Ok, so earlier I upset maybe everybody with my total breakdown over customers of prostitutes. And seriously, I just got this sort of cognitive blank spot like the ones you get where there’s a word you’ve said all your life and then one day you say it and you hear the sounds of this word coming out of your mouth, maybe even a beloved word, and it just. Doesn’t. Make. Any sense. And there was this whole unreeling-through-history sensation (sort of like that scene in Trainspotting where the Ewan McGregor character overdoses and sinks into this square red-satin hole) where I thought about the whole virgin/whore dichotomy that’s plagued women for all these millennia and it hit me with all the ways it’s hit men as well, and I just freaked out.

Carefully reading everyone’s comments, and having some time to sleep on it, and continuing to try to integrate what amounts to a pretty unsettling chain of ideas has been really helpful. Helpful enough that I think I might be able to clarify all the gallons of virtual ink I’ve spilled in the last two prostitution-related posts into one semi-simple point:

People who think the “joke” that “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think” have a serious problem. The problem isn’t prostitution, though, it’s people who think that “joke” is funny.

There. That’s the point. I just didn’t get it.

And no, obviously not all customers feel that way (though quite a few prostitute’s customers I’ve dealt with over the years seem to have felt that way.) And plenty of people who aren’t customers believe the “joke” or think it’s funny, including anti-prostitution crusaders who can’t conceive of prostitutes as anything but stupid, and uncultured.

Now sure, there are other considerations — for instance I wonder if the time, money, and effort spent trying to “root out” prostitution wouldn’t be better spent smashing the whole oppressively centrifugal virgin/whore dichotomy (“if you’re a woman you have to decide which you’ll be, and if you’re a man you can sort of pick one from category A and another from category B but it’s bad form to mix them”), and smashing the whole ageist/abilist/classist/monculture-monogamist/beauty-worthiness/busy-ness business that leaves people believing they have no recourse but to pay each other to do things you wouldn’t even ask your partner to do because you’d divorce them if you thought they’d say yes. And if we did that then an assertion like “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think” would stop being funny and, in fact, would stop making any sense at all.

And if we did do all that then you bet, then there would, could, and (who knows) maybe even should be a whole sector of sex professionals that raised no more eyebrows, and no more concerns than body workers, physicians, psychiatrists, hospitality specialists, personal trainers, or food-service professionals do no. And if so then cool! In that world you could probably sign me or my partner, since she, like me, loves to be indulged and pampered and totally respects the skill and integrity of the people who provide us with those things. But! I still think that world must grow on the decayed, composted detritus of “you can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.” Because that sentence? That’s some kind of fucked up way of looking at women, of looking at men, of looking at the world.

Sorry for any prior confusion.

Someone named M, writing in Swarthmore College’s of The Daily Gazette offers a pretty cogent list of “Things I Hate to Hear People Say About Sex”

1. Sex is healthy.

Is that really the point? Spinach is healthy, sex is fun. Yes, there are about a hundred and one studies that describe the various health benefits of an active sex life, but very few show unique advantages to having sex as opposed to, say, dancing, or anything else that gets your body moving in a way that you enjoy. I was going to make a crack about pickup lines based on this premise, but really, “hey, baby, let’s reduce our risk of heart disease” is about as sexy as anything else you’ll hear at a frat party. Note: what is medically well-established is the link between prostate stimulation and a reduced risk of prostate cancer – so probe away, gentlemen, or ask your partner to do it for you. Don’t forget lube.

Read the editorial in context here.

Other items on the list are equally nicely stated. I could quote the whole shebang if I quoted another word so go read it for yourself.

So as part of an extra-credit assignment I went to a Planned Parenthood office in one of the edge cities just north of Seattle and got an STI screening. Ok, technically I don’t get credit for the STI check, I get credit for the two-page paper I’m going to write about the experience.

I’ve got to wait 7-10 days for the results but I just have to say a few things about my experience so far:

- At least for men things have really changed in the last 30 years: I sat on an exam table, I asked and answered questions, I peed in a cup, they drew blood, I paid and left, if they find anything they’ll call me, otherwise not although I’m welcome to call them to confirm everything came back negative. And unlike 30 years ago there’s no nearly-lube-free prostate squeeze, the last drop of which is smeared onto a microscope slide screeners used to perform. Instead they just said “catch the beginning of the flow” while collecting the urine sample. For men, at least, everything they can realistically test for can be detected either in the urine sample or the blood sample.

- Insurance will evidently often pay for it if you’ve got insurance. And if you don’t have insurance Planned Parenthood and other similar service providers generally offer their services on a sliding-scale fee basis.

