit. She wonders if she even knows what the word means. She wonders if she’s wrong. She wonders how to know. Her mind runs over and over and over again, up against the same walls. These are recurring walls. She knows they have nothing to do with the particular relationship she has embarked upon, despite the fact that the issues are triggered: insecurities, shame, fear of making the wrong choice, fear of failure, the perfectionist, fear in general, distrust that eats into her days, and always the sharp and bitter voice that spins everything so negatively. The negative force from within. Enforcing staticity.

 

She is still kneeling in the shower. She imagines her Daddy entering and lifting her up, washing her body gently, soothing her tears. She wants to come to him whole, and hates herself for the fragments, for the voids that gape like wounds. The brat who protects those wounds with cruel words. Pushing pushing pushing. But he won’t come. She has to learn to make herself whole.

 

At some point she realizes the bathtub is hard, the water too hot. She could keep crying forever, it seems, it’s one of those days. She sits taller, she breathes deep, even as the water runs down her throat. She feels every part of herself. In that one moment they are all present, looking to her, demanding that she give them sway. They are a mess. But she can separate them. And build bridges. There is a kind of joy. She has never known herself on so many different levels.

 

She comes at the oddest moments. Born of Chaos. Her Eros. Her bittersweet. She is eros. She is her eros. She is her bittersweet.

 

What would really happen if she let it all go?

I have before me a vision of a feminist erotic ethics derived from BDSM erotics. To get there, to go there, I must set aside the counterarguments and questions I have thus far wrestled with. I have attempted to do so by setting aside the overly simplistic critiques offered by radical feminists because the hypocritical violence they perpetuate through their rhetoric gets us no where. Not only is their logic easily appropriated by the moral majority (Whatling 419), their arguments lack any attempt at understanding, at a willingness to consider alternate subject positions—yes, even the chained woman—and the complexity of such positions. Many other feminists, including myself and our heroine, agree with the goals of the radical feminist project, recognizing the importance of working to change the continual violence against women. However, as Vance insists, “to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live” (Vance 1). What gets produced, then, is a female subject narrated by Sandra Lee Bartky—P., who is “deeply ashamed of her [masochistic] fantasies” (363). “She experiences her own sexuality as doubly humiliating; not only does the content of her fantasies concern humiliation but the very having of such fantasies, given her [feminist] politics, is humiliating as well” (364). The problem of P. is in line with the obvious problem of our heroine: “What to do when one’s own sexuality is ‘politically incorrect,’ when desire is wildly at variance with feminist principles?” (362).

Opening feminist theories of sexuality to the concept of ethics enables us to critique and understand the harms of particular feminist rhetorics concerning sexuality. Mackinnon and many other radical feminists perpetuate what Rosi Braidotti calls “negative passions or negative forces”—negative in a depathologized sense, functioning as prohibitions, inhibitions, refusals—which “dampen [any] ability to enter into relations with others, and dim [any] ability to relate to the world.” For Braidotti, “ethics” refers to “the way in which we act upon the world.” Her particular concept of ethics is derived from Gilles Deleuze, and serves to counter the negative passions and forces that “hinder” and “dim” the way we relate to others and the world at large. Transformative and affirmative ethics, according to Braidotti, promote a “transformation of what is designed to bound us negatively.” To act in “bad” ways upon the world is to impose or to maintain a “staticity,” promoted through fear, negativity, paranoia, anger, excessive narcissism and excessive limits. To act in “good” ways upon the world is to change it, “allow[ing] us to work on the horizons of hope,” and allow[ing] us to “look at conditions of possibility.” Doors open, even at the risk of risking it all. Better than the staticity of a lock-down, a shut-up.

Affirmative ethics falls in line with many conceptualizations of feminist ethics. Generally, feminist ethics “starts with the lived experiences of women in everyday moral deliberation,” while “traditional [male-centered] ethics starts with abstract rules, principles, and maxims that guide individuals in making moral choices.” Elisabeth Porter notes that while many types of ethics have emerged from feminism, there are “three interrelated features of feminist ethics”: personal experience, context, and nurturant relationships (4-5). In addition, feminist ethics also emphasizes particularity (in the face of extreme universality and impartiality) (10-11), care (in the face of extreme justice) (12-13), and self-respect and autonomy (21-24). Each of these features lends itself to one of the primary images and structures of feminist thought: interdependence. Sometimes invoked as a deliberate key term, more often than not implied in and among other concepts (such as in transformative and affirmative ethics, as well as in the more general ethical features mentioned above), interdependence is the tool by which we build relations with the world (human and non-human) and the tool which should guide our actions upon the world. Interdependence demands the stability of all subjects—not necessarily their coherence or wholeness—in order to build and promote relations and communities between subjects.

