Mistaking the Revolution

Something most Harvard students don’t realize about shopping period: It’s not over until the fat lady sings. Or, more accurately, until some lady—her weight and looks don’t really matter, because she loves her body, of course—buzzes to a crowd of excitable college girls about their need for increased awareness of sexual health and politics. Also, their need for orgasms—you’re not a real woman unless you’ve had lots of them, and the reason you’re not having them is that your boyfriend is a chauvinist pig.

Was that politically incorrect and sexually oppressive of me? Oops, let’s rewind then. What I meant to say is this: the extracurricular seminar Female Sexuality is back, and last week dozens of Harvard women congregated in the Women’s Center to be briefed about the logistics of the course, how to apply, and how to get sexually liberated.

The class, nicknamed FemSex, began in 1994 at UC Berkeley. Initially, FemSex was a class about erotica, but has since expanded into the topics of sexuality and reproductive rights, anatomy, and pornography. Last winter, FemSex debuted at Harvard, and it was such a hit that this spring the course has been expanded into two sections.

“Before FemSex, I thought I could talk about sex and stuff…but I learned that I couldn’t [before taking the course],” one alum said at last week’s meeting. And this seems to be the theme of the course: Almost nothing is left unsaid.

Some of the intentions of FemSex appear perfectly reasonable—to be sure, women should be aware of their sexuality—but the course overindulges in hyperbole. It descends into sensationalism, overestimating the oppression of modern female sexuality. What’s more, its method of ensuring sexual liberation is tiresome.

According to the syllabus, for instance, in its fifth meeting, the course discusses menstruation: “We will discuss the social and cultural stigmatization of women’s menstrual cycles and the concept of women’s genitals as ‘dirty.’” If the FemSex gang is implying that stigmatization of menstruation exists at Harvard—that female undergraduates are shunned for five days or so each month—then I guess I’ve missed the red tents inside the Yard. Alternatively, if FemSex facilitators are suggesting we should talk more openly about menstruation, that seems equally ridiculous—we don’t talk about our bowel movements, and this matter is not so different. The stigmas FemSex weeps over don’t exist here or in any of the progressive contexts in which we find ourselves.

In another meeting outlined by the course syllabus, FemSex strives to help members become intimate with their genitals by encouraging them to look inside themselves with speculums and then report back. The experience of looking at her girlish parts aims to leave the student with a new sense of ownership over her genitalia. I suppose not all of us read Deenie as preteen girls—you know, that Judy Blume book that taught us it was okay that we touch ourselves—but did a Harvard undergraduate really need a roomful of other women to facilitate her revelation?

The major trouble with FemSex is that its very message is conflicting. On the one hand, it rejects the old tokens of patriarchal society in that comedic “Fuck guys! I just want to dance!” sort of way. Men are evil predators, the course preaches; a great number of them run around assaulting women, and they can never make us climax, because, as discussed in section 10, entitled “Masturbation and Orgasms,” we live in a “society that defines pleasure by male standards.” Class members would do well to find better sexual partners, I would say.

On the other hand, the course seems oddly embracive of old-fashioned virility. At one point, the seminar takes a field trip to a strip club, and its members seem to aspire to the same strong sexual desires felt by males. If this is the answer to healthier female sexuality, then maybe class members should act more like men: men don’t hold meetings in which they agonize over their sexuality.

The last important issue FemSex seems to completely wash over is the fact that, for some women, sex may not be such a big deal. Sure, we are all sexual beings, but there is no reason to aspire to the typical male’s degree of sexual desire—most women don’t spend that much time thinking about sex. That fact is not a reflection of some societal oppression. If anything, it’s liberating.

Judging from the syllabus and last week’s meeting, a woman thinking of taking FemSex would do better to spend her time and $15 course fee elsewhere. For instance, she might work on finding a boyfriend who wishes to bring her sexual pleasure in “female terms”—that shouldn’t be too hard, given how progressive most modern Harvard men are. Alternatively, visiting a psychiatrist to try to pinpoint the reason she feels the need to talk about her menstrual cycle with people she runs into on the street might be useful. Visiting a strip club is not going to help her become a fuller person—unless she’s looking for a backup plan to investment banking, in which case she should make a detour to the gym, too. The only value in FemSex, it seems, is in parody.



Lucy M. Caldwell ’09 is a history and literature concentrator in Adams House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.