Title: Gender and sexual violence: gender identities, masculinity and
strategies for change.
Author: Chris Beasley
Abstract:
Men have a stake in ending gendered violence but this stake has not yet been widely
embraced by men. Thus we must think carefully about our future strategic directions.
Taking the case of sexual violence, I suggest that while young people are constantly
invoked in popular media to be sexual and to undertake sex, young men have not been
engaged by the 'critical' literatures (scholarly or policy literatures) attending to
sexuality. These critical literatures—which include writings in gender/sexuality
studies and sex education policy materials—aim to offer alternative understandings of
heterosexuality. Yet such critical approaches remain largely negative and/or focussed
upon danger rather than considering heterosexuality in positive terms that might
encourage young men in particular to embrace the aim of egalitarian sexual practices,
including ending sexual violence.
Tensions in gender/sexuality scholarship, and sex education materials which draw
upon that scholarship, produce significant absences with regard to analysis of
heterosexuality and heterosexual subjects. In this context, existing research indicates
that recognition of pleasure in sexual health has resulted in increased use of condoms
by men and greater involvement of women in negotiation of sexual practices. This
knowledge is not just relevant to prevention of disease, but has implications for
stategies regarding sexual violence.
Introduction
The paper begins with the question of effective strategies in relation to sexual
violence. It does this with the intention of taking up the work of internationally
established Masculinity studies scholars like Michael Kaufman and Michael Kimmel,
who insist that men—along with women—have a stake in ending violence, including
sexual violence (Kaufman 2001; Kimmel, Interview). The paper involves reflection
upon my earlier involvements in rape crisis work in the light of my current thinking
about masculinities and masculine sexualities.
While I agree that theoretically men may well have a stake in ending violence,
including sexual violence, this stake has not yet been widely and actively embraced
by men. Thus I consider we must think carefully about our future strategic directions
for scholarship, activism and public policy. My concern is that existing cultural
discourses do not provide much that might encourage that men’s theoretical stake in
ending sexual violence to be actualized in everyday life. This is a matter which has
important ramifications for the field of Preventive Health.
I suggest that while young people are constantly exhorted in popular media to be
sexual and to undertake sex, young men have not been engaged by 'critical' voices
(scholarly or policy literatures) attending to sexuality. These critical voices—which
include writings arising from Gender/Sexuality Studies, and from the Preventive
1
Health field such as Sex Education policy materials—aim to offer alternative
understandings of heterosexuality and masculine sexuality to those which are on offer
in the popular media. Yet such critical approaches remain undeveloped, largely
negative and/or focussed upon danger/risk rather than considering heterosexuality in
terms that might encourage young men in particular to be inspired by the possibilities
of egalitarian sexual practices and embrace the aim of ending sexual violence.
My aim is to develop this overall analysis by outlining (albeit briefly) FOUR
interconnected arguments: these are
1. The Foucauldian thesis regarding the modern proliferation of sexualized discourses
may well require qualification in relation to ‘critical’ non-commercial voices such as
those arising from Gender/Sexuality studies and Preventive Health.
2. The Gender/Sexuality field involves approaches which inform Preventive Health
with regard to sexual health. Yet this field contains (a) heterogeneous trajectories
which have had the effect of (b) leaving heterosexuality stuck in the mire of the old
‘sex wars’ debates, such that it remains almost exclusively aligned with the secondwave Modernist ‘sex-as-danger’ camp of the sex wars debates.
3. Preventive Health agendas attending to sexuality—in particular, Sex Education in
schools—draw upon these Gender/Sexuality writings. Despite certain elements of the
‘pro-sex’ approach, the crucial focus on prevention/pre-emption of danger and risk
within Preventive Health (including Sex Education) also predisposes it to fall back
upon the primarily negative ‘sex-as-danger’ orientation with regard to heterosexuality.
4. ‘Critical’ non-commercial voices are not able to attend to hetero-pleasure. Yet,
existing research indicates that recognition of pleasure in sexual health education
results in increased negotiation of sexual practices. This has ramifications for the
theoretical framing of non-commercial voices dealing with sexuality and, in
particular, for their anti-violence strategies.
