Bad sex positivity as seen on my Tumblr dash (depending on what crowd you hang with you may have seen this develop differently):
2012: Consent is Sexy! Yes means Yes! Sex is Empowering! It’s all simple and fun! Just say yes and you’re good to go! Buy my feminist porn DVD for € 50 to become the best sex positive feminist you can be! Sex For Her Inc.
2015: All kinks are valid! And by all kinks we mean BDSM. No need to explore why we eroticize rape, just buy some rope and get to it! Time to put safe words in all sex positive places so ‘no’ can mean ‘yes’ anywhere!
2017: What we need to do is get rid of all the freaks and weirdos and get back to the Wholesome Pure sex positivity where we talk about condoms and tell young girls how to consent to sex in the missionary position with their boyfriend when they’re ‘Ready’.
And the thing is, all these forms of sex positivity were terrible because they sought simple answers and treated sex positivity like an aesthetic and a set of simple community rules to follow and words to say to be a Good Person and to recognize the Bad People.
Real sex positivity comes from accepting that sex is messy and complicated and weird and that’s part of why it can be wonderful but rarely simple. It involves grappling with complicated truths like how rape culture and systematic oppression impact our desires. And it involves truly facing our own ability to violate the consent of our partners regardless of whether we resemble our idea of what a Rapist looks like.
Reading tips:
– You can take it back. Consent as a felt sense. http://bandanablog.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/you-can-take-it-back-consent-as-a-felt-sense/amp/
– You might be a rapist is it never occurs to you that rape is something you are capable of. https://maybemaimed.com/2014/11/07/you-might-be-a-rapist-if-it-never-occurs-to-you-that-rape-is-something-youre-capable-of/
It’s frustrating how much writing I see that sort of identifies these same problems, but instead of responding with room for
complicated truths, the answer is
“So we’re gonna create a new sex positivity where it is clear that there are a couple of specified kinks here that you shouldn’t fantasize about ever.”
And like… that’s not remotely helpful. Because it doesn’t create room for honest open conversations about where these fantasies come from, how rape culture, sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism, etc impact our desires (spoiler alert: it impacts the really obvious sexist, racist, transphobic, ableist fetishes AND it impacts your more ‘ordinary’ everyday fantasies), where that translates to interpersonal harm and how we do the difficult work on unlearning that.
Those are conversations we need.
And we need them for all of us. We can’t pretend that most of us have a sexuality that isn’t impacted by all the fucked up shit in society and only some of us need to sit in the ‘I have a sexist kink’ corner and ponder over our sins. Just like everyone of us has to unlearn bigotry in our everyday interactions, everyone of us is gonna find some of it in our sexuality. And we don’t unlearn that by being quiet about it. We do it through messy conversations..
If what you want is a new sex positivity that doesn’t have any uncomfortable conversations and just keeps a ‘ problematic kinks not allowed in this space’ list, count me out.
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(by the way, this is only one thing that good sex positivity needs. We also need to talk way more about what shitty polyamory looks like and how much abusers currently get away with in polyamory spaces. We also need to talk about how in self-proclaimed body-positive fat-positive etc spaces the young skinny white bodies are still the most desired because
our ideas of beauty don’t actually change over night by wishing them away. Etc. And we need to have sooooooo many conversations about how bad BDSM culture is and how we should probably burn it to the ground and rebuild kink without fetlife and without the creepy straight male doms that run all the BDSM munches. More conversations needed. These are just some of them.)
QueerAnarchism 