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.
—-
(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.)Less “Sex positivity” more “sex responsibility”!
Always more sex responsibility, sure. But I wouldn’t say less sex positivity. I wrote this post because I care about sex positivity and because sex positivity is still so so necessary.
Every single problem described above, including the ‘all kinks are good kinks’ bullshit, comes from sex negativity. People avoid the complicated conversations and jump to ‘all kinks are valid’ because the thought that anything about sex is potentially not valid opens up a chasm of fear and doubt and shame that are still inside us because we grew up hearing that sex is dirty.
(It works out awfully convenient for kinky predators, as shame always does)
A desire for simplicity comes from shame. Space for those complicated conversations comes from comfort and acceptance. We need sex positivity to have those conversations.
Absolutely so, and I think even when there’s not so much “shame” per se, there’s still a “giggle factor” that makes it hard for people to have a serious conversation about sex and sexuality.
People run away with sex positivity and it ends up in a “anything goes or else you’re some kind of anti-sex Puritan” place – they run away with sex responsibility and you end up in actual prudish behavior control, so there definitely needs to be a balance
Or rather, the discussion around sex should be rooted in respect and communication more than moralizing, which is where it often ends up. People like to be prescriptivist I guess.
Yeah but I wouldn’t describe it as finding a balance.
Do you know how formerly-christian new-atheists are often massive jerks? That isn’t because they are extra run away atheist. It’s because they need to feel smugly superior to everyone because deep down they’re still terrified of being sinful. They haven’t let go of the shame part of organized christianity enough to be comfortably atheist yet and leave others alone.
People who do the “anything goes or else you’re some kind of anti-sex Puritan” are in my opinion kind of like that. They’re not too sex positive, they’re actually still to close to sex negative shame to accept complexity.
It’s really frustrating to see how much of the debate around sex goes on between
“anything goes or else you’re some kind of anti-sex Puritan” folks and “if it is sexual and outside the norm it must be predatory” folks, but it’s not surprising. This is what people who are deeply uncomfortable about the idea of dealing with their own shit do to each other.
See also how this relates to disposability culture within social justice:
So when I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.
Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.
All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.
Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.
Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society.
Just as my father once held open the door to our house and demanded that I leave because he didn’t know how to reconcile his love for me with my gender identity, we denounced each other and burned bridges because we didn’t know how reconcile our social ideals with the fact that our loved ones don’t always live up to them.
I believe that sometimes we did this hypocritically – that we created the so-called call-out culture (a culture of toxic confrontation and shaming people for oppressive behavior that is more about the performance of righteousness than the actual pursuit of justice) in part so that we could focus on the failings of others and avoid examining the complicity with oppression, the capacity to abuse, that exists within us all.
From: 8 Steps Toward Building Indispensability (Instead of Disposability) Culture
QueerAnarchism 