There were so many irritating presumptions in Joan Smith’s column, “Why women don’t cruise” (November 13 to 19), that it’s difficult to know where to begin to protest them. Shaun de Waal’s response in last week’s First Person took a considered look at the implications of Smith’s article for the nature/culture debate, but was, in my opinion, far too polite.
The dreary reality is that Smith’s own opinions on cruise-shy womanhood sit in opposition to Camille Paglia’s post- feminist, neo-con agenda, one which would have all men clutching their cocks and rushing off to build sky- scrapers in the face of a bunch of destructive, snake-headed women.
While Paglia’s immaculately researched academic polemic is offensive to some and dodgy to most, it at least takes cognisance of the potency and presence of women’s sexuality: Paglia thinks Madonna is fab. And, to the extent that Paglia is the bte noire of Eighties feminists like Smith, I think Paglia is fab.
Smith offends me – and a few thousand women I’m sure – because she makes women’s social and sexual lives sound like girl-bonding rituals that will end at best in a tea party, at worst in tears. Women, she tells us, make “careful arrangements” for their safety, and immediately protect any foolish female among them who might want to break free and walk around on her own.
That’s before or after they meet some guy at a nice party where they all know the host. And should a woman meet a man, Smith suggests, her arousal would occur only in a context of absolute domestic privacy and intimacy, an idealised zone in which none of those icky, “counter-erotic” risks – “the anonymity, the sense of doing something clandestine and transgressive”, come in from the cold to play.
These elements of casual sex, which in Smith’s opinion confirm the idea that sex is “a furtive, shameful activity”, are mainly attributed to gay men and “bisexuals cruising as a way of keeping elements of their lives separate”. There is an obligatory qualification, and heterosexual men are swept into the realm of Smith’s smug purvey via the sad body of United States President Bill Clinton, an icon of power-hungry, commitment-phobic manhood, with a “degraded” Monica Lewinsky clinging uneasily to his shirt-tails.
Oh, please. Not for nothing has Lewinsky got a mouth as big as her hair, and don’t tell me she didn’t get a kick from those “furtive” sessions in the oval boudoir.
Smith even tries to ground this odd behaviour in men in pseudo- psychoanalytic observations about their post-orgasmic deflation, propped up by the later observation that men “leap out of bed after sex, moving on to another activity as quickly as possible”. And this under the banner of a generalised “sexual disgust”. I can’t confirm having had this experience, but perhaps I might suggest that Smith pay some attention to her technique and her underwear.
Smith’s naff, sloppy theorising irks me so because one of the greatest results of feminist interventions in culture has been the recognition that women are sexual beings who have agency. Women are not simply bunny rabbits cowering on the shaggy carpet; they are sexual hunters themselves. Women are not just there to be looked at by men, they look, nay, they even perve.
Women do not only wear trousers and sensible shoes and go to dinner parties, they have been known to slink around in stilettos and tight skirts, prowling public places for someone to take home. If Smith had watched MTV or been to a club-zone lately – or even bothered to concede that she lives in the late Nineties – she would know that both boys and girls, women and men, hunt in packs.
This is not, of course, to suggest that women are safe on the streets, in parks, in public toilets, or even in bars. It is not to diminish the threat of rape, particularly in South Africa, where many women experience their identity as “to-be-raped”, an appalling consequence of living in one of the most violent countries in the world. And it is also not to ignore that many, many women seldom see a social life, left as they are with the work of child-rearing, house-keeping, and money-earning.
But it is to suggest that Smith’s article attempts, albeit with careful qualifications and demure understatement, to steer “womanhood” back into a dark space potentially more dangerous, in these times, than the streets: that of a priori victim of men’s social, sexual and economic power.
It’s a pity that Smith will never go to a Janet Jackson concert. She could stand to learn a thing or two about different kinds of women, and the men and women who adore them.