1. The Foucauldian thesis and its potential limits: the question of differential
social ‘spaces’ for sexual norms/identities
Foucault challenges what he called the ‘repression hypothesis’, the hypothesis which
for example Freud outlined when he described social relations as founded upon the
repression of sexuality (1981). By contrast, Foucault asserts that discourses about
sexuality have proliferated and have in the process created new norms of behaviour—
which he describes in terms of ‘an economic exploitation of eroticisation’. We are
told we must behave in certain ways. Now we must be sexual. These new sexual
norms, in Foucault's terms, come to ‘discipline’ us, such that ‘we find a new mode of
investment…no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by
stimulation’ (Foucault 1980: 57).i
It would seem at first sight that Foucault’s approach is self-evident—that the modern
world is saturated in (hetero)sex. A sexual 'freedom' consisting of insistent cultural
exhortations to engage in heterosex appears omnipresent in our modern society. And
yet, I am not so sure this is the whole picture. On the one hand, I too have a sense that
we are all–and perhaps young people in particular—constantly bombarded with
images of sexual identity by a range of cultural forms. This bombardment amounts to
2
provision of sexual education by privatised commercialised sources with sexuality
presented in terms of material consumption. Such sources say in essence, ‘Buy this,
be sexy’. On the other hand, I have a sense of missed opportunity. What I mean is
that non-commercial voices regarding sexuality seem to me to be offering a decidedly
limited alternative to the constant bombardment of sexual imagery from privatised
commercial sources.
I suggest there is a significant gap between the cacophony of popular commercial
voices about (hetero)sexuality and the comparatively silent and largely negative
critical voices in gender/sexuality studies and Preventive Health sex education
materials that might be expected to provide a counter-point. Gender/Sexuality
writings and Sexual Health literature, by contrast with the popular media, largely do
not attend to hetero-pleasure; they neither proliferate (hetero)sexual discourses in
terms of the demand to be sexual or in terms of an agitated response to fear of the
sexual. Rather heterosex remains unspoken for the most part and, when meagerly
acknowledged, is simply cast as a problem. This is scarcely a mode of ‘eroticisation’
and ‘control by stimulation’. Instead the gap between commercial and noncommercial modes leaves heterosexual pleasure to privatised voices and effectively
abandons a strategy for alternative visions and social change.
If I am correct about the mismatch between commercial monopoly over heterosexual
pleasure as against the paucity and comparatively bare and negative framing of noncommercial voices (both scholarly and policy), then this suggests we may need to reassess the scope of Foucauldian claims regarding the proliferating expansion of
sexualizing discourses in modernity. The Foucauldian challenge to the ‘repression
hypothesis’ may at least require some qualification when we consider noncommercial ‘spaces’ and publics. Non-commercial discursive spaces may well not
offer the same sexualizing norms and sexualized identities. In short, the Foucauldian
‘sexualization’ thesis may underestimate the unevenness of the social.ii
To suggest that noncommercial voices might differ somewhat from the proliferation
of sexualized discourses elsewhere is to suggest perhaps their maintenance of a more
repressive treatment of sexuality, which in my view has implications for the way they
address and their capacity to address sexual violence. Non-commercial voices
regarding sexuality may not be taking up the challenge of providing alternative,
potentially more reflective perspectives that move beyond the limits of medicalised
discourses and genuinely embrace a more holistic treatment of bodies and desires. I
suggest that insofar as these non-commercial voices offer a limited challenge to the
increasingly prevalent discourse of sexuality as consumption, they do young people a
disfavour, effectively giving them little purchase on the possibilities of fashioning
their own sexuality and sexual citizenship. In this setting, re-imagining the theoretical
framing of Gender/Sexuality studies and Preventative Health in the arena of sexuality
is not just a theoretical issue but has some very practical implications.
2A. Heterogeneous trajectories in the Gender/Sexuality field
The Gender/Sexuality field involves socially critical and theoretically sophisticated
approaches which flow into and inform the limits of Preventive Health approaches
with regard to sexuality. However, the Gender/Sexuality field (which is a crucial
source for alternative understandings of masculine sexuality and anti-violence
3
agendas) contains disparate sub-fields—importantly, the three sub-fields of Feminist,
Sexuality and Masculinity Studies—with distinguishable trajectories. Tensions
between heterogeneous trajectories in the Gender/Sexuality field then impact upon
analyses of heterosexuality.
