Sexology and Antifeminism - Jeffreys.pdf

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Sexology and Antifeminism
Sheila Jeffreys
I have been involved in Britain in feminist activism against pornogra­
phy since 1978. In the first few years of that struggle there was a won­
derful, burgeoning movement and then, to our astonishment, we dis­
covered that we were getting strong opposition to our efforts from a
direction which we had not expected. Perhaps we should have ex­
pected it, but we had not. At socialist-feminist conferences — in partic­
ular, at leftist conferences — some women who were describing them­
selves as feminists were doing nothing but trashing the feminists who
were fighting against pornography.
This attack from within feminism really surprised us especially as
the attack grew and grew. Our activism became more and more diffi­
cult. Some feminists were being quoted in all kinds of journals and at
all kinds of places, saying how ridiculous the fight against pornogra­
phy was. For many years we had all agreed, as very good feminists,
that it was important not to have horizontal hostility. Indeed, it had
been felt that we should not devote our time and energy to countering
the campaign that women who were describing themselves as femin­
ists were waging against us. I felt in the end, however, that it was
important to challenge this backlash directly.
The attack has not, of course, simply come from those women who
describe themselves as feminists. It has also come from sexual liberals
on the left — in particular, from men — and from a large part of the
gay male movement. That is where the backlash is coming from, but it
is being represented within feminism as well. What I have really wanted
is to approach head on the arguments these people have been making
against us. It's about time, I think, that we stood up for ourselves.
Copyright © 1990, Sheila Jeffreys.
ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX
REFORM IN THE EARLY
TWENTIETH CENTURY
I want to show that a very similar backlash against feminists has
happened before, against the first wave of feminism. This backlash at
the beginning of the twentieth century, which carried on into the 1920s,
has been called by historians the first sexual revolution of the twentieth
century. There are supposed to have been two, one in the 1920s and
one in the 1960s. What I suggest is that this so-called sexual revolution
was in fact a backlash against feminists, and the values produced by
this revolution are the values now being promoted by the sexual liber­
als in their attack again on feminism.1
I don't think I'm saying anything controversial because the sexual
liberals themselves are only too pleased to point out their links with
the sexologists and sex reformers who took part in that backlash against
feminists at the beginning of this century. For instance, Gayle Rubin,
a promoter of sadomasochism and a sexual libertarian, sees herself as
being in a pro-sex tradition with a pedigree going back to Havelock
Ellis, the sex reformer (Gayle Rubin, 1984). The feminists fighting por­
nography and male sexual violence are in what she calls the antisex
tradition, starting in the first wave of feminism. And I am pleased to
see myself as being in that tradition, although of course I wouldn't see
it as being an antisex tradition exactly.
I take Gayle Rubin seriously. She's certainly in the Havelock Ellis
tradition. I want to tell you some things about Havelock Ellis which
those of you who have read my book will know. His work needs to be
considered because he is said to be so tremendously important by sex­
ual liberals. Whole books are being written about him now saying how
good he was for women and for everybody.
Before I look at what he was saying, I'd like to address feminism at
the end of the nineteenth century and how it dealt with sexuality (Sheila
Jeffreys, 1985; Sheila Jeffreys, 1987). When I started looking at these ef­
forts, although I had received a master's degree in late Victorian and
Edwardian social studies which had covered the feminist work on other
issues, I had no idea there were struggles of any seriousness around
1Sexual liberals are those who subscribe to the 1960s' agenda of sexual tolerance, to the
idea that sex is necessarily good and positive, and that censorship is a bad thing. Sexual
libertarians have a more modem agenda and actively advocate the "outer fringes" of
sexuality, such as sadomasochism, with the belief that "sexual minorities" are in the
forefront of creating the sexual revolution.
sexuality or violence against women, because those efforts were not
mentioned in the textbooks. Documents were not collected in the an­
thologies telling us what those women were saying. There was no way
of having access to their ideas. I don't think it is by accident that these
huge efforts which feminists were engaged in have been eliminated
from the history of feminism. I think it is very deliberate. It's a big
struggle to pull them out of history, to bring them back to conscious­
ness, and make them available to us. I fear very much that the cam­
paigns we are engaged in today can disappear from history in a pre­
cisely similar way.
The sexologists and sex reformers attacked feminists in the last wave
of feminism as antisex prudes who were acting against the interests of
women. This is how historians have represented them up to the pre­
sent day. This is how we are being represented right now by the sexual
liberals. This is the way they are writing our history.
When I started looking at feminist efforts at the end of the nine­
teenth century, I knew that women had been involved in work against
prostitution because there has been some feminist historical work on
the Contagious Diseases Acts. What astonished me about these fem­
inists was that the language they were using was so fiercely feminist.
They described men's use of women in prostitution as an abuse of
women, as dividing what they called the class of women, and putting
aside one half of that class simply for men to use for their own pur­
poses. I was surprised by the strength of the language that was used
and the way in which these writers were very directly pointing out
men's abuse of women in prostitution, and targeting men directly in
everything they said.
