boy i’m tired of seeing a constant refrain on ‘progressive’ posts that says like ‘well as long as it isn’t sexualized’, as if anything sexual is obviously bad. cross-dressing’s okay if it isn’t sexualized. queer characters are okay if they aren’t sexualized. dancing is okay if it isn’t sexualized. murder is okay if it isn’t sexualized!
and people keep using the term sexualized as if it’s just the same thing as objectified, as if being sexy makes you less human. because that’s what we’re all taught, right? sluts aren’t people. pervs aren’t people. but it’s bullshit.
sexuality is not an inherently dirty, damaging, wrong, toxic, stupid, or frivolous aspect of human experience and human expression. coercion, violence, and dehumanization are what hurt people, and they hurt people in plenty of nonsexual ways too. treating people like things— seeing them only as objects to gratify you— is wrong no matter what.
sex is a crucial element in a lot of people’s lives. sexuality is a big part of a lot of people’s identities. it’s not something we can ignore or devalue. if we continue to insist that sex is inherently bad and damaging, we’re going to continue seeing sexual people as bad and damaged, and that is antithetical to any truly progressive cause.
Same with
sexualized
queer spaces and politics. We NEED sexualized queer spaces. We NEED politics that go beyond the ‘love is love’ shit and into the ‘SEX IS SEX and it’s fucking awesome’.
A massive part of queer oppression is based on the idea that our sex life is dirty. It’s not who we love that disgust people most, it’s who and how we FUCK. & This is not an LGB thing. This is very very true if you are a
transgender person with any kind of sex life. Especially, god forbid, if
you are a trans woman of transfeminine person who takes any kind of
sexual joy in feminine things or in the gender euphoria of changing her
body.
And we internalize so much of that. Surrounded by rainbow flags and ‘love is love’ a lot of us still feel secretly dirty.
So we hide our sexuality and we are ashamed of it and we end up organizing our sex lives in secretive ways, which takes us to places where we are more likely to experience violence. We are less likely to assert our boundaries because we don’t feel like we deserve them.
QueerAnarchism 