Sex and feminism

“Self-actualization” is a word many students (male and female) learn in Women’s Studies courses. One course last term, in particular, was devoted to the study of activist bell hooks (she prints her name with lowercase letters) regarding her feminist theory and cultural criticism.

Self-love and self-acceptance are the necessary ingredients of self-actualization, which in hooks’ view is necessary to healthy relationships, especially when it comes to sexuality.

Of course, we don’t all want a relationship, and thankfully, bell hooks provides a feminist sexual politic that allows for us to express sexual desire as the spirit moves us. In her book Feminism is for Everybody, hooks writes that liberated females not only get down and dirty wherever and whenever they choose, but also that it’s okay to choose not to be sexual or to focus on self-pleasuring.

For those who want to take hooks’ ideas as a challenge, this writer recommends experimenting with celibacy and then discovering how to make masturbation better. She Bop, a female-friendly sex toy boutique owned by women in North Portland, can certainly help with that.

It can be easier, though challenging, for some women to celebrate themselves through self-pleasuring than it is to imagine finding pleasure with a partner. As hooks writes, sexual liberation can’t exist when women “believe their

sexual bodies must always stand in the service of something else.”

It’s hard not to be bitter towards ex-lovers when all you’ve known is the sexual experience of helping your partner get off, but hooks’ feminism is not an angry movement. While hooks empowers women, she also celebrates men.

Another work by hooks, The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, is a celebration of men. Hooks asserts that the pressure to be manly and dominant in sex and in life hurts men. If you look around and listen, you’ll notice military recruitments displaying men with guns, advertisements for cologne that show guns of oiled muscle, and hear lyrics sung and rapped by angry men. Maybe, as hooks writes, “despair and rage” is what men bring to sex. In that case, men are victims of a patriarchal society, just as women are.

Whatever we need individually, we’ll find it together. That ethos of mutual respect is the foundation of feminist sexuality. Let’s continue our progress towards self-actualization, inside the classroom and in the world.