Sexual pleasure as a human right: Harmful or helpful to women in the context of HIV/AIDS?

Synopsis

Sexual rights advocates recommend that sexual pleasure should be recognised as a human right. However, the construction of sexuality as gender-neutral in sexual rights literature conceals how men's demand for sexual pleasure often reinforces the subordination of women. In the context of HIV/AIDS, men's belief that they have a right to use women for sexual pleasure is a recognised and cross-cultural barrier to effective HIV prevention. Research on sexuality from the fields of feminism, political science, public health, and HIV/AIDS reveals that violence against women is fundamental to the construction of masculinity. This violence is manifested through rape, sexual coercion, sexual objectification, and prostitution. By challenging the forms of sexuality and sexual pleasure that reinforce masculinity, it may be possible to imagine sexual rights that are based on sexual equality. In this article, I suggest that a new model for sexual rights that simultaneously provides women with greater sexual pleasure and lessens the risk of HIV transmission is possible.

Introduction

Within the growing international discourse of sexual rights, it is increasingly recommended that sexual pleasure should be recognised as a human right. Since 1983, sexologists have worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) to define sexuality and sexual health (PAHO & WHO, 2000, WHO, 1987). Their work culminated at a meeting with the WHO and the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) in 2000, during which the WHO agreed to endorse the World Association for Sexology's “Declaration of Sexual Rights” (PAHO and WHO, 2000, pp. 2, 37–38). Within this Declaration, it is recommended that sexual rights are fundamental to human rights. The right to sexual pleasure is listed as one of eleven core principles. There are five major sexual rights declarations or bills in global circulation and four of them propose that sexual pleasure should be recognised as a right. The authors of these declarations use gender-neutral language in principles and definitions of terms. Thus, they do not explain how the right to sexual pleasure, or any sexual right, may affect women and men differently. The omission of a feminist analysis of gender from sexual rights principles means that they are difficult to apply to political reality. However, the fact that one set of these principles has now been endorsed by the WHO demands that feminists test the application of each principle to women's lives in a variety of economic, cultural, and sexual contexts. I am interested in exploring whether a right to sexual pleasure will enhance progress towards sexual equality and whether it will help efforts to prevent HIV transmission from men to women. Sexual equality has been included as a theoretical goal because it is essential to the meaningful expression of human rights. I have selected HIV as a political context because each day, 8800 women are newly infected with HIV (UNIFEM, 2000, p. 11). Women account for 55% of new infections and 70% of all new infections are spread by sexual intercourse (Sandrasagra, 2001, UNIFEM, 2000). In this sense, the spread of HIV from men to women directly involves the pursuit of sexual pleasure and therefore, the proposed transformation of sexual pleasure into a human right.

Feminists and sexologists have attempted to define the concept of sexual rights during the past decade. According to political scientist, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky (2000), sexual rights became a part of international discourse in the platform for women's reproductive rights during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) and at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (FWCW). She explains that the term “sexual rights” appeared in the draft Platform for Action arising from the Beijing conference, but was deleted from the final version. Petchesky believes that the phrase was deleted because “underneath the aversion to sexual rights lurk taboos against homosexuality, bisexuality, and alternative family forms” (Petchesky, 2000, p. 86). She reveals that the sexual rights discourse at Cairo and Beijing was suppressed by Vatican-led fundamentalists who began a media campaign against reproductive and sexual rights on the basis that they were associated with “individualism”, “Western feminism” and “lesbianism” (Petchesky, 2000, pp. 86–87). Petchesky is concerned that the human rights discourses of feminists focus solely on sexual violence against women rather than asserting women's right to sexual pleasure. She believes that this is a “victim-izing tendency” and that feminist human rights campaigns “capitalize on the image of women as victims” (Petchesky, 2000, p. 90). Her aim is to create sexual rights in which there is a positive acceptance for relationships and family forms beyond heterosexuality in a new paradigm that she labels sexual diversity and “multisexualism” (Petchesky, 2000, p. 91).

Petchesky's emphasis on “multisexualism” intersects with Barbara Klugman's criticism of the European interpretation of sexual rights. According to Klugman, director of the Women's Health Project at the University of Witwatersand in Johannesburg, the phrase is interpreted differently by South Africans than Europeans. She contends that in South Africa, sexual rights are understood as “the right of women to control their sexuality” (Klugman, 2000, p. 1). She criticises the European delegates' interpretation of sexual rights at the 1995 Beijing conference because, as she claims, they were “unable to conceptualize sexual rights beyond the limited aspect of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation” (Klugman, 2000, p. 6). Thus, there are strong differences underlying the interpretation of sexual rights, even among feminist advocates. While Petchesky concentrates on how the suppression of sexual minority politics impedes the possibility of sexual rights for lesbians and homosexual men, Klugman focuses on how male dominance obstructs all women's sexual rights.