“Andrea Dworkin was probably turning in her grave”: Pornography, (Post)Feminist Backlash and Contemporary Women's Memoirs

Abstract

Summary In a comment that is perhaps representative of new voices in contemporary feminist criticism, Natasha Walter states that in the 1970s “[a]ll treatments of sexuality in culture were forced to reveal the imprint of sexism”. She concludes that a minority of feminists perceived “any hint of sexuality in culture” as “proof of sexism” (Walter 1999: 112). Now, in the 21st century, the representation of dominant female sexuality, across all mediums of visual and textual expression, predominantly avoids the usual cultural trap of promiscuity; the image of the uncontrolled nymphomaniac, and it is this climate of active female sexual expression and a more inclusive (post)feminist discourse that has seen recent erotic non-fiction memoirs thrive. In this article, I will discuss three recent erotic memoirs: Melissa P.'s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush before Bed (2004), Toni Bentley's The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2006) and Catherine Townsend's Breaking the Rules: Confessions of a Bad Girl (2008). In the context of these memoirs, I will discuss the manner in which the texts celebrate, rather than contest, the eroticisation of male power and sexual values ascribed by the mainstreaming of the sex industry, and demonstrate how, in the context of postfeminist rhetoric and second-wave feminist backlash, this eroticisation of male power is represented, contentiously and divisively, as ostensibly liberating to women.