A couple of years ago I saw on a bumper sticker one of those newly-manufactured slogans which come and go like the daisy sticker and the smiley face. It said something very like Having abandoned my quest for reality, I am now looking for a good fantasy. I cannot think of a better slogan for the nineties, or for the particular people and subculture which I am trying to challenge: the new lesbian feminists of the last decade before the millennium, who have perhaps so despaired of getting or wielding any power and control over a hostile and incomprehensible world, that they prefer to devote their time and energy to elaborate fantasies of absolute personal, sexual power.
I have, actually, nothing against fantasy. No one who has read as much science-fiction and eagerly watched as many movies as I have, could earnestly uphold such a position. I do have a problem with fantasy as the basis of relationships between adult human beings.
Childhood fantasy play may be an important developmental stage, and is sometimes (though by no means always) harmless; but after a certain age I think it indecent to assume that other people should or can be props and actors in one's private fantasy productions. It makes me reassess the literal meaning of the term objectification - once much used in feminist rhetoric, now tarnished with age, no longer hip or trendy. I find it a really essential word, indispensable in trying to understand human error and wrong-doing.
The sm social scene, for example, places strong emphasis not only on costumes and accessories, but on categorizing individuals by what they are and aren't into or willing to do. The handkerchief colour code is the classic public expression or advertisement of these categories, and I use the word advertisement with purpose. This convention reminds me strongly of a shopping mall, where potential buyers shop for the correct accessory, the proper cast for their current movie. It reminds me also of the anterooms of certain whorehouses where the merchandise is on display, and the male customers decide whether they want the Asian girl or the white one, the blonde or the redhead, the young one or the more motherly type. It is a selection among goods on a shelf.
There is a sense in which the redefinition of our sex lives into a set of fixed requirements, according to which we shop around for compliant partners, means that we regard each other more and more as prostitutes: as service providers or as commodity. Of course, it's trendy these days to defend not only prostitutes, but prostitution in general. Hookers certainly need defence, against harassment from police as well as violence from customers. Their working conditions are appalling; but sympathy and support for women enmeshed in the commercial sex trade is now being manipulated into support for the trade itself. It's beginning to be old-fashioned or even reactionary to think that there is anything wrong with prostitution at all. And maybe that's a good place to begin.