I suggest in other works that the three subfields of Feminist, Sexuality and
Masculinity Studies are not simply commensurable bits that fit together neatly like
pieces of a jigsaw. The subfields contain differing knowledge cultures involving
(amongst other things) different theoretical underpinnings and emphases (Beasley
2005; Beasley forthcoming). On this basis I argue that, since the 1960s/70s, the
subfields have aligned in shifting ways, and that this is particularly evident in relation
to sexuality. While initially Feminist and Masculinity Studies developed closely
linked modernist theoretical paradigms under the rubric of the term ‘gender’, with the
rise of postmodern approaches Feminism and Sexuality Studies have moved closer to
one another in terms of overarching theoretical frameworks. By contrast, Masculinity
Studies has increasingly appeared as ‘the odd man out’. If the scholarly subfield
which is particularly focused on men and masculinity is at something of a distance
from other major subfields in the Gender/Sexuality field, then this is something of a
problem in the context of developing theoretical frameworks and strategies intended
to involve men in ending sexual violence.
In brief I would note two points in support of my claims regarding these
developments. Whereas (with the telling exception of feminist work on violence)
Judith Butler’s work has become a cornerstone of both Feminist and Sexuality Studies
theoretical frameworks, major ‘gate-keeper’ theoreticians in Masculinity Studies such
as R. W. Connell remain rather resolutely modernist and highly skeptical concerning
postmodern agendas and Butler’s work (Connell, 2005: xix; Connell, 2002: 71;
Connell 2000: 20-1). Secondly, theorising in both Feminist and Sexuality Studies now
largely take as given that gender and sexuality cannot be reduced to one another—a
postmodern perspective strongly associated with Queer Theory (see Richardson
2001). Both Feminist and Sexuality Studies nowadays (once again barring feminist
work on violence) do not presume that gender produces sexuality. Feminist and
Sexuality Studies do not presume that men as a group have a specific and different
sexuality from that of women as a group. By contrast, Masculinity Studies thinkers
remain aligned with (second-wave) Modernist views which presume that gender does
effectively determine sexuality. Michael Kimmel, for example, supports the claim that
heterosexual men and gay men are largely alike in terms of their sexuality (Kimmel
2005: 16-21; Kimmel and Plante 2004: xiv). He approves the statement that ‘straight
men might have as much sex as gay men, if women would only let them’ (Kimmel
2005: 74). Such a view may be said to reduce sexuality to gender in that men as a
group are said to have a particular sexuality and women to have another kind of
sexuality. Such a view is decidedly at odds with Postmodern and Queer critiques
which reject prioritizing gender over sexuality and reject stable distinct gender
identity categories.
The point here is that the different trajectories of Feminist, Sexuality and Masculinity
Studies have shifted in relation to their differential uptake of Postmodern
perspectives. This differential uptake has particular resonance around sexuality and
sexual violence. It became explicit in the 1980s so-called ‘sex wars’.
4
2B. Feminist/Sexuality/Masculinity Studies and the Sex Wars: the consignment
of heterosexuality to ‘sex as danger’
Feminist and Masculinity Studies literatures—that is, Gender studies literatures—
have been in an ongoing ‘conversation’ with Sexuality Studies writings. A crucial
theme in this conversation may be summarised as the ‘pleasure and danger’ ‘sex
wars’. In short, the ‘sex wars’ amounted to a debate between on the one side
Modernist radical Feminist (Gender studies) thinkers like Catherine Mackinnon,
Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffen and Mary Daly, amongst many others, talking about
‘sex as danger’ in the 1970s/80s, and on the other side the growing influence from
the late 1980s/1990s of Postmodern thinkers associated with Sexuality Studies,
talking usually from a Foucauldian and Queer Theory perspective about ‘sex as
pleasure’, the ‘pro-sex’ position.