- All the people I met are genuinely nice, caring, compassionate people. Whatever impression one might get from the media they’re nicer than that. Even the media that says they’re nice. The young man who checked me in, and totally helped me work around a blown appointment time? Great. The lab tech who set me up, gave me a cup to pee in, weighed me, and took my blood pressure? Kind, professional, and totally reassuring. The nurse practitioner who actually did the exam was great too. She reviewed my history, talked me through the options, informed me about what’s changed in the 25 years since my last dedicated STI check (!!!), got me up to date, and helped me select the tests that would be meaningful, informative, and potentially diagnostic… and then yakked with me for a few minutes after drawing my blood to tell me about the NuvaRing contraceptive ring and told me that for some reason that’s the one hormonal contraceptive most people come back saying they don’t just like but love. (Your mileage may vary, neither she nor I have a financial or career-advancing interest in that or any other form of contraception, etc.)

And finally, I was also really impressed with the basic policies relating to privacy, dignity, health and social risk, and mental well being. Now I happen to know they’re neither the only nor necessarily the very best, the very best organized, or even nicest people offering reproductive-health services in the greater Puget Sound area. But as a selected representative provider they’re darn good and I gotta say

I’m reposting my response to a multitude of heated comments to my previous post which mostly inadvertently, has ticked off a lot of people I like quite a lot and almost always whole-heartedly support. So rather than rephrase things for each individual I’m going to try to either dig myself out or, very likely, dig myself deeper. Here goes.

First of all, since at least last summer I’ve been trying to reconcile what I felt was a big disconnect between the very real attitude advances women are going through in terms of agency, interest, and expression on the one hand, and the majority of men who, stuck wherever we largely are conceptually, see all that and say only “yeah, yeah, show me your tits?” Well, this post is, in part, an expression of frustration with all that.

And now, not just for Amber but for everybody: Today a friend of mine in class, who’s working at a copy center to help pay for school, said it was slow so she was doing homework the other evening, and a customer came in and asked her, evidently dead seriously, why she was bothering to study when someone with her looks and body should just forget all that and find a sugar daddy. But here’s the thing, it’s not like she’s fucking stupid, right? She’s passing her college courses, right? And she’s got a mirror and knows what she looks like. And she’s even in a communications/gender-studies/sex-ed class where this week everyone’s busy putting together their own, and answering other’s, audience survey forms for presentations next all next week about cool, cool stuff like the benefits of anilingus, the history of the condom, intro’s to Seattle’s Center for Sex-Positive Culture a.k.a. The Wet Spot, and where the instructor’s been using sex toys as the subject of all her examples of speech presentations, right? So it’s not like my friend’s either dumb or disinterested in sex. And yet. And yet… somehow this lard-assed grandpa’s supposed to be clueing her in to a possibility she might not have already chosen to pursue if she were so inclined? Sorry, that’s not cool, that’s not disabled-in-a-world-with-no-acceptance, and that’s not edgy-something-one’s-partner-won’t-do. That’s just lame.

I mean, fucking hell, it’s not even like the guy just asked her if she’d like to stop doing her homework for a few minutes, put up the “back in two minutes” sign on the door, and have sex with him. For pay or not for pay. Nor did he make inquiries into her attitudes about sex, her interests, her potential partners, or how often she was already having sex with friends, acquaintances, and compatible friends-of-friends, alone or in combination, without anyone having to pay her anything. Hell, he didn’t even ask her if she wasn’t already a prostitute! No, instead he opined that, with a body and face like hers an education was a waste of effort… as if she couldn’t have both! Which, she says, she didn’t appreciate.

So before responding everybody hold that thought for a second as well. Next item: Lately there’s been yet another round of calls amongst international feminist legal scholars to once again pull out the tired old, boring old, and wrong old idea that it’s simply inconceivable that any person, anywhere, at any time, could possibly be a prostitute on purpose; that each and every prostitute on the whole planet earth has no, zero, none agency and is therefore automatically and irrefutably “trafficked” and “prostituted.”

Now, since I happen to know a number of women who are or have been sex workers who were neither “trafficked” or “prostituted” I happen to think the idea that all sex workers are captive thralls is bullshit. And yet there incontestably are trafficked and enslaved sex workers — every couple of months out here on the west coast, anyway, another underground, illegal, unlicensed, and unregulated brothel with pretty unambiguously trafficked and uncompensated sex workers gets busted. Which means some subset of customers of prostitutes are knowingly purchasing the services of coerced sex workers and don’t care.

So hold that thought too. And yet… and yet… there’s still that perpetually percolating notion out there that nobody in his or her right mind would willingly become a prostitute because prostitution is somehow the worst possible job on the planet, something so odious, so vile, so instinctively demeaning, that it could only be coerced. Thus, for instance, the agitation to have it all defined as, well, coerced. But that’s obviously bullshit.

