WELCOME to your 'New Look' journal. It's good to see a new socialist newspaper, at a time when the Left press is fighting for survival.
As a woman and a feminist, however - as well as a socialist -I look to any new Left publication for an understanding of the importance of feminist politics and at least an attempt to take their feminist readers seriously. An article on Madonna: 'Is she a feminist or isn't she?'(S. Pickett and Sam Inman) is hardly original for a Marxist publication recently, and neither, unfortunately is its line.
Glossing over the complex debates on sexuality and sexual politics taking place in the teminist movement at the moment, S. Pickett and Sam Inman unquestioningly Madonna's liberal individualist position on the meaning of eminism, fantasy and sexuality. Feminism is reduced to individual women 'taking control' of their sexuality - and such control, it seems, is to be found in 'dressing like a bimbo and choosing 'to be 'chained up'.
Personally, I always thought that being sexually submissive and masochistic, and 'dressing like a bimbo' were precisely what this culture intended women to 'choose' in their sex lives. I fail to see any breaking of bourgeois taboos'. in a woman singer expressing her (hetero)sexuality by dressing in familiar pornographiccodes and singing that she likes to be spanked and told what to do On the contrary, this is pretty boring and predictably what women performers have been doing for years.
Perhaps what is different about Madonna - and here the article gets it right - is that she expresses a new form of bourgeois individualism: and also a new form of so-called sexual liberalism. Let's not be fooled for one moment that this has anything to do with feminism.
May 18.1991 No. 2 Madonna may have learnt how to use libertarian language in order to redefine her depress ingly traditional female sexuality, but this presents no threat to either capitalism or patriarchy.
The very attempt to distinguish between consensual and non-consensual sex in this way is a problem. Unless you happen to believe - which presumably as marxists and materialists we don't - that power is held by individuals to give or take at will, then it's blatantly ridiculous to argue that any woman freely consents to being tied up or dominated, and freely 'like it'.
The notion of consent here is no more relevant than it is relevant to say that women 'choosé' to go into particular (worse paid) jobs, or to married or to be heterosexual. These are hardly 'free' choices made from shopping list of fairly presented options.
Sexuality in our society is constructed in a context of male domination and women's subordination; when this subordination is eroticised this is hardly 'breaking bourgeois taboos'. As socialists we know that women's sexual subordination - like their economic suboraination - can only be challenged on a collective basis, by challenging the underlying unequal relationships existing in capitalist and patriarcha cultures.
Feminism, like socialism, is a term which the liberal right has long attempted to appropriate. It's a shame to see Socialist Outlook going in the same direction as other left iournals of male dominated •roanisationg depoliticising both power and sexuality, and thereby trivialising feminist politics hope to see the balance redressed in future issues!
Rachel Wingfield London N4