Carmen Barroso¹

 The last decade has been witness to the appearance of something without precedent in many countries of Latin America. In hundreds of grassroots groups from diverse backgrounds, women have begun to publicly express their doubts, experiences and concerns about sex, which, for them, has always been synonymous with fear and shame.

Although this movement has provoked various reactions, its implications have not been adequately studied. As a result, women's movements in Latin America have approached this phenomenon with only a partial understanding, at times overvaluing and at times ignoring sexuality. DAWN can contribute to overcoming this problem, by promoting a more profound analysis of sexuality.

sex: a new need?

Why has a theme about which discussion has been rigidly controlled for centuries come to be publicly discussed in women's groups from low-income sectors? In order to answer this question, we must first understand the reappearance of grassroots movements on the political scene. The articles of Virginia Vargas, Eva Blay, Elizabeth Jelin and many others have helped us to understand the increased participation of women in social movements at the grassroots level as part of a wider process in which everyday life is politicized. Women's groups have made original contributions to this process, among these, an increased discussion of sexuality.

The most visible discussions have centered on women's demands for sex education. These demands grew out of at least three different needs: for self-education in order to educate children; for information, to control fertility; and for new forms of pleasurable sexual relations. Those needs did not arise in a vacuum; they are the result of the totality of social changes which have accelerated during the crisis affecting Latin America.

sex education for children

Traditionally, the sex education which fathers and mothers provided to their male and female children was very simple. From infancy, silence, evasive responses or brutal repression conveyed the same idea: sex is dirty and shameful, something which it is better not to know about. A double moral standard separated men from women, and "good" women from "bad" women.

Mothers, in particular, had to exercise rigid control of their daughters' sexuality, preserving the virginity of single daughters at all costs. Unquestionable authority and constant vigilance were necessary and generally sufficient to achieve these ends. While many exceptions to this approach existed, they did not alter the norm.

During the last decades, however, the situation of young people both within and outside of the family has been radically altered. Parental authority has been weakened and constant vigilance of young people has become impossible. Sociological and anthropological studies have shown how migration and urbanization have affected family relationships. The great expansion of education and the communications media has given young people a new status and contributed to the spread of values of self-fulfillment and liberation. Statistics showing an increase in the number of adolescent mothers beginning with the 1970s are only one of the indicators of wider changes occurring all over the continent.

As a result of all this, mothers cannot impose on their children the rigid norms under which they were educated, and are not even sure they should try to do so. Their search for sex education to teach their children reflects this perplexity.

birth control

In almost all countries of the continent the average number of children per woman has fallen drastically.² In some countries, as in Brazil, this decline has occurred in all social classes and includes rural areas.

The social changes which contributed to the decline in birthrates are well-known. The population has emigrated in mass to the cities, where caring for infants is difficult. The precarious housing conditions, the absence of infrastructure such as day care centers, and generalized violence make the constant supervision of small children imperative. Yet, growing numbers of women have begun to work in the formal labor market, where working conditions prevent the simultaneous supervision of children. Migration also makes it difficult to depend on the resources of family and neighbors for childcare. Further, the changes in agriculture, especially the increase in the percentages of crops which are exported, have raised the cost of food even for inhabitants of rural areas. Changes in technology have also made child labor obsolete.

Cultural factors have also played a role in the declining birth rate. In spite of the fact that feminism is far from being a movement of the masses, its ideas, although diluted and even distorted at times, reach a large segment of the population through the communications media. In Brazil, for example, the number of televisions tripled during the 1970s, with 75% of the urban population currently owning them. While the media does not promote new roles for women, it stimulates consumerism, which is incompatible with large families.

At the same time as these conditions were motivating women to avoid having children, women had little access to information which would enable them to make conscious decisions in this respect. Governments have not taken the lead in providing birth control information and private entities have thus had to take on the cause of population reduction. As a result, the fall in fertility rates is occurring at the cost of the health of poor women. The Pill is provided without monitoring or other medical services that may be required, clandestine abortions are performed in precarious conditions, and sterilizations are performed on poor young women without providing them with information about the effects on their future fertility. These problems are a source of constant concern among women who have to make crucial decisions for themselves and their families. Their search for sex education reflects the difficulty of those decisions and their lack of information.

pleasure in relationships

Among members of the present generation the meaning of marriage has come to reflect the idea that marriage is the center of sexual and emotional realization. If the past decades witnessed the gradual predominance of the idea that romantic love is an essential part of self-realization, during the past few years the idea which has predominated is that sexual pleasure is an indispensable good, a right, if not of everyone, than of those who assume the commitment of marriage.

