Beatrice Faust writes that ‘the right to choose’ must extend further than abortion. Women must be able to choose to express their sexuality or their celibacy; whether to be heterosexual, lesbian or bisexual; and must have the right to make the first move in a relationship or ‘wait until we are asked’. But talk to any woman today and they will tell you that these rights seem harder to achieve than the abortion right from grudging male peers.

When it comes to the right to choose pornography, it seems that for women this could be more accurately described as the right to choose erotica. Although Beatrice Faust doesn’t actually state this as such, it is implicit in all her findings. Havelock Ellis, Kinsey, Hite and other lesser sexologists have always stressed that men and women respond to different sexual stimuli. They aren’t turned on by the male nude to the extent that men are by the female nude – they respond to the whole being of the man. They can also ‘climax as easily and as quickly as men, and some women can climax often and rapidly – a facility that is unknown among men’.

Beatrice Faust cites the male reaction to a female stripper’s body and a woman’s response to a male pop-star or film-star. The woman is responding to the person, the man to the body. More instructive is the type of pin-ups males and females favour; one tends to be pornographic or cheesecake, the other symbolic. Fantasy is another important indicator. Beatrice Faust argues that the tendency for men to fantasize sexual conquest in waking and dream states far outstrips corresponding female fantasies. Indeed, I was struck by Paul Wilson’s findings in his recent book Intimacy: A sex or love experience that men’s central fantasy was to seduce a nubile female, whilst women’s fantasy centred in finding intimate sharing relationships. It is men’s association of sex with libido that enables them to imagine having sex with almost any female, whilst women are not aroused by a man they don’t find wholly attractive to all their senses. Where Women Sex and Pornography becomes really interesting is when it tackles this question of stimuli, which raises all the old issues of heredity and environment in the name of gender research. Beatrice Faust argues, for instance, that when homosexuals take oestrogen for cosmetic reasons they discover that it actually softens and refines the skin. The author postulates from Kinsey’s studies that lesbians climax more often because they are able to fully explore the sensations of stroking and caressing; from Havelock Ellis’ work that maternal nursing of infants gives women an erotic potential denied to men; and from some intriguing data on Marilyn Monroe that ‘clothing and cosmetics can be an erotic turn-on for the women who use them, as well as for men who look on’.

Her conclusion is that men concentrate on the genitals and ‘make love to women as they would like women to make love to them – that is, as pseudo males, women want to love and be made love to as they love babies – that is, in a nurturant, tender fashion’. Women drift in love-making into a ‘sensual haze’ where orgasm is an optional bonus. ‘Foreplay’ and ‘afterplay’ are male terminology. And if that wasn’t enough, the author cites Sylvia Plath and D.H. Lawrence for the attitudes to the phallus. Male genitalia to males can be a symbol of power as well as sex. It is physically impossible for women to rape men, but not vice versa.

Where Beatrice Faust stands in the polarised positions of the biological determinist French feminists and the culturally based feminism of Americans like Kate Millett is somewhere in between. Beatrice Faust argues there are biological and cultural viables, and it is not just males who need to explore their ‘yin’ gentle side, but also females who need to be more assertively ‘yang’. Both sides need to explore their androgynous genes to escape biological and cultural stereotypes.

One disagreement I have with the book is that perhaps the author is too kind to men. She states, for example, that D.H. Lawrence knew his work was art and not pornography, but that seems to ignore his work at the end of his sojourn in Mexico which conveys more about his brutal dark obsessions about women than anything about art. Ten years ago, before I read this work, I was considering doing a thesis on Lawrence in Australia – after I read it, I decided not to touch him.

The chapter ‘The Mystery of the New Chastity’ does countenance this to some degree, and strikes fresh insight into feminist practice. In a just put-down of the New Left from a woman’s viewpoint, Beatrice Faust shows how old role models were continued amidst the new liberation. She writes:

The New Left adopted the motto ‘make love, not war' on the assumption that making love was also making revolution ... hut the mode! of sexual emancipation for women was assimilationist: they were forced to fuck on men's terms.

She quotes Slokely Carmichael in 1964, ‘The only position for women is prone’. So in an indirect way, Beatrice Faust is arguing that the Feminist Movement of the 60s and 70s was just as much a protest against the male Left as it was against capitalist patriarchy.

In a brilliant climax to the chapter, she writes:

Feminist women had tried the masculine. fun morality and the assimilationist model of emancipating women by letting them act in every way like men. They found the morality brutal rather than hedonistic and the model oppressive instead of liberating ... Permissiveness had scarcely been accepted as a historical development before it became fashionable to defend the right to say no.

The way out? Beatrice Faust ends the book by arguing that we need to seek new rituals that ‘equalise sexual responsibility between men and women, as well as providing a cultural buffer between male and female sexuality'. Where 1 do have some difficulty with the ending is that although Beatrice Faust seems to favour erotica rather than pornography throughout the book, there is no conclusive statement. The book ends by arguing that men and women need to change androgynously and for some women this could involve enjoying pornography. But it has been proven that women arc not very turned on by porn, and that the East, in contrast to the West, has an erotic art form which arouses both sexes. It doesn’t seem good enough to argue that violence and pornography are inherent in Western culture – we need to ask why. We need to also ask whether a different non-patriarchal political structure in the West would produce erotica in contrast to the current pornography. If this is something we desire, then it is what we must work towards.