First it’s bullshit because, in fact, as we know, plenty of people don’t agree it’s the worst job at all, right? People we know. People I and other commenters in this thread so far know personally, have met, have had long conversations with, and have no reason at all to believe they’re any happier or more unhappy than any other self-employed professional.

And second it’s bullshit because there are in fact jobs that, if the standards sought by prostitution opponents were applied, would appear even further down the list. If I offended any colonics workers I apologize but I was getting a little bored with my other preferred comparisons: boiler-room phone sales and agricultural stoop labor — one of which is clearly emotionally draining the other is physically draining. And yet one almost never hears opponents of prostitution agitating for the dignity of agriculture workers, and never for the dignity of boiler-room operators. Or, I might add, the dignity of those who’s job it is to sluce and vacuum other people’s colons.

And so I’m saying (but evidently not too well) is that if sex work is really that bad then other jobs, colonics workers in this case, must be even worse. Of course if prostitution isn’t really that bad — an argument you’ve probably noticed I make rather frequently — then everything I said about colonics changes as well.

And the final point I’m going to ask you to hold on to for a moment, is that I think the notion that ugly people, fat people, old people, disfigured people, or disabled people can’t find partners is kind of out of line. The first time I ever went to the Center for Sex Positive Culture, for a group discussion of body image, I met an extremely pleasant group of people of literally all shapes, sizes, ages, physical conditions, gender orientations, preferred-partner counts, and kinks, who spoke both about the difficulties they faced in the outside world and the great sex with varied and non-judgmental partners they were finding for free in the community the Wet Spot has created. And for that matter, it being 11:22 PM on a Thursday Night, the regular Thursday night Grind ought to be in full swing right this second. Which means that any of the differently-abled people some commenters have expressed concern for had previously joined the center and attended its brief but comprehensive orientation that includes express language about policies regarding tolerance and diversity, then they could go in (most areas are wheelchair accessible) and feel pretty welcome. And, more to the point, get together with each other or other CSPC members and dance, converse, make out, or fuck each other silly either in public in one of the main rooms or else in one of the smaller, more private enclosed spaces about the premises. All for about $65 a year and, I think, a $15 cover charge. (Quick aside: CSPC is definitely not for everyone — a fair number of younger people characterize it as a place where old people have sex, and a fair number of other people have a hard time with their extremely earnest approach to things, and others have difficulty with their strong BDSM emphasis. But what can I say, it’s a chartered 503© non-profit community center that just happens to have an extraordinary number of well-used hardpoints in the ceiling and walls so you’re going to get a little bit of that. But at least in Seattle there are a number of smaller venues that cater to more specific, less diverse preferences and those are great too.)

So. I’ve asked you to hold a ton of things and I appreciate your patience. I’ll take them off your hands though not necessarily in the order I handed them out in, and, I hope, in the process you’ll at least better understand where I was coming from when I wrote this seemingly galvanizing and divisive post.

1) Whereas the customers of some sex workers may be perfect, adventurous gentlemen many of them aren’t. They don’t particularly value the service sex-workers provide, they don’t particularly respect sex workers, and they have opinions about sex workers that, ahem, may have more in common with the bitterest prostitution opponents than with the often progressive practitioners who may feel I was singling out them, their friends, or their select customers.

2) There’s an assumption that, somehow, non-Barbie/non-Ken types must seek out prostitutes because no one else will have sex with them. There’s a similar assumption that there are just some things that… what… no “good” woman (at least) wants to do and… what?... no woman period would do except for money. Please! As I’m writing some of them are doing it right now. Without having to pay anyone but the great volunteers at the check-in/ticket counter.

2b) Maybe instead there’s some kind of assumption that non-Kens aren’t so much unable to find willing sex partners as unable to hook up with Barbies without paying them. Well, that’s entirely possible but extremely different from the previous assertion that they need prostitutes because no one else will have sex with them at all.

2c) Oh yeah, and leaving aside “teh disabled” for a minute, if there are actually plenty of people in the world who are capable

3) Possibly due to more focus on male customers than female sex workers, there’s another move underway to demonize prostitution in a way that denigrates, alienates, and denies the agency of numerous autonomous prostitutes. These opponents seem so motivated by panic about patriarchy and misogyny that they may be attributing more power and authority to sex-worker’s customers than reality supports. And while I think authors of those initiatives really do mischaracterize the situation it’s still the case that an extraordinary number of (mostly) men purchase the sexual services of (mostly) women they know to be coerced. And don’t care.

3a) If one is going to argue that sex work is demeaning (as I do not) then out of a sense of both consistency and decency one ought to acknowledge that other jobs are even more demeaning (which I don’t think they are.)

3b) Rather than mischaracterize what’s still (in my past experience) the bulk of customers as arrogant exercisers of macho, masters-of-their-destiny, patriarchal privileged types I thought it might be more productive to mock, socially castigate, and just generally recognize their marginality rather than centrality.

