Rights, responsibilities and citizenship in heterosexual women's talk about sex: promoting women's sexual health and safety.

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on qualitative data from eighteen interviews with heterosexual women about their experiences of sex with men. Drawing on ideals of individualism and free choice, women construct a citizenship discourse in which they and others are positioned as active sexual subjects with rights and responsibilities to sexual choice, pleasure and fulfilment. Critical examination of respondents' discourse reveals how it is profoundly gendered, based on masculine forms of sexual desire and masculine understandings of pleasure. The paper argues that, despite its gendered nature, the inherent reciprocity of the citizenship discourse (as produced through the link between rights and responsibilities) generates the possibility for women to negotiate their sexual freedom and promote their sexual health and safety.

KEY WORDS

sociology, feminine sexuality, heterosexual, citizenship, discourse

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This paper argues that women's sexual health and safety begins with ensuring freedom of sexual expression and association, and with challenging deeply entrenched notions of men's sexual dominance and women's sexual passivity. Much of the existing empirical literature demonstrates how women's sexuality is constructed as passive to men's, with women talking about sex as a 'gift' to their male partners (Gilfoyle, Wilson and Brown 1992) or formulating their sexual desire in terms of monogamy, marriage, love and trust (Holland et al. 1991, Holland et al. 1992, Maxwell and Boyle 1995, Lear 1995, Kippax et al. 1990). The passivity of feminine sexuality has been described various ways--sometimes in terms of a 'have/ hold' discourse (Hollway 1984) or the 'Madonna/ whore' discourse (Ussher 1994), in which feminine sexuality is positioned dichotomously as morally good or bad. It has been suggested that these understandings are predicated on the Christian principle that sex should take place within a lasting and committed heterosexual relationship (Hollway 1984). As such, women's sexuality is positioned as either reproductively driven and confined to a heterosexual, monogamous marital relationship and thereby 'good' or rabid, dangerous, in need of control and thereby 'bad' (Hollway 1984, Hollway 1989, Cowie and Lees 1981, Ussher 1994, Summers 1994).

Feminism, cultural studies and other disciplines reveal how the configuration of feminine sexuality as passive can be challenged in women's (and men's) talk about sex, and how understandings of women's sexuality can be complex and diverse. Jenny Kitzinger (1995), for instance, describes how teenage girls in their talk about sex, refigure the derogatory image of the whore or slag to represent a sexually empowered woman in control of her sexual choices. Deborah Warr (2001) notes similar potential for the reconfiguration of feminine sexuality in young women's sex talk and their emphasis on romance. Young women identify romance as a significant source of sexual pleasure and Warr (2001) suggests that this constitutes a space in which the meanings of feminine pleasure and desire can be transformed, particularly because romance is often dismissed as unrealistic and frivolous and therefore outside the gaze of dominant (and masculine) interests. Kath Albury (2001, 2002) uses cultural representations available in the popular media and on the internet to demonstrate how heterosexual women enjoy sex, and are attracted to sexual experimentation and sexual subcultures such as fetishism, 'sacred' sex, sadomasochism, and do-it-yourself pornography.