At the root of these changes are the same social changes which caused the decrease in birth rates: urbanization, migration, participation of women in the labor market and spread of communications media, which, together with other factors, created new aspirations for sexual pleasure. The abandonment of communities in which the individual and her family not only had a defined role, but also had a stable network of friends and neighbors, to live in anonymity in the city, where the conditions for social and political participation are precarious and working conditions alienating, increased emotional needs. The satisfaction of these needs depended more and more on relationships with spouses or among the members of a reduced family circle.

In addition to these factors, the horizon of possibilities in the city was greater. Both the choice of partners and types of relationships grew extraordinarily because there were many more individuals with whom one could have direct contact and because the family increasingly exercised less and less control over its members. Although there were more possibilities for relationships, many times such relationships did not materialize and the feelings of deprivation were greater than if the possibilities had been non-existent.

Other changes were directly related to these changing emotional and sexual needs. The cultural industry creates images which transcend the bleak day-to-day existence of the majority of the population. Among the innumerable images generated, those which emphasized the theme of emotional relationships between men and women have acquired predominance. Whether in the form of the millions of copies of the "Sabrina" series or similar novels, or in the form of prime time soap operas on all television stations, the love game has captured the imagination of millions of Brazilians of all ages. This occurred in other countries as well.

Such a process, however, did not occur by chance nor was it the sole creation of the cultural industry. The cultural industry takes pre-existing needs and elaborates and expands them. By presenting models and patterns of relationships which are distinct from the everyday reality of the majority of viewers, the industry creates new emotional and sexual aspirations in the same way that product advertising creates desires for products that are out of the reach of the majority of consumers.

Another important factor is the growing participation of women in the salaried job market. Their increased activity, in spite of poor conditions—both in terms of salary and work conditions in general—tends to favor the development of self-determination. Many women begin to perceive themselves as autonomous subjects with the right to personal realization in all areas, including the sexual. They no longer see themselves as the givers of sexual services to their husbands, but as persons who have desires and can demand the satisfaction of their own needs.

All of these changes cause a growing number of women to feel the need for emotional and sexual realization. This need is rarely articulated explicitly, but inevitably it is expressed in small groups, after discussions of questions which are more legitimate socially (such as sex education for children and family planning) have permitted the women to relax with each other.

women speak: who listens?

When poor women first began voicing demands for sex education, the reaction of the "intellectuals" was incredulity. Their explanations for this new phenomenon were predominantly economic because neither "progressives" nor "critical thinkers" allotted space to the personal for poor women. That was the exclusive realm of psychologists, who, with their language about "the unconscious", "frustration", etc. were more concerned with understanding another social class, which, because it was not preoccupied with questions of survival, had the luxury to experience emotional conflicts and other similar frivolities.

Among feminists as well the initial reaction was one of caution. Desiring to take their place in the sun among other social movements, feminist groups at first fled from questions about sex as fast as the devil flees from the cross. In addition, because the movement often sought the support of the Catholic Church, it had to avoid all issues which might clash with the Church's vision of the Holy Mother. The protective shade of religious organizations was important, especially under authoritarian regimes, where civil society was unorganized, institutions weak, and the threat of repression always present. The price of raising the banner of equality between the sexes was still too high. To extend it to sexuality would be to run the risk of a total loss of respect.

Another factor kept the feminists from an open discussion of sexuality. Their militants, who were principally from the middle class and the left, had their own phantasms to exorcise. Feminists felt the need to prove that they were not preoccupied with female frivolities, that they were committed to the political struggle about what was "really important". On a theoretical level they had had enormous successes in the debate about the relation between domestic work and capitalism, for example. On the organizing level, the feminists committed themselves to the "general struggle" against the high cost of living, etc. Feminists also felt the need to be careful not to impose worries and values of bourgeois origin on low-income women.

Nevertheless, this self-restraint could not last long. In more radical or more conservative versions, the pleasures and dangers of sex had always been included in the agendas of past feminist movements. In Brazil, for example, the books with no "veils" of Maria Lacerda Moura (Amad y no os multipliqueis, 1932) and of Ercilla Nogueira Cobra (Virginidad anti-higienica, 1924 and Virginidad Inutil, 1927) were pioneers. As early as the 1930s the Federacion Brasilera para el Progreso Femenino [Brazilian Federation for Female Progress] defended sex education in a paper presented at the Second International Feminist Congress, held in Rio de Janeiro (Bruschini and Barroso, 1986).

