...nonexistent poll, and his audacity inspires those of us who theorize sexuality to make bolder pronouncements. But while Bersani wants to locate aversion, something in between needing and liking, my interest is in the pleasure gap between men and women. My hunch, like Bersani's, is a theory, in this case a deduction based on an informal polling of friends, recent media hype, (2) and medical reports. (3) And from the outset, I should say that my comments are made against the backdrop of a relatively recent development in the history of human sexuality--the availability of a pill that functions to produce the erections that many men were previously unable to sustain.

It is in the context of who is now able to have sex (older men, but also increasingly somewhat younger) and those who will soon want to have sex with men when they heretofore did not want to have it (some straight women), that new statistics about having sex have begun to circulate. Both the phenomenally successful five-year-old blue pill, Viagra, and the in-production pink pill that will do for reluctant women what Viagra has done for impotent men are stories that have prompted the news media to circulate the following numbers: in the United States, thirty percent of males suffer from erectile dysfunction, and forty-three percent of American women "suffer" from what is called "arousal disorder." (4) These statistics--as hypothetical as my assertion that most people aren't having sex--are relevant to Janet Halley's "Queer Theory by Men." (5)

I might have argued that we have reached a kind of hiatus in sexuality studies, now distanced historically from the AIDS crisis, exhausted from legalization of abortion battles, overwhelmed with internet pornography, and ambivalent about kiddie porn. But now Janet Halley's thinking anticipates another crisis that should produce a flurry of new theories. It is not just that there will always be, as Janet Halley puts it, the "profoundly irresolvable problematic of desire," (6) it is that there are also new unanticipated agents involved in the production of desire, or rather, agents that an earlier feminism might not have imagined would come together in just this way. So, I want to think about feminist theory as it meets real women, such as the abused wife Sheila Twyman, (7) against a somewhat new social background that I will characterize by a striking confluence: drug manufacturer Pfizer has recently circulated the figure that nine Viagra pills are now dispensed every second. (8) Rape crisis centers in Los Angeles currently use the following statistic to illustrate the situation they try to ameliorate on a daily basis: every nine seconds a woman is beaten by her boyfriend or husband. (9) These statistics reflect a lot of hard-ons and a lot of beatings and, while there is no necessary correlation between the two implied here, I find the parallel suggestive. The nine seconds eerily echo the nine pills. Someone will argue that there are many more pills taken than there are (reported) incidents of abuse and that Viagra users are older men and thus less likely to act out against women. Nevertheless, in provocative combination these numbers ask for serious feminist consideration. (10)

So against these popular statistics, we return, following Halley, to some really hard feminist issues: the semiotics of sexual dress (popularly, "she asked for it because she looked like that"), the corollary question of whose sexual interests are served, the flexibility of the "eroticization of domination" thesis, (11) and the difficulty of sexual reform. But first, since the strategy of "taking a break" frames this essay, I want to weigh in on Halley's notion as it is not clear to me whether the intent is to urge feminism to another position by circumventing it entirely or whether the idea is just meant to get around feminism because feminism cannot accommodate a position that might deliver justice in a case such as Twyman v. Twyman. (12) We learn, if we didn't already suspect it before, that despite its enlightened analysis, feminism is not necessarily about justice for all (or for both as in Twyman (13)), although it is certainly about justice for some oppressed groups. Thus, it is clear to me why Halley wants a "break" from the automatic victimization thesis of some feminisms (as well as from the "homo-supremacy" of queer theory). But to argue that we need to "take a break from feminism" because feminism is structurally unable to imagine men's erotic interests makes feminism look, well, ungenerous. And also for feminism there would be the question of gay as opposed to straight men where gay male erotic interests would have more legitimacy than straight male interests, which, by (feminist) definition, are opposed to the erotic interests of women.

I realize that Halley might not think that there are many choices of where to look for a theory of men's erotic interests and the field is uneven since the bulk of the important work has been produced by gay, not straight, men. But Leo Bersani and Duncan Kennedy are very strange bedfellows, and what they seem to have in common, other than just being men, is their shared interest in maintaining the possibility of excitement, which means looking out for their own sexual interests to the degree that they construct these interests as a kind of standard. We are reminded that although feminism has a theory of pleasure, it has no theory of excitement, which is not to ask for it, but to wonder why it would figure as such a marked parallel in both gay and straight male thinking about sexuality (without just looking to the hard penis as an explanation).

Where is feminism today? That United States drug companies came to have a hand in the literal manufacture of desire worldwide does not surprise us, but the function of a kind of feminism in the mainstream is a surprise. That feminism's remarkable achievement of ubiquity in...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.




More articles from Duke Journal of Gender Law & Policy
Signatures of the impossible.(response to Ian Halley in this issue, p...., March 22, 2004
Dear Ian.(response to Ian Halley in this issue, p. 7)(Annual Brainerd ..., March 22, 2004
Can a leopard change his spots? Child custody and batterer's intervent..., March 22, 2004
VAWA's unfinished business: the immigrant women who fall through the c..., March 22, 2004

Looking for additional articles?
Search our database of over 3 million articles.

Looking for more in-depth information on this industry?
Search our complete database of Industry & Market reports by text, subject, publication name or publication date.

About Goliath
Whether you're looking for sales prospects, competitive information, company analysis or best practices in managing your organization, Goliath can help you meet your business needs.

Our extensive business information databases empower business professionals with both the breadth and depth of credible, authoritative information they need to support their business goals. Whether it be strategic planning, sales prospecting, company research or defining management best practices - Goliath is your leading source for accurate information.