Anticlimax Quotes

“Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality sexy. For women to find passive, objectified men sexy in large enough numbers to make a pornography industry based upon such images viable, would require the reconstruction of women's sexuality into a ruling-class sexuality. In an egalitarian society objectification would not exist and therefore the particular buzz provided by pornography, the excitement of eroticised dominance for the ruling class, would be unimaginable.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“The main problem for women trying to emulate male sexuality is that as a ruling-class sexuality, it is constructed around the fact that they have a subordinate class on whom to act sexually. Women are that subordinate class. The elements that constitute male sexuality depend upon the possession of ruling-class status such as objectification, aggression, and the separation of sex from loving emotion. Women are bound to be unsuccessful in seeking to acquire a form of sexuality which depends upon the possession of ruling-class power. It might be possible for some lesbians to seek a close emulation of ruling-class sexuality because they are able to practise on other women. Heterosexual women cannot practise ruling-class sexuality on men because they are not the ruling class. All that heterosexual women are in a position to do is to accommodate male sexual interests... In male supremacy men's sexual access to women gives them power and status. It does not make much difference who initiates the act, the men still gain the advantage.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“To clarify the dilemma women have about sexual enthusiasm for men, it is helpful to contrast it with men's situation. It is unlikely in the extreme that men will have experienced actual sexual violence from women or its threat. Men do not live in cultures where the degradation and brutalisation of men at the hands of women is the stuff of pornography, entertainment and advertising. Men do not live with the consciousness that they are being hunted by women who would take sexual delight in dismembering them simply on account of their gender. They do not live in a society in which their degradation through sex is the dominant theme of the culture. They do not have to approach women sexually in fear or with distressing images or associations with their own oppression. The images they are likely to carry with them are those of women degraded and brutalised by men. In fact they are likely to have practised sexual arousal with such images, extensively, through pornography and fantasy. It is not surprising, then, that sexologists have identified women's 'inhibition' as the main sexual problem of this century. They have identified as healthy sexual feelings those which the male ruling class experiences and have chosen to avoid recognising the political reasons why women might feel differently.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“It should not be a surprise to find that s/m fantasy is significant in women's sex lives. Women may be born free but they are born into a system of subordination. We are not born into equality and do not have equality to eroticise. We are not born into power and do not have power to eroticise. We are born into subordination and it is in subordination that we learn our sexual and emotional responses. It would be surprising indeed if any woman reared under male supremacy was able to escape the forces constructing her into a member of an inferior slave class.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“The sexual revolution completed the sexualisation of women. Both married and unmarried women were expected now to become experts in sexually servicing men, and to get over their own tastes and interests in order to become efficient at this task.
Where once a large group of single women might have escaped the destiny of servicing men and concentrated upon their own life work, they were now conscripted into compulsory heterosexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Pornography, then, educates the male public. It would be very surprising if it did not.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“A woman who has experienced rape or sexual harassment in childhood or adulthood, who knows about the rape and murder of women from the media, who has seen the sexual values of men portrayed in their pornography and on billboards, has a difficult choice in the area of sex with men. She can choose to treat her man as being quite different from other men and as being in no way implicated in men's sexual violence. This is not easy and requires an awkward split in her mind. She is still unlikely to escape having her sexual and emotional responses affected by her experience and knowledge.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Despite women's experience or knowledge of sexual violence, despite whatever is going on in their marriages and how their husbands behave, women are expected to engage with enthusiasm in sex. [Women] have to make a separation between the sex in which they 'let go' and become enthusiastic and the rape they experienced last night or the pornographic advert they saw on the underground this morning. What is required is either a mind/body split or an eroticising of the oppression itself.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Pornography is not egalitarian and gender-free. It is predicated upon the inequality of women and is the propaganda that makes that inequality sexy.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“When feminist analysis moved on from stranger rape to the much more likely possibility in a woman's life of rape by a man close to her, the male establishment and heterosexual system suffered a more serious challenge.