Modernist radical feminist writers like Catherine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin in
the 1970s/80s drewing attention to the ways in which sexuality was socially
constructed along gendered lines to uphold men’s social dominance. They noted the
links between normative heterosexuality and displays of men’s power over women
such as rape, and were rather courageously critical of penis-centred conceptions of
sexuality. They were however inclined to depict women as a group as vulnerable and
men as a group as predatory. Such a perspective dovetailed with ‘women-centred’
radical feminist viewpoints like those of Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly which gained
considerable force in the 1980s. In these forms of radical feminism men and women
were categorically divided. The emphasis was on gendered power and in this context
men’s sexual power over women.
The Modernist radical feminist approach was in short focussed on, the ‘danger’ of
hetero-sex, the evils of prostitution, pornography and rape. In this account, men were
all beasts, but they did have sexual fun, even if nasty oppressive sexual fun. Lesbians
had gentle womanly fun. Heterosexual women, owing to stupidly consorting with the
beasts, had no fun at all. Importantly, this ‘sex as danger’ position remains the most
common viewpoint in Masculinity Studies today since—along with feminist work on
violence—it remains one of the last bastions of support for Modernist radical feminist
agendas. However such a position increasingly came under fire from the 1980s
onwards and reached a head at a conference at Barnard College, NY, in 1982 titled
‘Pleasure and Danger’. At this conference a so-called ‘pro-sex’ position was put
forward which rejected that all women were as one and that all women liked gentle
‘vanilla sex’ (Echols 1983, Echols 1984; Rubin 1994; Califia 1996, Sullivan 1997;
Epstein and Renold 2005).
The ‘pro-sex’ stance was increasingly critical of Feminism which was cast as
‘mumsy’ and sexually repressive (Beasley 2005: 158-170). The pro-sex position set
itself in opposition to this and was strongly associated with the rise of Foucauldian
Sexuality Studies and Queer theory developed by theorists like Judith Butler, Gayle
Rubin and Steven Seidman. Sex in this approach was precisely about embracing
danger, power and even consensual violence. The ‘pro-sex’ position was however
primarily, even almost exclusively about queer sexualities. In the related literature on
sexual citizenship, the focus remained firmly on queer minorities, particularly gay
men. In such pro-sex theorising, queer minorities were discriminated against, but at
least they now all had fun. Heterosexual men were still sexual and still nasty. And
5
heterosexual women, they largely disappeared from sight—probably because of the
sheer embarrassment of being so boring (Jackson 1999: 13-15; Beasley 2005: 122-3).
The upshot of theoretical tensions and shifts in the Gender/Sexuality field expressed
in the ‘sex wars’ is that heterosexuality is simply rarely examined nowadays in
Gender/Sexuality studies writings. There are for example very few current (post 1998)
books on heterosexuality.iii Heterosexuality is largely taken to be of little critical
interest, as simply to be equated with heteronormativity, and remains mired in the old
‘sex wars’ divide. In that debate heterosexuality is cast by the ‘sex as danger’
perspective as immured in gendered inequality with an emphasis on its nasty and
normative features. More recently, the combined Feminist/Queer ‘pro-sex’
perspective has become prevalent in analyses of sexuality, but in this approach queer
becomes the site of subversive, transgressive, exciting and pleasurable sex, while
heterosex continues to be locked into its earlier constitution as problematic. Insofar as
it is mentioned at all, the emphasis only shifts somewhat to its boring and normative
features. These existing accounts of heterosex as either primarily nasty or boring, but
in any case normatively exclusionary, do not provide much room for maneuver.
In essence critical scholarly voices in the Gender/Sexuality field have almost frozen
and remain largely undeveloped regarding heterosexuality. To the extent that it is
discussed, these voices largely confine heterosexuality to the abandoned backblocks
of theoretical history by leaving it stuck in the predominately negative ‘sex-as-danger’
camp. For example, it is almost impossible to find any account of heterosexual men’s
pleasure in Masculinity Studies that does not presume desire=damage. Only gay
men’s desire involves permissible pleasure. Similarly, if we look at International
Studies writings attending to sexuality it would seem that predatory penises and
vulnerable vulvas abound (Peterson and Runyan 1999, Bayliss and Smith 2001 third
edition, Tickner 1992; Tickner 2001). More specifically, most of the limited debate on
sexuality in a global context has been fashioned by themes of trafficking, slavery and
rape in war, themes largely dominated by gendered representations of male
victimizers and feminine victims (Sabo 2005; Re-public: re-imagining democracy
2008, ‘Gendering Border Crossings’ www.re-public.gr/en; Women’s Worlds
Congress www.mmww08.org/index.cfm?nav_id=41).
