The wellspring of all this was that women had sexual identities of their own. This moment in feminism rejected the idea that sex necessarily involved the exploitation of women by men, and with it the idea of a pay-off, where women bought emotional connection with physical generosity. These feminists scorned the notion of gender essentialism, where women were naturally monogamous and men naturally promiscuous. Robin Rinaldi, writing as a woman too young for second-wave feminism and untouched by the unremarkable third wave, wonders: “I had expended so much effort as a teenager and young woman trying to avoid the shameful female pitfall of ‘being used’. Why had no one ever mentioned the satisfaction … of sharing pleasure through my body?”
The answer is very simple: because sex-positive feminism really petered out at the end of the second wave, and the caricature of that era never mentions it. The whole point of the caricature was to neuter the movement: were you to mock women for their sexual abandon, you would run the risk of making them sound quite fun.
This fault line – does your argument rest on women being victimised by sex, or do the women in your frame have appetites of their own? – crops up a bit now, mainly in debates about pornography and sex work. Yet female sexuality is almost never discussed with the casual, celebratory self-assertion of the 70s – and that could be the legacy of the era most egregiously lost: more beautiful than broderie anglaise, more utilitarian than dungarees.
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