Dancing to Different Tunes: Sexuality and Its Misconceptions

For much of history, sexuality has been an ever-present shadow on the lives of women. Even today, their own true sexuality is distorted by a genitally-fixated world, and among feminists, explorations of sexuality have remained too narrowly focused. Too little emphasis has been placed on motherhood, and the implications of biology have often been dismissed. Disagreements about sexuality have caused serious rifts among feminists, obscuring the fact that male-dominated interpretations of sexuality are injuring women’s happiness and, indeed, their civil rights. This work synthesizes 30 years of writing on the subject, and proposes a comprehensive theory of sexuality and feminism. Re-introducing the dynamics of biology, it extends sexuality to the sensuality of nurturing a child and to what, the author controversially argues, can be an ecstatic birthing process, offering new insight on the possible function of the female orgasm. In addition, her ideas on male sexuality challenge myths about natural aggression and machismo. Ethna Viney unravels the key modern theories of sexuality - academic, psychological and philosophical - and integrates them in a common-sense way with concepts of her own. The result is a contribution to the debate on the shifting choices facing women today.