ABSTRACT
Lesbian feminist theorists argued that the sexuality of male domination is constructed around the eroticising of women’s subordination. They rejected the ways in which inequality could be eroticised by lesbians, as in butch and femme role-playing and sadomasochism. A backlash to these politics developed in the 1980s from within some parts of the feminist and lesbian communities, which took the form of a movement of lesbians who were in favour of sadomasochism and role-playing. They promoted a sexuality of dominance and submission as both natural and progressive. It combined with a campaign by libertarian feminists to defend pornography from a feminist challenge, creating the so-called ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s, in which the newly emerged feminist critique of sexuality was trounced by the powerful forces of male dominance. The critics of the lesbian feminist challenge to the sexual politics of male domination named themselves the ‘pro-sex’ tendency and were largely successful in defeating the lesbian feminist attempt to transform the construction of sexuality.
