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woman's role as the absolute victim of male sadism” and “perpetuate[s] the supposedly essential nature of woman's powerlessness” (22).
It is in the sphere of female desire that feminist theory has arguably become most fractured, colonized in particular by debates that situate pornography as central to the suppression of active female sexuality. Since the nineteenth century, feminist theorists have disagreed on how to improve women's sexual situation and, even more basically, on what women desire sexually. Subsequent debates, some “broadly protectionist, attempting to secure some measure of safety from male lust and aggression,” (Vance 1) have clouded attempts to vocalize freely the pleasures and possibilities of female sexuality, situating pleasure in a “smaller public space and a more guilty private space” (7). Despite the achievements of second-wave feminism, in both the public and private spheres, and the emergence of third-wave feminism as a social movement—as evident in the “sex positive” work of Carol Vance, Susie Bright, Nancy Friday, and Merri Lisa Johnson—public attitudes towards female sexuality in particular have not experienced the same comparative progress. On one hand, Anthony Giddens has theorized the merits of “plastic sexuality” as forms of sexual exchange freed from their intrinsic relation to reproduction, and thus a more creative form of sexuality permitting the sexual freedom to “create ourselves without being beholden to tradition, religious expectation or long-term obligations” (45). On the other hand, Merri Lisa Johnson has decreed a far more pessimistic state of sexual affairs: “the world polices women—even now in this so-called postfeminist era—into silence about sex, socially constructed modesty, and self-regulating repression of behavior and fantasy” (1). It seems crucial then, as Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott have argued, to remain critically alert to the social and cultural limits placed on pleasure and to be vigilant about how “our desires have been constructed within a heterosexually ordered patriarchal society” (20).
Despite the social regulation of sexuality—most notably female and homosexual sexualities—the twenty-first century bears witness to a