Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
1 My generation: sex as subversive 1
Saying yes to sex 5
Out of apathy, into the counter-culture 12
Saying no to sexism 21
2 The liberated orgasm? feminists fall out 31
The clitoral truth 34
Autonomy and control 41
Sex and love 44
Women loving women 49
Sleeping with the enemy 55
Wars without end 61
3 The coital imperative: sexology and sex research 70
Denning nature: sex as energy 72
Early battles between the sexes 79
From difference to sameness 85
Sex therapy regimes 92
Feminist sex research 101
4 Laws of desire: psychoanalytic perspective and dispute 117
Sexual drives, psychic realities 118
Family romances and sexual difference 122
Phallic prescriptions, penile practices 129
Women's desire and the bonds of love 140
Promises and evasions in psychoanalysis 151
5 Gay and lesbian challenges: transgression and recuperation 165
Coming out, fighting back 166
Any woman can: reconstructing the lesbian 170
Following Foucault: resisting homosexual identity 178
Who's a pervert?: queer theory and gender sabotage 188
Flaunting it: lesbian chic and the gay nineties 199
6 Rethinking heterosexuality: women with men 213
Heterosexual defensiveness: a crisis of confidence 215
Body matters: cultural inscriptions 218
Sexual histories: bodily constraints 226
Desiring subjects: identification and fantasy 233
What's sex got to do with it?: subverting the codes of gender 245
Phallic fictions, female pleasures 253
7 Sex in society: social problems, sexual panics 267
Gender uncertainties and sexual crisis 269
Backlash USA: managing economic dislocation 274
Beyond the phallus: male passivity 282
Cultural contradictions: female bodies and the power of women 296
Sexual liberation and feminist politics 308
Notes 319
Index 363
