Conformity And Sexuality

The important take-away from each of these strands of social and political developments in the 70’s is that, increasingly, they served to introduce and deepen the split between gender conformity and sexuality; the latter came to be understood almost solely in terms of object(s) of desire, and thus to perpetuate standing conceptions of whiteness and racialization in the U.S. In the case of the women’s movement, radical cultural feminism, and gay liberation, issues of sexuality seemingly were treated and lived as distinct from those of gender such that resistance to particular hegemonic ideas about sexuality had little connection to dissent from oppressive conceptions of the gender. The Sexual Freedom League arose out this context. Indeed, the SFL was also dominantly concerned with sexual object choice because a space had now been opened for
A newspaper article about the SFL further describes “swinging” as one of its main activities, which was the “practice of having intimate relations with a variety of partners other than one’s spouse…in a short span of time.” The organization is labeled in the same article as a “secret middle class organization.” These descriptions fall in line with those made by the women that I discussed earlier, as well as my analysis of the race and class-based circles the SFL’s membership occupied. Other internal materials describe these swinging parties as attracting heterosexual married couples and single people who were interested in expanding their sexual experiences beyond the monogamous, heterosexual bedroom. This seems to be the “suppressed majority,” which makes sense particularly in the context of certain patriarchal sexual expectations that women members sought to undo and the more liberatory experiences they desired. Another SFL newsletter contains statistics about how many people are bisexual and asks about interest in bisexuality and planning a bisexuality activity. It seems that, within the SFL,