ABSTRACT
Sex has always been political. Feminists have long recognized this, and since at least the nineteenth century have actively campaigned against men’s sexual exploitation of women. Further back, still, Mary Wollstonecraft (1999) published a searing critique of normative modes of male sexuality in the late eighteenth century. In the early twentieth century, however, feminist attention to sexual politics diminished – a decline that Margaret Jackson (1994: 3) has linked to the development of sexology and its scientific legitimation of what she referred to as “the patriarchal model of sexuality”2: that is, a model of heterosexuality in which the domination of women was naturalized. Through sexology and its popularization within sex manuals, she argued, the norms of sex that feminists had been fighting to change were (re)cast as immutable, determined by the laws of nature.
