A Brief History and Impact of the Feminist Sex Wars (Revised)

The edit clarifies the subject, puts the literature in context, and raises the questions you want to think about, all successfully. It also helpfully allows us to see where the thinking should now go. As a work in the history of ideas, this essay says, essentially, "second wave US feminists had a controversy in which thinkers who were critical of heterosexual engagement as a voluntary submission to patriarchy disputed with women who believed that their political and social liberation could be achieved without discarding heterosexuality and even late-20th century forms of abjurable marriage. 'Despite bad press,' this dialogue did not end the intellectual ferment second wave feminism started, which has now moved largely in other directions." This proposition is undoubtedly true, but it does not exhaust, or even largely reach, the possible analytical gains to be made at this distance. One might have said that the dialogue concluded largely in a realistic vein: heterosexuality and even marriage persisted. Lesbian and other sexual alternative lives for women also persisted, as they always had, and the lifting of some degrees of active hostility against such people and their lives turned out to support marriage as an institution more seriously, even as they challenged it. As is often the case in the history of ideas, the ostensible subjects of dispute turned out to be less important to the subsequent pathways of thought than the underlying intellectual dispositions to which the act of dialogue gave rise. The space from MacKinnon to Wendy Brown or Dinnerstein to Judy Butler is as rich as any vein in the history of thought, but "sex wars" turns out—unsurprisingly—to have almost nothing to do with why,