Part Of Why I Don't Think Much Of The State of Academia

Part of Why I Don't Think Much Of The State of Academia

This abstract from a recently published piece in the Berkeley Journal of Law, Gender, and Justice:

Yet, despite the conceptual centrality of sexual desire and sexual activity, family law says nothing explicit about sexual pleasure. And despite the salience of gender equality in contemporary family law, the field remains preoccupied with performances that produce heterosexual men's orgasms while ignoring or rejecting women's interest in orgasmic pleasure. As a result, family law today is marked by fundamental omissions and inconsistencies.

This paper attempts to begin to fill the gap and to explore the incongruities. It builds on Susan E. Stiritz's Cultural Cliteracy: Exposing the Contexts of Women's Not Coming (published as a companion piece) and examines the relevance of Stiritz's analysis for family law. According to Stiritz, "'[c]ultural cliteracy' denotes what an adequately educated person should know about the clitoris, which is that it is a culturally despised body part because it is an obdurate reminder of women's independence and power and supports women's liberation." Stiritz tracks the role of the clitoris and women's sexual pleasure through history, compares past and contemporary anatomical understandings of the clitoris, and then demonstrates through empirical studies, based on courses she has taught, how cultural cliteracy can empower women and bring new insights to the reading of women's texts. She calls for the integration of "adequate understandings of the clitoris" into a variety of different discourses, including law.

The paper isn't much less silly. "Culturally despised body part"? This isn't East Africa, or Afghanistan. The paper gets properly upset about some things:

Overall, popular culture remains notoriously androcentric, sexualizing even young girls in the interest of men, reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies, and creating dangers (including exposure of young persons to sexually transmitted disease) abhorred by family law.

And yet it is clear that the author has not a clue that is the collapse of traditional values, and its replacement with the values that the author certainly approves of, that has created this disaster.