While such themes are undoubtedly crucially significant, I do want to challenge
heterosexuality’s comparative absence in contemporary gender/sexuality debates and
challenge to its continuing restrictive constitution as unremitting cruelty and pain in
the service of oppressive normativity. Heterosexuality is a majority orientation but,
relative to other sexualities, it is under-theorised as a potential source of pleasure,
interest and transgression, and over-determined as a source of domination.iv Such a
stance offers little in the way of strategic directions for positively engaging young
men in the development of an egalitarian heterosexuality. This failure regarding
strategies relevant to young men is perhaps particularly ironic in the case of feminist
work on violence and Masculinity Studies. It is here that the intriguing status of
Masculinity Studies as ‘the odd man out’ in Gender/Sexuality thinking, as at a
distance from the now more thoroughly ‘pro-sex’ agendas of Feminist and Sexuality
frameworks, comes home to roost, since Masculinity Studies’ general advocacy of a
‘sex-as-danger’ stance has implications for its capacity to re-conceptualise
heterosexuality and sexual violence strategies.
6
The problematic analysis of heterosexuality in Gender/Sexuality theorising reoccurs
in odd ways in the Preventive Health field and thus in Sex Education materials.
3. Preventive Health, Sexual health: pro-sex collapsing into the reiteration of ‘sex
as danger’
Preventative health has constituted itself as a field of thinking which moves beyond
the narrowly instrumentalist medical model with its emphasis on disease and illness,
on the rationalist scientific calculation of what is wrong with the body that needs
fixing or management: primarily surveillance and regulatory framework containing
risk/danger. This medical model focuses on what is awry and how the mutinous body
can be brought to heel. Doctors save us from the failings of our bodies. Preventive
health asserts its difference from this negative framing of our embodiment by
emphasising a more holistic engagement with the body, by attempting to expanding
the meaning of the field of ‘health’ beyond what is wrong with the body (The Medical
Institute for Sexual Health, www.medinstitute.org).
The way in which a preventive health theoretical framework is expressed in sexual
health is evident in the definition of the World Health Organization (WHO; World
Health Organization), revised in 2002. This definition states
Sexual health is a state of physical, emotional, mental and social well-being
related to sexuality; it is not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction or
infirmity. Sexual health requires a positive and respectful approach to
sexuality and sexual relationships, as well as the possibility of having
pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and
violence. For sexual health to be attained and maintained, the sexual rights of
all persons must be respected, protected and fulfilled
[www.who.int/reproductive-health/gender/sexualhealth.html#2].
Sexual health not only has physical and mental aspects, but is also defined within a
social framework. Sexual health is further defined in an affirmative way, stressing
well-being and not just stating the absence of negative qualities. In other words, there
are important links here with the ‘pleasure—pro-sex’ position I outlined in the ‘sex
wars’ debate previously. This association is evident in the WHO definition of
sexuality:
[s]exuality is a central aspect of being human throughout life and encompasses
sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure,
intimacy and reproduction. Sexuality is experienced and expressed in
thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviours, practices,
roles and relationships. …Sexuality is influenced by the interaction of
biological, psychological, social, economic, political, cultural, ethical, legal,
historical and religious and spiritual factors [www.who.int/reproductivehealth/gender/sexual_health.html].
WHO's definitions of sexual health and sexuality have a utopian cast. Given the
worldwide prevalence of heteronormative sexual prejudice, most, if not all, sexual
minorities would seem to have a problem. Phenomena such as sexual violence and
sex-trafficking, and also more generally the contruction of women as sexually
7
passive, form serious limitations to the sexual health of women. The Preventive
Health framing of sexual health as defined by the WHO may be seen more as a
worthwhile goal to aim for, rather than a representation of most people's current
condition. However, what it indicates is an expansive account of the field of ‘health’
exceeding any medicalised model: sexual health within this Preventive Health
framing is construed as a prerequisite for people's (sexual) quality of life and as linked
to conceptions of (sexual) justice and full citizenship.