Our heroine, kneeling at the edge of a play dungeon, is witness to the interdependence and the affirmation. Our heroine, taking these emotions and satisfactions home with her, the fulfillment of her desires that extends as a deep joy throughout her being, understands that what she learns in and through BDSM reverberates through the rest of her life, into her interactions with others. Actual play may be separate, but what she learns and carries over is not. And, contrary to popular belief, she is not merely learning how to submit the way the patriarchy wants her to submit. The patriarchy is not so clear in its threat and its domination. She learns that, first and foremost, she must know herself—in all of her splits, all of her inner differences, all of her multiple and conflicting desires and wants. Her self-knowledge is key, and it must be a continual process. The self is never a coherent or complete entity in BDSM. Our heroine must practice both clear communication and negotiation of her desires and her needs. Each and every interaction with another member of the BDSM community must be given respect, care, trust; each and every member of the community must always work toward keeping other subject positions in mind. Thinking outside of oneself, thinking of others. These are the core ethics of BDSM, functioning in much more complicated and ambivalent ways than critics often acknowledge.

But to fully understand the complicated and ambivalent ethics of BDSM practice—to understand, in fact, why such a cultural practice demands such a clear set of ethics—we must consider the particular erotics of BDSM. It is precisely these erotics that fuel the easy dismissal of BDSM practice; and yet it is precisely these erotics that are not given enough complication and understanding. Aside from the eroticization of pain, power exchange, humiliation, shame, fear—aside, in other words, from the eroticization of what is typically considered negative, undesirable, and therefore the antithesis of the erotic—it is precisely the ethics of BDSM that become eroticized. In other words, our heroine experiences such acts of communication, care, respect, negotiation, and yes, even consent, as turn-ons. As forming their own sort of erotics. In BDSM practice, erotics and ethics are in fact interdependent on one another.

Beyond and because of the interdependence, the erotic ethics of BDSM might also be described as creative and revisionary. Creative in the sense that Foucault has described BDSM: “[BDSM] is the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure . . . I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. . . . These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on” (165). For Foucault, BDSM practices help us to recognize the power of the body to take pleasure from multiple, nonsexual sources, and from entirely new sources, sources beyond the what is typically considered sexual.

Revisionary, in that the creation of new forms of pleasure happen with familiar objects, roles, institutions, worlds, narratives, and so on. What I mean is that while pleasure is desexualized, at the same time the “very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, . . . very unusual situations” become sexualized, thereby transforming our sense of what is sexual, as well as transforming our understanding of those very things. BDSM practice takes what might be seen as the antithesis of the goals of “traditional” sex acts and transforms them into a source of eroticism. Such a transformation of hetero- and homonormative sex acts occurs through the negotiation of power dynamics (role play), fetishization (of objects, of roles, of age, of bodily fluids, clothing, etc.), giving pain, receiving pain, giving and receiving pain, multiple partners, sex without orgasm, orgasm without genitals, and so on. On the other hand, BDSM holds the potential to transform the ordinary into an erotic and/or sexual experience. The creative and revisionary strategies of BDSM erotic ethics has the potential to change the way we perceive, think, and act about the world and its inhabitants—including our sex and sexualities, including what we might label “feminist.” So much the better for our feminist heroine.

Her first time in a dungeon. An all women’s play-party. She plays the part of the voyeur, sent there with orders to watch. Not to touch. To watch, observe, absorb, let go. Not to speak. To watch.

 

She is not alone. Her escort is a switch, a woman who tops her husband but loves to submit as well. She is dressed in a rubber body suit that clings to curves and flesh, oddly erasing texture and yet heightening shape. She wants to explore and feel this woman’s body, but she has her orders. She yearns, yet takes pleasure in knowing that she is honoring her Daddy’s trust.

