Bits and Megabits

Performance, of course, is not the same as satisfaction. Permission is not the same as agency; the ability to say yes is not the same as the ability to say yes, with him but not with him, or yes, like this but not like that. The sexual revolution, in full bloom by the time I hit high school, seems to have given the girls in my circle a half-filled tool kit, an ability to act sexual without much of a corresponding sense of what it really meant to be sexual, a door that opened into a poorly-lit room. This may have been a by-product of the difference between the sexual revolution, which advocated freedom of expression in the most love-the-one-you’re-with general way, and the women’s movement, where activism tilted toward the more tangible arenas of reproductive freedom and sexual health….They gave us at least a rudimentary sense that sex was something we were allowed to do. But they went only so far. What did not trickle down—what may have never quite crystallized within the movement itself—was a deeper sense of empowered desire, a construction of female sexual pleasure as an end in and of itself, a yes articulated in our own voices.

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