Yet while Preventative Health sometimes has a rhetorically expansive ‘pro-sex’
framing, it frequently fails to live up to its promise. It frequently falls back into more
traditional models of health. This is because Preventive Health as a field draws upon a
dual legacy: the influence of Gender/Sexuality theorizing and a concern with health as
management of risk. As both Broom (2007) and Diprose (2007) have indicated, the
crucial focus on prevention/pre-emption of danger and risk within Preventive Health
(including Sex Education) predisposes it to fall back upon the primarily negative ‘sexas-danger’ orientation with regard to heterosexuality. In many, if not most, accounts
of sexual health the ‘sex-as-danger’ feminist position I discussed earlier is reborn as
populations and individuals being exposed to health ‘risk’. More affirmative and
expansive accounts of (hetero)sexuality, which enable consideration of heteropleasure, become side-lined.
Sexual Health becomes aligned with ‘risk’ with regard to sexuality in the first
instance by lapsing into an instrumental medicalised account of sexuality, reinforcing
a focus on sexual ‘problems’ conceived in biomedical terms. For an example of this,
consider the first World Congress for Sexual Health in April 2007, with a classic
Preventive Health conference theme of ‘Achieving Health, Pleasure and Respect’ the
main topics were as follows: Sexual Health, Basic Science on Sexual Function, Desire
Disorders, Arousal Disorders, Orgasm Disorders, Sexual Pain Disorders, Sexually
Transmitted Infections, Cultural Studies on Sexuality, Sexuality Education, Endocrine
Disorders, Gender Dysphoria, Sexual Paraphilias, Sexual Violence, Issues in
Reproductive Health, Sexuality in Special Populations, Studies in Human Sexuality,
Sexual Orientation, Ethics. This rather grim and decidedly medical looking list
contains rather a lot of disorders, infections and dysfunctions [www.sex-sydney2007.com/callabstracts.htm].
Secondly, even when Preventive health models of sexuality do not lapse into
miserable medicalisation, more socialised versions of ‘risk’ frequently still dominate.
For example, in the 4th Edition (2007) of The Puberty Book, (Darvill and Powell: 127)
a book recommended by that doyen of Preventive Health in the arena of sexuality,
Family Planning Australia, in answer to the question ‘can sex be fun?’ the answer is,
‘Sex can be lots of fun…it depends on the circumstances. If both partners
want to have sex together and are protected against unwanted pregnancy or
catching an STI, it is more likely to be enjoyable’,
A pro-sex agenda becomes, ‘avoid pregnancy and don’t get STIs.’ Tellingly the
clitoris gets four lines in this book, while vaginas get over 20. This is, I should add,
one of the better Australian books for adolescents.
Non-consensual heterosexual sex and sexual violence is undoubtedly a world-wide
concern. For example the 2003 Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR
2003) and the 2003 National Survey of Australian Secondary Students (NSASS 2003)
8
both show a significant pattern of forced sexual activity (Combes and Hinton 2005).
The first study showed 21% of women in the broad population and the second
indicated 26% of 15-17 year old secondary students reported unwanted sex (13 %
under pressure from their partner). In this context it is no surprise to find that rape, for
instance, is not perpetrated by a lunatic fringe but rather is a crime marked by its
ordinariness (Kimmel 2005: 189). Relatedly, there is research evidence from a range
of locations that young men face considerable peer pressure from other young men to
engage in sex (Schubotz et al. 2004)
Yet sex education is not compulsory in Australian schools and there is no nationallyconsistent curriculum for teaching teenagers about relationships or sexual and
reproductive health. This is not a problem in Australia alone. Furthermore, most
sexual health education programmes remain restrictively focussed upon biomedical
information. As the 2003 Australian Study of Health and Relationships—the largest
and most comprehensive survey of sexuality undertaken in the country—has revealed,
sex education in schools gains ‘top marks’ from young people in terms of inserting
‘Tab A into Slot B’, but apparently gives little clue about the interactive including
pleasurable aspects of the enterprise (Powell 2007; ARCSHS 2003; Maushart 2007).
