Chapter 3 - Stripping Off for the First Time

Summary

Chapter 3 focuses upon sex and desire. It examines voluntary vulnerability as desired and experienced by heterosexual women, an area which has been largely neglected because of vulnerability’s association with victimhood and sexual exploitation in feminist discourse. The audacity of expressing a desire to sexually submit to a man, not for conservative reasons but for those of sexual adventure, is exacerbated if that woman is a feminist. To publish these desires and experiences as one’s first book is more audacious still. I focus on Katherine Angel’s Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (2012), Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997), and Marie Calloway’s what purpose did i serve in your life (2013) to explore the significance of women who makes themselves vulnerable to the men they desire.