I remember the first time a friend told me that she had been choked without her consent during sex. I was in my early 20s, and it hadn’t been the first time for her – she had also been slapped and had her hair pulled, all by men she had met online – but I was shocked and concerned. “It’s as though he was trying to do what he has seen in porn,” she said. As our 20s progressed, my single friends came to feel that a transactional dating environment only exacerbated the problem: the men they met would watch porn, then “order” a woman on Tinder to act out what they had seen. It felt, by all accounts, mechanistic, depressing and disempowering.
I write this in the midst of what is being called a backlash against sex-positive feminism. For more than a decade, millennial women have been looking back at the 90s and early 00s in which we came of age and reflecting on the all-pervasive sexist lad, porn and raunch culture, and the toxicity of the tabloids and women’s magazines. As a result, fourth-wave feminists are ambivalent about pornography and its effects, and this scepticism has coexisted quite peacefully with a desire not to shame women while deconstructing the issues we all face.
I say this because Generation Z’s discovery that porn can be damaging is making headlines: some even speak of this as though it is a backlash against millennials, despite it being no real departure from the beliefs of my generation. It’s more a rite of passage that most of us raised in the internet age have been through. Billie Eilish’s comments about porn and its damaging effects are true and righteous, but they are not new. They are the logical culmination of this feminist wave, which you could argue has been embroiled in a long, slow rebound from the postfeminism of the 1990s espoused by Generation X.
Much is made of the tension between older, third-wave feminists and millennial feminists (while I realise that it isn’t always useful to divide women into generations, when it comes to waves of feminism it can be elucidating), but this always lets the 1990s postfeminists off the hook. Something I share in common with my (boomer-aged) mother is that both of us wonder what on earth these women were on.
These were the women who said that feminism was over, who collaborated with the lads to bring about the heavily sexualised, objectifying, porn-influenced era we grew up in. They were the “cool girl” feminists, always one of the boys, who dismissed any attempt to critique the culture they had formed a part in creating. When we came of age and began to pull apart this hellscape, which included the women’s magazines they wrote for, they slapped us back down to protect their own interests. They could not tolerate us criticising their role in the problem.
If I sound angry, I do not mean to. But having sat on the frontlines of feminist discussion before retreating due to exhaustion, exasperation and boredom, I do feel it’s important that my generation’s role in the movement is not erased. Sex-positive feminism was never about giving men a free pass to choke women in bed without their consent. It was about affording women who were sexually active, including sex workers, the respect that they had previously been denied.
Look at the body of literature that is being produced by millennial women such as Sally Rooney, Megan Nolan and Raven Leilani, who are all examining rough sex, power dynamics and coercive control. Indeed, such topics are so prevalent – with good reason – that they risk becoming repetitive, but you can hardly argue that we haven’t been trying to get to the bottom of why women are being so regularly subjugated and objectified.
Of course, there were Gen X feminists who critiqued porn culture at the time – Ariel Levy and Natasha Walter, for example – and women writers who were adults during that era of feminism who are sceptical of its legacy. In Katherine Angel’s brilliant Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, she writes of the role that postfeminist thinking has played in so-called “consent culture”, how it demands confidence and empowerment where they may be uncertainty and ambivalence and, ironically enough, is contributing to the fact that so many women are experiencing bad sex. “Postfeminism insisted on sexual assertiveness and sex-positivity – on a gleeful pleasure taken in seeing oneself as a subject of desire,” she writes. “A woman who failed to declare her desire noisily and defiantly was falling short of her personhood. She was harking back to a fusty, frigid, feminism …”
Angel frames bad sex as an important political and social issue, and, while I’m keen to stress that men can (naturally) play a significant role in bad sex, the failure of 1990s feminism should also not be forgotten. Women of my generation feel enormous solidarity with women in their late teens and 20s now, because we have been through it ourselves (though admittedly without the new horrors offered by Instagram and influencer culture).
They might be surprised, given the tone of some of the media coverage (including the claims that we view them as “puriteens”), to realise that, in examining the long-term impacts of porn, they have our support. Now all we have to do work out is how to make women’s sex lives better, together.
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist
