Why write about sex? begs the Introduction to this volume of assorted think-pieces, short stories and articles. Why add to the tawdry glut, insist the editors, before wondering, a few lines down, if taboo and shame ‘are among the necessary products of capitalism’; and by the time they’ve ended up with –

 Pleasure, Roland Barthes has suggested, makes us ‘objective’. It allows us to lift our eyes for an instant to the horizon to see what might be coming in our direction. Desire is ever renewed. Still, in sexual satisfaction, we find moments of rest and vision. This book, we hope, is a contribution toward hastening such moments our way.

by this time we may feel we have been wrapped in a Playboy centrefold, sold in our millions by a gloating entrepreneur – and with one bound Jacqueline was free – saved at the last ditch by a friendly old semiologist with his talk of split selves and a penchant for his mother.

Or, as those witches of the reign of James I, so fashionable now as a subject for the study of the oppression of women, might remark: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, something rad-fem-les this way comes!’

Reading this book in the absolute quiet of a Dorset village, it was hard to escape the conclusion that overcrowding does indeed lead to the warped mind, to a promiscuity that leans like the Tower of Pisa, threatening always to subside into a shattered onanism; that this type of talk about sexuality is like coating the tongue of the talker with fur, leading to the inevitable bad breath, mauvaise foi. Skyscrapers have led to agitation, in the racing clouds women long for androgyny. (Agonies of jealousy, cruelty, sexual deprivation are no doubt enacted every moment at Affpiddle, but by the sound of the village at nightfall, only in the commercial breaks.) And New York seems from here the divided cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cells of each city multiplying horribly and changing into the other and back again. Hence the cry of exasperation in Alice Echols’ ‘The New Feminism of Yin and Yang’ (she is reviewing The Transsexual Empire by Janice Raymond: … ‘those transsexuals who identify themselves as lesbian feminists simply seek to undo their surgery by pursuing relationships with women in order “to become the man within the woman, and more, within the women’s community”.’ (A sort of Trojan Mare. One feels Gore Vidal would make good use of this.) The author continues, ‘One specific example of this is the way a transsexual walked into a women’s restaurant with his arms around two women, one on each side, with the possessive encompassing that is characteristically masculine’.

This is a dreadful situation, and there is no doubt it would be very irritating to enter the Star Inn at Affpiddle for a pint of scrumpy, find a protective arm encircling, one, and then discover that this arm belonged to none other than a man who, fed up with driving the tractor, had opted for a bucolic, busty look and then caused major embarrassment by coming over to give a woman a squeeze. Indeed, she might find herself debagged and thrown into the village pond, a fate normally reserved for the straight rather than the born-again witch – or indeed, in English aristocratic circles, for straight gays in Oxford quads. (It’s hard, too, to take seriously the contention of John D’Emilio, the only male contributor to this volume, in ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’: ‘I want to argue that gay men and lesbians have not always existed … their emergence is related with the relations of capitalism…’ As far as I know there has been capitalism in Scotland of just as earnest a variety as elsewhere, so how to explain the graffiti noted by a friend some fifteen years ago in a dour public convenience: ‘Is there nobody queer in Crieff?’)

The most difficult thing about most of the pieces in Desire is that they are so difficult to read. It may be that this proves (in a way not necessarily so transparent with general writing, in that the reader may feel simply not attuned to the way in which an idea is set down) that those who, like Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing, have forged a language for the new consciousness of women are followed at the owner’s risk. I for one find that in such pieces as Master and Slave by Jessica Benjamin – an examination of the Story of O, and also containing references to a masochist as ‘she’ as if the hapless originator of the name had not been a Mr Masoch – the sickening thud of such sentiments as:

I believe that we are facing unbearably intensified privatization and discontinuity, unrelieved by expressions of continuity … the psychological origins of erotic domination can be traced to one-sided differentiation, that is, to the splitting of these impulses and their assignment to women and men, respectively …

only make me feel how extraordinarily complex and subtle the subject is, and how ludicrous the tackling of it must necessarily appear when the tackler is neither Henry James nor Willa Cather. This is a harsh verdict – perhaps it is wrong to suggest that fiction is a better hope for opening out the problems between the sexes than theory (unless a Millett, Firestone or Greer is spinning a highly original fiction). But statements such as (from ‘Is the Gaze Male’? by E Ann Kaplan) ‘… voyeurism and fetishism are mechanisms the dominant cinema uses to construct the male spectator in accordance with the needs of his unconscious’ or as Johnston argues, that Sternberg represses the ‘idea of woman as a social and sexual being’, thus replacing the opposition man/woman with male/non-male ‘. . . and other assumptions of the conscious determination of artists to repress and oppress women, simply shows a total lack of understanding of the meaning of art. It is certainly true that films must be made, and are now in the process of being made, by women directors as able to show the old myths in the different light that was always there to play on them – as Alison Lurie did, for instance, when she went to the store of oral lore used by the Brothers Grimm a century ago and found each tale had its counterpart lying there: the Sleeping Prince, Cinders the pantry boy. But to look at history and sex through Paranoia 3D makes for a grisly spectacle.

Hoping for the salvation of fiction, I leafed through the book one final time in the garden. A Sunday afternoon and the old Claudette Colberts were showing the wickedness of exploitative Hollywood to another generation of fascinated eleven-year-old viewers. I came to the following, entitled ‘Outside the Operating Room of the Sex Change Doctor’ by Sharon Olds.

The reader will be spared the unpleasant references to Chile and Vietnam. There’s one very good and enjoyable piece of history and biography, ‘Feminism, Men and Moderm Love: Greenwich Village 1900–1925’. Here, Ellen Kay Trimberger has researched and quoted a fascinating period when women who were artists and who fought for independence, came up against the infantile expectations of the men.