The issues of incest and marital rape strike blows at the fundamental institution of male supremacy itself, the heterosexual family. The serious contradiction faced by heterosexual women became much more pronounced as the prevalence of child sexual abuse and relationship rape was revealed. How could the trust and innocence required to get women to love and marry men, and produce children with them, be sustained in the context of this knowledge?”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“When women and girls experienced throughout life such systematic sexual aggression from men it was realistic and reasonable for women to be resistant to and suspicious of male sexuality. The focus moved away from women as the problem to a critique of male sexual behaviour and an analysis of the ways in which men's sexual violence sustained their power.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Starting with rape, feminists dragged into the public arena plentiful evidence that sex was not an unproblematic joy for women. The result of uncovering the huge but hidden amount of abuse that women and girl children suffered in the form of sexual harassment, sexual abuse in childhood and marital rape, was that the sexual-liberation agenda had to be submitted to critical scrutiny.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Women's anxiety is not just some unnecessary vestige of a past morality but a realistic response to most, if not all the practices and ideas about sex in this book. The Joy of Sex shows women to be rather unregenerately 'Victorian' in attitude to sex, never quite catching up to what is modern. Women's backwardness was the problem in all sexual-revolution advice literature.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“But the increasing independence of women provided a direct threat to the maintenance of male power and privilege. That no such threat did materialise, it will be argued here, owes a great deal to the success of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was a counter-revolution and constituted a timely adjustment to the fine-tuning of the heterosexual institution. [...] . Sex was constructed to be the new binding ingredient in marriage which would compensate for the decreased efficiency of legal and economic constraints. The 1960s was a new time of crisis for male supremacy and a new adjustment had to be made.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Sexual intercourse is the only purely reproductive sexual practice and if it is engaged in by women only when they wish to procreate then reproduction is under women's control. Once sexual intercourse is established as compulsory then women have recourse only to artificial contraception, abortion, and infanticide, to control reproduction and childbearing.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“...the work of sexologists and the development of sex therapy are all instances of how men’s power over women was to be supported and managed through the regulation of marital sex. Sex, in this scheme of things, was not a natural and spontaneous seeking after pleasure by men and women, but a regulatory mechanism designed and constructed to enforce male dominance and female submission.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Evidence from a group of women who had worked as prostitutes showed how pornography had been used on them in the course of their work, providing the model scenarios for gruesome rapes and assaults. They explained that, 'Women were forced constantly to enact specific scenes that men had witnessed in pornography.' The young women entering prostitution would be trained and accustomed by the use of pornography, '... the man would show either magazines or take you to a movie and then afterwards instruct her to act in the way that the magazines or films depicted.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Pornography gave the lie to any idea that women were gradually achieving equality. Pornography made it clear that what constituted sex under male supremacy was precisely the eroticised subordination of women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“...a consequence which the pornbrokers may not have intended. Women were able to look at pornography and for the first time had at their disposal a panoramic view of what constituted male sexuality. [...] pornography became more and more concerned with sadomasochism and much more brutal in its portrayal of women. [...] We decided we needed to study pornography, to see exactly what was in it and understand what it told us about men's attitude to women, about male sexuality and about the construction of heterosexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Caputi defines serial sex murder as 'gynocide, sexually political murder, an extreme form of terrorism in the service of the patriarchal state'. The result of this and other acts of sexual terrorism is that 'women are supposed to accept it as a "normal" , unavoidable consequence of modern life that we must conduct our lives in constant vigilance and fear, restricting our movements, staying inside at night'.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“When mainstream male gay sexual practice eroticises dominance and submission then male gay s/m has to be explained in the context of the construction of male sexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Feminists rejected the fetishised image of woman in pursuit of a woman's right to full human status, physical freedom and independence. [...] To understand the meaning of these clothes for men it is illuminating to look at [...] pornography. [...] [In one scenario] the young man was forced by the dominating woman to don the undergarments despite his protestations. [...] [In another scenario] the 'women's' clothing is used to degrade and humiliate a strong and independent woman who would never have worn such garments in her everyday life. If the very same kind of garments can be used by both men and women in rituals of sexual humiliation it would suggest that these clothes represent not 'women' but the crippling, restrictive and inferior role which has been assigned to woman in the gender role system.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Hodges does not consider that the social construction of sexuality in the whole of male supremacy might be deformed by 'sexism'. [...] Sexism is a shadowy emanation rather than a form of behaviour carried out by men.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Feminists want to free all women from the threat of harassment in the street through the reconstruction of male sexuality. [...] men would have to abandon objectifying exploitative sex and redefine altogether what they saw as sexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Male and female sexuality are very different, we are told, [...] None the less women are instructed to try to develop male sexual responses in order to be the 'ideal lover'. [...] So clearly sexual behaviour is not natural or inevitable. It can be learned where this serves the interests of male-dominant heterosexuality, and is only disconcertingly recalcitrant where such learning might serve women's interests.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“The sexual revolution was heterosexual. Even the most progressive of sex-advice writers was unable to conceive of homosexuality in women or men as a reasonable alternative to heterosexuality.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“[...] the effect of decensorship was the burgeoning of mass-market pornography. John Sutherland describes how the pornography industry developed in Britain subsequent to the 1959 Act and the great trials.
"Meanwhile, in the shadows behind these spotlighted censorship spectacles, 'pornography' was growing steadily from a hole-in-the-corner specialist supply service to a multi-million pound, efficiently organised industry".”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“Kappeler demystifies the process of canonisation. She brings into the picture the 'economic infrastructure which underpins the literary establishment'. [...] Either the book must be 'chosen or valued by an authority' who is already accepted by the literary elite, or it must be judged to be 'similar to or like... another literary work' which has already been accepted. [...] At no stage in this process does anyone seek to define what literary quality is, except in the vaguest terms.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“The dispute, [Suzanne Kappeler] writes, is not about whether certain literary works degrade women but whether there is anything wrong with the systematic degradation of women, the wholesale cultural objectification of women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution

“A 1966 book by Russell Trainer entitled The Lolita Complex demonstrates the effectiveness of this learning. It is a work of popular sexology which provides a vehicle for the author to describe the sexual abuse of children all over the world and in history, presumably for the titillation of his male audience. Russell Trainer claimed that 'Lolitaism' was spreading in American society. The sexual abuse of girls is here transformed into 'Lolitaism'. The agency is removed from the male abuser who is indeed scarcely mentioned, to become a problem caused by and consisting in sexually active young girls. This sleight of hand is reminiscent of the way in which male writers on prostitution have traditionally written as if women performed prostitution all on their own to themselves. The male abuser disappears in such work too, and prostitution becomes a problem created by women.”
― Sheila Jeffreys, Anticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution