there’s a thing in a certain sector of femslash fandom and f/f romance where it has become axiomatic that a properly feminist depiction of a woman’s and especially an older woman’s sexuality must not include inexperience or insecurity, which is of course an outgrowth of a legitimate objection to misogynist limitations on imagining women’s sexuality, but which has also become very restrictive in a lot of ways.
very wonderfully, for example, harry potter old-lady femslash fandom has resoundingly rebuked the misogynist prudish-spinster cliché that finds an extreme expression in jk r*wling’s version of minerva mcgonagall (which, btw, connect the radfem dots please!), but with the result that any depiction of mcgonagall as prudish or a spinster is viewed as reactionary—despite the fact that the prude and the spinster are figures as dear to lesbian culture as they are repulsive to heteropatriarchy.
another example from my recent reading is the largely wonderful care and feeding of waspish widows by olivia waite, a regency f/f romance in which both of the protagonists are women who have previous experience of sexual intimacy with other women and thus do not have to overcome that particular obstacle with each other. i’m very certain waite did this in order to counter certain tendencies in thinking of historical lesbianism or bisexuality as a default improbability, and to restore some naturalism to how we think about historical women’s sexuality. it works perfectly well in the novel and i’m sure to many readers it comes as a relief; for me, in the case of one character in particular, it rang false, and it felt like waite had sacrificed a dimension of the character and some emotional potential to an ideological objective. it felt as though she had rejected the idea of midlife lesbian awakening as too disempowered for her protagonist. this is certainly not the only way to view the novel, but it did feel to me as though some sense of superficial feminist obligation to political didacticism was pulling against a deeper feminist demand to honor the full range of women’s real sexual experiences.
the HP example is a particularly polarized version of this phenomenon, the olivia waite example a relatively nuanced one, but they are both describing the same basic problem of the emergence of a restrictive definition of sexual liberation as the necessary condition of representing women’s relationships to their bodies and sexual selves. one result of this programmatic demand for female characters to be utterly sexually self-realized is that any effort to depict women who do have sexual hangups or bodily insecurities is inhibited from the start by the need to simultaneously avoid the landmines of misogynist cliché and push back against a superficial feminist prescriptivism.
this is obviously just one dimension of a much bigger problem in which it remains extremely challenging to discuss women’s and especially older women’s sexuality at all because of how heavily overwritten it always is from the start by very heavy layers of unexamined cultural expectation. (if you have ever considered trying to do some casual research to find out about what we know about postmenopausal sexuality on a population level, may i suggest that you: do not do that but have a nice snack or other treat instead?).
anyway i have no particular conclusions here but it is something i have been thinking about a lot over the past year in particular, and i am curious to hear other people’s thoughts on it as well! especially if you are in fandoms i am less familiar with where there are particular configurations of this issue that you think would be illuminating (cough, @cosmic-llin and @walkthegale)!