5 Does Sexuality Have a History?

Key Ideas and Terms to Know:

• Subordination
• Gender hierarchy practices
• Abuse
• Choice & desire
• Shame & stigma

Main Point 1: Sexual Abuse

A key point of MacKinnon’s is that we have hardly any historical tools for compiling a history of “what is practiced as sex” because people who experienced sexual abuse were shamed out of sharing what happened to them. Through the new information we have from more and more people speaking out, MacKinnon says we can see the practice of sex is inextricably intertwined with abuse. She argues that sexuality is “deployed” and used against women in men’s search for pleasure.

“One thing we have learned is that sex, as practiced, includes abuse, of women and children principally. They are abused in the name of sex, in the course of the practice of sex, in order for men to get the pleasure that defines sex.” (MacKinnon P.4)

Main Point 2: Who is Speaking?

Because we lack conversations around the experiences of sex for women and those who have been abused, MacKinnon says we don’t really have a history of sexuality at all. We simply have discourse about sex and the pursuit of pleasure for those who are powerful enough to talk. It is our conversations about sex, and not experiences of sex, that form our history of sexuality.

“We write about what we can get at, based on what we do have, which is painted on vases, forget about what we don’t have, who and what are excluded, who is not permitted to paint on vases. We act as if we have all there is. We forget about the meaning of what is not there, not known, maybe even not knowable. In other words, the silence of the silenced is filled by the speech of those who have it and the fact of the silence is forgotten in this noisy discourse about sexuality which then becomes its history.” (MacKinnon P.4)

Main Point 3: Who Gets Pleasure?

MacKinnon argues that sexuality is not inherent or natural, but instead a series of practices and discourses that produces and reinforces gender inequality in social life. Her history of sexuality is dominated by a narrative of “who uses who for pleasure and how they get away with it,” which she notes as being distinct from “a history of who gets pleasure and how.” (MacKinnon P.8)

“In the modern period, there have been some changes for the worse, away from equality. Women are expected to like sexual force better and better, partially as a product of the movement for sexual liberation and partially as a result of what produced that movement. Freedom for women’s sexuality becomes freedom for male sexual aggression. During this period, it appears that the actual level of sexual abuse to which women are subjected has escalated.” (MacKinnon P.6)