SHine SA (Sexual Health Information Networking and Education, a government
agency in South Australia) also reports that 80% of young people regard sex
education in schools as useless or fairly useless [sexual_health_statistics_2008.pdf].
Similarly, a joint report to the British government on sexual health in 2005, fuelled by
the ‘risk’ of teenage pregnancy rates, stated that sex education in schools provides
basic factual biological information but beyond that was extremely limited and even
confused (Campbell 2005). Sex education of even this meager sort is of course under
threat in the US (Irvine 2000).
However, perhaps an even more important limitation of sex education programs is the
insistent use of fear and risk of disease to try to motivate people to practice safer sex
(Philpott et al. 2006). In this context it is no wonder that there is considerable
evidence that the ‘the “official” discourse of sex education [does] not relate to teenage
lives’ (Chambers et al. 2004). Specifically, the sex education curriculum all too often
neglects the complicated process of choices regarding sexual behaviour, and is deeroticised. While sex education almost entirely evades queer sexualities, it also
neglects heterosexual female sexual pleasure and characteristically denies
heterosexual young men a positive and legitimate sexual subjectivity (Harrison and
Hillier 1999; Allen 2006). This is a serious problem for sexual health strategies
intending to promote egaliatarian sexual practices including ending sexual violence,
given that as both Broom (2007) and Diprose (2007) point out, the inadvertent
consequence of such the ‘scare’ tactics associated with preventing risky behaviours
may well be increasing resistance to sexual health education. My point here is that a
proudly pro-sex agenda in Sexual Health agendas can still involve a heavy dosage of
regulatory imperatives and does not necessarily produce attention to pleasure, even to
hetero-pleasure. Sexual health education programs remain dominated by a framing of
sex as risk and danger—by assumptions which reflect the modernist feminist ‘sex-asdanger’ position I outlined earlier, often depicting women/girls as vulnerable and
men/boys as culpable. This Preventive Health focus on fear and danger with regard to
heterosex is problematic precisely because it is likely to be counter-productive.
9
Even programs which we would rightly judge to be at the forefront of a Preventive
Health sex education are constrained by ‘the already minimal cultural space afforded
sexual pleasure’, as Janice Irvine (2000) puts it. For example, the SHARE Project, a
sexual health program for upper level high school students in South Australia which
ran between 2003 to 2005 under the auspices of SHine SA) strongly emphasised its
holistic Preventive Health framing, presented itself as having a healthy, ‘neutral’, nonmoralistic approach to sexuality and implicitly therefore as not about suppressive
regulation of sexuality (SHine SA 2003: 8-9). Yet SHARE was explicitly shaped by
concerns about risk and danger. For instance, SHARE was highly attentive to teenage
pregnancy and STIs, stressed rational knowledge-based choice, ‘safety’, service
usage. The program also stressed being positive about sex, but, at the same time, the
program could barely mention pleasure. This is not a criticism of SHARE, which
faced vitriolic attack by Christian Right-Wing lobbyists for its ‘pro-sex’ stance
(Gibson 2007), but simply to point out, that Preventive health in sexuality—even in
its more progressive manifestations—is rarely in practice about sexuality. It is rarely
about doing sex, let alone about experiencing or giving pleasure, and much more
about health as regulatory management of social risk.
Debra Lupton (1995; Petersen and Lupton 1996) argues that rational calculation and
managing risk associated with social inequities and ‘lifestyle’ choices is the mainstay
of the Preventive Health agenda including Sex Education, which ties it into regulatory
governance. I would add, in common with the perspectives of Hage (2003), Burke
(2007) and Diprose (2007), that it is also strongly associated with the present
dominance of public discourses throughout the Western world prioritising ‘security’.
However, I am not sure this analysis is sufficient.
Lupton’s Foucauldian analysis casts the Preventative Health framework as still mired
in the ‘sex- as-danger’ camp, with her Foucauldian approach as the properly ‘pro-sex’
alternative. In other words, she reiterates in many ways a binary enunciated in the ‘sex
wars’ debate. We are faced here either with sex as danger and risk OR sex as pleasure.