 

When they arrive, the party has been going for over an hour. People collect around certain stations, in the kitchen, straggling up and down the hallway of rooms between the main play area and the kitchen. She takes leave of her escort and scopes out the main room. The most visible. The most humiliating. She kneels in the corner and does what she is told. Removes the roll of duct tape, scissors, and permanent marker from her bag. Removes the yoga mat and the pillow. Removes her boots. She hasn’t been the best of girls, recently. She struggles with what it means to submit. She struggles with communicating clearly to her Daddy what it is that she needs. She struggles to communicate this to herself. Instead, she acts out. Instead of taking the few moments to identify her feelings, rather than acting blindly from them. She is still learning.

 

She unrolls the yoga mat and assumes a comfortable kneeling position, with the pillow for cushion. She arranges her skirt modestly around her thighs. She writes in large bold caps on a strip of duct tape the length of her mouth B R A T . She snips off the strip, stores the extra materials, settles into her kneel and places the tape across her mouth. No talking. Only watching.

 

At some point in the night, she begins to cry. What for, she doesn’t remember. The pleasure of her punishment? Wrestling with her eternal internal critic, who always seeks to make her feel bad or wrong or ashamed? Learning to separate this punishment from other punishments she might give herself? She is too hard on herself. And there is a deliciousness in letting someone else be hard on her.

 

At some point in the night, she is surrounded by three women who touch and comfort her. There is a deep eroticism here, though nothing strictly sexual. Her escort makes note, but doesn’t interfere. She isn’t breaking any rules. She isn’t touching or talking. But she is being touched and soothed. Her punishment. Her delight. Her window to other intimacies.

 

She once memorized a passage of Audre Lorde: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

 

The paradox, or the perversion of it all: she has never felt so loved in her life. And that terrifies her.

Change is hard. And Eros, generator of the erotic and of desire, was once a demon. For our feminist heroine, in her exploration of BDSM erotic ethics, what she discovers often comes in the form of a demon: both of this world and not, something, some being, some body able to bridge between the familiar and the ever unknown. Between the familiar and the unknown is an awe-ful and painful place to be, one full of ambivalence. Braidotti suggests that such a position, on the cusp of change, imbued with the affect of pain, is a marker of the work of an affirmative ethics. And in order to welcome and practice an affirmative ethics, we must “think again about pain”; we must ask “what does pain really tell us?” According to Braidotti, pain “expresses our affective core. It means we can touch and be touched. . . . Pain is a marker of our ability to feel.” Affirmative ethics is a foundation for creating change; and change—“to leave behind what was familiar, soothing, comforting”—is painful. But Braidotti urges a separation of pain from suffering, stating that to feel pain might not necessarily be to suffer, but simply to feel. To simply be affected. Such a conceptualization of pain and change is remarkably in line with BDSM erotics, which take as a source of pleasure ways of being that are often rigidly separated from the “pleasurable”—such as pain. Pain is transformed into a source of pleasure, into a way of being, into a way of feeling. Pain transforms into a fantasy, into a demon eros, into an erotic ethics. Our feminist heroine weeps from her pleasure, her ambivalence, and the pain of her endless change.

WORKS CITED

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation.” “Nagging” Questions: Feminist Ethics in Everyday Life. Ed. Dana E. Bushnell. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. 361-84.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Affirmative Ethics.” Lecture. Center for Feminist Research Lecture Ser. University of Southern California. Los Angeles: 18 April 2007.

Butler, Judy. “Lesbian S & M: The Politics of Dis-illusion.” Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis. Ed. Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. H. Russell, Susan Leigh Star. East Palo Alto, Ca.: Frog in the Well, 1982. 168-75.

Foucault, Michel. “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Essential Works of Foucault Ser. New York: New Press, 1997. 163-73.

Hall, Cheryl. “Politics, Ethics, and the ‘Uses of the Erotic’: Why Feminist Theorists Need to Think about the Psyche.” Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics. Ed. Bat-Ami Bar On & Ann Ferguson. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3-14.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1984. Triangle Classics. New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1993. 53-9 (54).

Mackinnon, Catharine A. “Sexuality.” (1989) The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 158-80.

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 267-319.

Porter, Elisabeth. Feminist Perspectives on Ethics. Feminist Perspectives Ser. London: Longman, 1999.

Vance, Carole S. “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 1-27.

Whatling, Clare. “Who’s Read Macho Sluts?” Feminism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Morag Shirach. Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 417-30.