Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

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Dear Betty,

Thanks so much for mentioning the importance of the sexual revolution in reference to Feminism. There is so much idealised libertarian politics around at the moment that I’ve become convinced that many younger people simply don’t realise how fragile personal freedom actually is; how it was fought for in so many areas of life through the civil rights movement and feminism.

The current backlash against political correctness here in the UK and elsewhere is, in my view, indicative of the misapprehension that freedom is an innate social norm; it is as if those who stood up to repression in the name of social justice were somehow foolish or misguided. It saddens me to think that so many on the political right consider it brave to belittle those who are already disenfranchised, and to do it from the safe haven of belonging to a social milieu that is unlikely to do them harm. There is also tribalism at work too; to be anti-P.C. in the age of consumerism is also to fear the loss of social position within a hierarchy geared to false individualism.  

For me, political correctness is simply an extension of civil rights: it gives actions social context; it keeps safe liberties once only afforded to the few and has enabled freedoms enshrined in law to be enacted in the raw - from equal pay to equal treatment before the law and from the religious freedoms sanctioned by a (theoretically) secular state to the freedom to walk unmolested in the street or at work. This is essentially a process view of life where ends are less important than means and it is in due regard for political correctness that we sanction the continuance of social change, the message is the medium (to turn a well used phrase from destination to journey) and to turn our collective backs on PC is to say that the fight for freedom is over. And that is when this great journey will sadly end.

Furthermore, if we feel so threatened that we can not extend civil liberties to personal relations, for which read civility, then there is little hope of extending freedom to the desperate millions who, having been robbed of the few resources left behind by colonial forces, might easily be swayed by the violence of sheer survival. Nothing is so damaging as the assumption that those who have the most will keep on taking; and for women and men to own their own orgasms is surely part of that wider sweep of enfranchisement. If we can not own our own pleasure and our means of reproduction there is little hope that we might be responsible adults in other spheres of life. If our most intimate roles continue to be essentially and intrinsically sado-masochistic then it is men with guns who will continue to run everything.

Political correctness is, for me, one of the real joys of sex.

Best wishes

Chu