I went on to discover something I had no knowledge of and about
which there was virtually no information in secondary sources: there
was a fifty-year campaign by those women against the sexual abuse of
children. This started out of the struggle against prostitution, and it
centered at first on raising the age of consent for girls so that young
girls could not be used in prostitution. There wasn't a law against men
using women in prostitution, but age of consent laws would have re­
moved young girls from men's reach. That campaign culminated in the
raising of the age of consent for sexual intercourse in Britain to 16 in
1885, and for indecent assault to 16 in 1922. It took fifty years.
Feminists were not simply trying to raise the age of consent. They
were fighting incest, pointing out that incest was a crime of the patriar­
chal family, of men against women, and that sexual abuse of children
was a crime carried out by men of all classes. They were fighting for
women jurors, magistrates, women police to look after victims, fight­
ing for all kinds of reforms that I thought had been invented by this
wave of feminism. They were involved in setting up shelters for women
escaping prostitution, something that is happening again in this wave
of feminism.
I was enormously impressed by these feminists. In fact, I sat in the
Fawcett Library in London getting terribly excited and wanting to tell
everybody what I was finding out. Feminist theorists like Elisabeth
Wolstenholme Elmy and Frances Swiney were writing at this time about
sexuality. We haven't had access to their work because it hasn't been
taken seriously. Where they are written about at all in history books,
they are simply called prudes and puritans and their ideas are seen
as retrogressive. What these women were arguing was that the sex­
ual subordination of women— men's appropriation of women's
bodies for their use— lay at the foundation of the oppression of
women.
Interestingly, these two women, Swiney and Elmy, made clear their
opposition to the practice of sexual intercourse. This practice has be­
come so sacred that it is almost impossible to imagine any serious chal­
lenge being made to it. What we have seen in the last hundred years
is the total and compulsory enforcement of that sexual practice upon
women so that women are allowed absolutely no outlet or escape from
it.
But at the end of the nineteenth century there were feminists who
were prepared to challenge intercourse. They were prepared to say, for
instance, that it was dangerous for women's health; that it led to un­
wanted pregnancies br forced women to use forms of technology, con­
traception, that reduced them simply to objects for men's use; that it
humiliated women and made them into things. Feminists pointed out
that sexual diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse were dan­
gerous to women's lives. They felt sexual intercourse to be a humiliat­
ing practice because it showed men's dominance more obviously than
anything else. They believed that this practice should take place only
for the purposes of reproduction, maybe every three or four years. I
know these are ideas which if you voiced them today would make
people think that you had taken leave of your senses. But these were
ideas that were absolutely mainstream; they were being put forward
by respectably married women, one married to a general.
These women were campaigning fundamentally for a woman's right
to control her own body and to control access to her own body. The
integrity of a woman's own body was the basic plank of their cam­
paign.
The efforts of these women are now said by the sexual liberals to be
retrogressive and dangerous. An example of such criticism is the paper
by Linda Gordon and Ellen Dubois, two American historians, pre­
sented at the Barnard Conference on sexuality (Ellen Carol Dubois and
Linda Gordon, 1984). Some of you may be familiar with this conference
and with the anthology that came out of it called
Pleasure and Danger.
The title article in that volume, "Pleasure and Danger: Seeking Ecstasy
on the Battlefield," was written by Gordon and Dubois about feminist
struggles at the end of the nineteenth century. In that article, they sug­
gest that although these feminists may have been well intentioned, they
nonetheless allied themselves to conservative forces and were danger­
ous in the end to feminism, and to woman's sexual pleasure.
So how did these feminists get removed from history? How did their
work get interrupted? When I wanted to answer these questions I went
to look at the writings of the sex reform movement, and at the "science
of sex" founded at the end of the nineteenth century. You probably
know that in the nineteenth century male Victorian scientists were set­
ting up classification systems for insects, stones, all kinds of things.
They were keen on classification because they wanted everything un­
der their control, and finding the correct pigeonhole made them feel
secure. At the end of the nineteenth century they started doing this
with sexuality. Doctors, for example, started defining sexual "perver­
sions." The so-called new science of sex was formed to tell people which
were the correct ways to act sexually and which were the incorrect
ways.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the most famous name in
sexology in Britain, and I think probably in the world, was Havelock
Ellis. Although Freud is a more familiar name and he was of course a
sexologist and in correspondence with Havelock Ellis, if we look at the
average marriage advice manual, it is the words and ideas of Havelock
Ellis we will find there, not those of Sigmund Freud. Havelock Ellis is
your friendly neighborhood sexologist.
Ellis has been seen as the founder and father of sex advice literature,
so Jeffrey Weeks, a gay male sexual libertarian historian of the present,
describes Ellis's work as "one of the springs from which the stream of
sexual liberalism has flowed with apparent ease" (Sheila Rowbotham
and Jeffrey Weeks, 1977). Edward Brecher describes him as "the first
of the yea-sayers" to sexuality (Edward Brecher, 1970). There is no doubt
he was and is a crucially important influence.
He argued first of all that men and women were entirely different
biologically and therefore psychologically. Using this idea of difference,
he set out to show how male and female sexuality were entirely dis­
tinct. Not surprisingly, the map he gave us of male and female sexual­
ity showed that male sexuality was absolutely and inevitably aggres­
sive, taking the form of pursuit and capture, and that it was normal

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