sawyl | Carter on sex and equality

Having finished reading Berlin's essays on Russian Thinkers, moved on to Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman. Here are a couple of wonderfully punchy, typically Carterian paragraphs on the effects of economical and social factors on sex:

If one sexual partner is economically dependent on the other, then the question of sexual coercion, of contractual obligation, raises its head in the very abode of love and inevitably colours the nature of the sexual expression of affection. The marriage bed is a particularly delusive refuge from the world because all wives by necessity fuck by contract. Prostitutes are at least decently paid on the nail and boast fewer illusions about a hireling status that has no veneer of social acceptability, but their services have suffered a decline in demand now that other women have invaded their territory in their own search for a newly acknowledged sexual pleasure. In this period, promiscuous modern abandon may seem the only free exchange.

But no bed, however unexpected, no matter how apparently gratuitous, is free from the de-universalising facts of real life. We do not go to bed in simple pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimental of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies — all the bits and pieces of our unique existences. These considerations have limited our choice of partners before we have even got them into the bedroom. It was impossible for the Countess in Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro to contemplate sleeping with her husband's valet, even though he was clearly the best man available; considerations of social class censored the possibility of sexual attraction between the Countess and Figaro before it could have begun to exist, and if this convention restricted the Countess's activities, it did not affect those of her husband; he happily plotted to seduce his valet's wife. If middle-class Catherine Earnshaw, in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, wants to sleep with Heathcliff, who has the dubious class origins of a foundling, she must not only repress this desire but pay the socially sanctioned price of brain-fever and early death for even contemplating it. Our literature is full, as are our lives, of men and women, but especially women, who deny the reality of sexual attraction and of love because of considerations of class, religion, race and of gender itself.