While the Foucauldian ‘pro-sex’ camp at least brought Queer sexualities into view it
is inclined to equate Pleasure almost exclusively with Queer sexualities while
heterosexuality=heteronormative and heterosexual women simply disappear from
view. The Foucauldian pro-sex stance may not be the answer. Indeed, as I have noted
in relation to Sex Education programs, a ‘pro-sex’ framework, merely affirming sex is
‘healthy’, does not get us very far.
What if we refused the sex wars binary and took a different direction? What if a
concern with risk, with making sex safe and a concern with pleasurable sex are not
mutually exclusive. In this context, existing research indicates that recognition of
pleasure in sexual health has resulted in increased use of condoms by men and greater
involvement of women in negotiation of sexual practices. (Philpott et al. 2006;
Ingham 2005; The Power of Pleasure
http://www.ids.ac.uk/ids/news/powerpleasure.html; Holland et al. 1992).
Recognition of pleasure paradoxically appears to produce more egalitarian rather than
non-consensual sexual relations between men and women. This research information
is not just relevant to prevention of disease, but has implications for strategies
regarding sexual violence. Recognition of hetero-pleasure can in other words inform a
10
shift in towards positively reconstructing men’s identities in ways that exclude
violence against women (White 2000; Jenkins 1990).
I have attempted here to indicate the limits of a primarily negative (an always already
punitive) orientation which emphasizes danger and warnings. I have suggested that
both Gender/Sexuality scholarly writings and Preventive Health Sex Education
materials remain captured by precisely such a narrow agenda. Yet it is possible, even
likely, that young heterosexual men’s sense of entitlement about non-consensual sex
cannot be effectively reconfigured if anti-violence discourses continue to constitute
heterosexuality in ways that do not pay attention to pleasure. Without engaging young
men such discourses run the risk of continuing by default to leave young women with
the task of being responsible for ‘risk management’ of sexuality and sexual violence
(Carmody 2005). We must face growing evidence that promoting pleasure when
discussing sex is likely to encourage forms of sexuality that are safer and more
egalitarian.
Conclusion
I suggest we may need to move away from the standard binary thinking of the old sex
wars. Both Gender/Sexuality writings and Preventive Health in the form of the sexual
health literature tend to be populated by vulnerable wombs and vaginas and
troublesome penises. Perhaps we could instead learn from aspects of the HIV/AIDS
work and refuse to accept the established binary of pleasure/danger, such that ‘safe
sex’ can also be hot sex. My concern here is that, to the extent that critical noncommercial voices do not attend to hetero-pleasure and the libidinal body, they are
unable to provide an enticing alternative to the seductive barrage of consumerist
messages about (hetero)sexuality and, relatedly, fail to engage young men in
particular. Indeed they may inadvertently produce a counter-productive resistance
amongst young men to sexual health strategies, including those which aim to promote
gender equity.
Strategies to encourage egalitarian (hetero)sexuality, and hence to end sexual
violence, must move beyond conceptions of heterosexuality simply as a problem in
order to generate positive identification with forms of heterosexual masculinity
attuned to egalitarian sexual practices. Though I have suggested some difficulties with
current directions in Masculinity Studies scholarship in this regard, in common with
Michael Kimmel I too see the aim as refashioning our sexualities ‘away from control,
aggression and violence and toward mutuality and equality—a loving lust that
is…equal parts heat and heart’ (2005: xiv).
Making safe sex hot may well provide a more attractive counter-discourse than the
existing emphasis on heterosexuality as monolithically normative, inequitable and
risky. But how do we do this without also energising conservative and/or religious
forces? Putting hetero-pleasure back into Gender/Sexuality studies and into sex
education is not just a question of getting out the aromatic oils and exotic massage
book, but is a deeply political question.
11
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i
My thanks to Carol Bacchi for discussions which helped me clarify my uncertainties regarding aspects
of the Foucauldian sexualization thesis.
ii
McNay, amongst other commentators, offers an early instance of similar general observations which
support my specific claim in this paper (1992: 38-47).
iii
Jackson 1999; Holland et al. 1998; Johnson 2005; Scott and Jackson 2007; Hockey et al. 2007;
Ingraham 2008.
iv
I am indebted to Heather Brook for this way of expressing the problem.
15