But it was not fidelity to historically defended principles which inspired feminists during the last decade to break their silence about sexual questions. It was the initiative of poor women who demanded sex education and family planning and achieved the legitimacy needed to place those issues in the framework of public discussions.

In 1979, at the March 8th commemorations in the "Praca da Se" in Sao Paulo, the women sang in chorus: "Mais pao e mais tesao" ("more bread and more 'excitement'"). They broke a taboo as well as the absolute hold that survival needs had on public debate, but the language they used was still masculine; the appropriation of a phallic metaphor revealed the lack of terminology to describe female pleasure.

Ecstatic with the possibilities which were opening up to them, feminists began to talk about sex exhaustively. It became necessary to create a framework for discussion, however, although much had been said and written before, to be sure. Members of religious orders, doctors and psychoanalysts all had something to say about female sexuality. But now feminists were trying to think about their own experiences, to look at themselves in the mirror, and to affirm the images they saw.

New scientific discoveries also made a contribution to the discussion. Sexology began to acquire acceptance in the scientific world. Laboratory experiments brought the vaginal orgasm down to earth. In exploring their body, innumerable women discovered their clitoris without guilt. Self-examination acquired the status of an initiation ritual, indispensable for entry into the community of the liberated. Some had homosexual experiences, which they believed was the only practice which really transcended the phallocratic system of compulsive heterosexuality.

Together with the pleasure and emotion of discovering a new identity, there was a political rationale directing the hearts and minds of feminists towards sex. Struggling against the assumption that class divisions prevented the development of a common agenda for women, they found in sexual repression clear evidence against this supposition. The demands for sex education and personal statements offered candidly by working class women, silenced those who still thought that poor women lived "by bread alone".

Furthermore, there was another equally strong political motivation for the discussion of sex—the need to define the relation between sexuality and reproduction from a new perspective. Family planning, a controversial issue all over the continent, was being attacked or defended for reasons unrelated to the right of women to control their own bodies. In some countries, however, women worked with some success to change the terms of the debate. As population policies directly involved women because of the impact they had on women's everyday lives, they also provided women with an opportunity to intervene in the debate on economic policies, because of the close link between population and economic policies.

In reality this potential is far from being fully developed. Many feminists settled for phrases such as "pleasure is revolutionary", as if the union of our multiple orgasms could make the Pentagon fall. Tired of abstract discourses which only obscured reality, many abdicated from theorizing, preferring to concentrate on their concrete experiences.

Many women who had come to feminism by way of their concern with the integration of women into development, continued utilizing economic categories of analysis. While they spoke much of multidisciplinary studies, feminism was not a flying carpet which permitted exchanges across the disciplines with such ease. While these women paid homage to the need for integrating cultural, social and economic elements, they did not progress much in this direction.

Research-action projects (or simply action projects) were divided into two types. On one hand were those which generated income or provided legal assistance, credit, etc. and which had incorporated some sex education activities because of client pressure. But this was conceived of as a peripheral issue in such projects, not as a basic necessity. On the other hand, health and sex education projects centered their activities on consciousness-raising, paying little attention to women's actual living situation.

And now?

Currently, there is a crisis which aggravates economic problems, and exacerbates emotional and sexual needs. There is the women's movement, which, although it has overcome the radical polarization between the "general struggle" and the "specific struggle", the "principal problem" and "secondary problems", the "political" and the "feminist", the "independents" and the "party members", the "grassroots" and the "bourgeois" and other dichotomies appearing throughout our history, it has not elaborated a holistic strategy to confront the diverse problems which face us.

It is true that this is not an easy task. It is a task which is both politically and conceptually difficult. Explanatory theories about a certain problem are no sooner elaborated than they become developed, sophisticated, and hard to resist. The feminist perspective, however, requires a much broader, multidisciplinary approach and plan of action. That is the current challenge facing the movement.

1. Researcher with the Fundacion Carlos Chagas, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
2. Of the 11 countries for which we have information about birth rates, in two different years of the last ten, only three did not show a decline: Costa Rica and Panama, which already had a low birthrate, and Haiti. From Population Reports: "Fertility and Family Planning Surveys: An Update", 1985.