Selling Women's Sexual Liberation. Middle class white women and sex consumptions in contemporary Argentina

KARINA FELITTI

Hempstead, New York

Congreso; The Seventeenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities; 2017

Hofstra University

Since 1950 psychologists and sexual therapists have considered that a satisfactory sexual life is a decisive aspect of well-being, while second wave feminism settled women?s sexual pleasure as a sign of gender equality. The right to achieve sexual pleasure announced in the sixties is nowadays organized according the language of efficiency from the business world. The question of how many orgasms guarantee sexual happiness, how many sexual partners qualify a woman as a liberated one become important in the current love/erotic marketplace that hierarchizes sexiness and sexual experience. Feminist slogans about sexual freedom, bodily self-knowledge and the right to pleasure extend beyond the spaces of feminist militancy. The increasing value given to entrepreneurship, both economic and emotional, leads women to ?work? and ?invest? for achieving sexual pleasure, improving their self-esteem and personal power. Sexual coaching sex toys, sexual self-help books, erotic literature such as Fifty Shades of Grey, and sexy lingerie, are some of the products that middle class white women consume in Western cities in order to achieve these goals. In this paper I present an approach to some outputs of my field work in Buenos Aires, focusing in the ways that this sex education affects women?s ordinary lives and their identities and considering the negotiations they establish with other discourses that also promote women?s liberation. This paper is divided in 3 sections: 1) the situation of women in contemporary Argentina in terms of gender equity; 2) the description and analysis of the field work; 3) and some partial conclusions of this ongoing research.