4) And finally, whereas I’ve acknowledged there are men and women who are perfectly content to do with a transfer of money from men to women exactly the same things they already enjoy doing for free can I just say cool, good for you, sounds like fun, odd how the fund transfers always seem to go one way when we know desire goes both ways but, still, what the heck? Nothing I’ve said in the original post and this even longer reply except maybe my little quip from two seconds ago about how money seems to flow only one way applies to you. Really. I don’t mean you.

So there. I’m with a lot more caveats than I started with I’m still sticking to my guns: a society organized such that some people feel obliged to pay other people for sex — and, to consider paying someone else a discount in order to knowingly have sex with a coerced individual — is, well, sorry, a target=”_blank” href=“http://www.google.com/search?q=define:weird”>weird considering how other existing social organizations allow people to do much the same things for free.

So I’ve just confirmed with another blogger that comments I leave on their blog are being automatically spam-filtered. And as she said

I did search for a recent comment from you …and found it amidst my spam. And not just comments awaiting moderation, but the ‘bad’ spam. LOL

Craziness. Every time I catch a comment of yours, I mark it as ‘not spam’. Which should mean it doesn’t keep snagging your comments.

I already knew blogging systems that use the popular (and otherwise generally excellent) Akismet kick me to the curb- and some other systems drag me down too. Now it looks like [Blogger’s correction: Wordpress! —fl] is doing it as well. That’s ok, sort of… something about a URL with text “real adult sex” in it maybe? And, after all, my original idea when I saw the URL for sale years ago was to start a straight-ahead progressive political blog with a minor in 1st Amendment issues precisely because I knew it would get filtered and nanny-netted.

What’s bugging me a bit more, though, is that I might be getting filtered when I comment using my alt-URL on Blogger, figleaf.blogspot.com and alt-email address (“talkingfigleaf” on the gmail system.)

Anyway, two questions:

- Anyone else with sexually oriented but non-spam content think their comments are getting filtered? – Has anyone else checked their moderation lists for incorrectly marked comments? (This might not be worth your while and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t bother.)

I promise I might be irked but I’m not offended if my main URL is being spam-filtered, although I’d like to politely ask policy administrators on the big filtering teams to add me to their white-lists. Unless their algorithms just don’t work that way or, of course, if they honestly believe I really am some kind of spammer or my content is really that inappropriate.

(Note: As chance would have it I’ve been so busy for the last three months that I’ve barely had time to keep up with the comments on my blog, let alone comment heavily on other people’s. Yet sometime in those three months I seem to have been plunged into black-list oblivion.)

Photo by Flickr user swankyswan. Used under a Creative Commons license.

WTF with the idea that you would “solve” your horniness “problem” with prostitution anyway?

Seriously, there are other things you can do, there are even other reasons to *go to a prostitute! But really, when you think about the logic it’s not… well… logical!

This just goes further into my point that whereas the profession of prostitution itself seems pretty value-neutral** the decision to seek prostitutes is beyond weird. Not necessarily wrong, no, but weird yes. But… like… seriously! It’s like there’s nothing wrong with colonics except that it’s kind of weird that, as the daughter said on the “Absolutely Fabulous“ episode “It’s just so you won’t have to go poopie like regular people.” Well, maybe I’m missing a really big point but isn’t that sort of what hiring prostitutes is all about? (And, not stray too far afield on the parallels, can anyone explain how colonics workers can be presumed to be non-coerced/non-trafficked? Because seriously there can’t be a more disgusting, depraved, or demeaning legal job on. The. Planet! Not to sound judgmental or anything.)

So just to recap: if someone chooses to be a prostitute or, I suppose, a colonics provider then I can totally respect that. But don’t ask me to respect someone who thinks he or she has to hire one of those people.

I mean… seriously… if nothing else whatever happened to masturbation? Because, what, you’re going to tell me “oh, I go to prostitutes because masturbation’s immoral?” I mean yeah, I happen to think that really is what goes through a lot of people’s minds, but I’m guessing it goes through their mind mighty fast because there can’t be anything in there to slow it down on the way.

Seriously! Think it over. Let’s turn things 100% on its head and say ok, cool, prostitution was 100% legal, 100% voluntary, 100% adequately compensated, 100% non-stigmatized: you still gotta explain to me why anyone pays to go!

And don’t give me a lot of story about how “good” girls don’t want to do whatever it is prostitutes are willing to because I’m pretty confident that nearly all customers are seeking to engage in one of maybe two routinely vanilla activities that… just isn’t that different from activities they perform. And, frankly, I’m just guessing that — women being people and all — there are roughly as many “good” women interested in non-vanilla activities as there are prostitute’s customers seeking those variations. So what’s left then?

Well, what’s left then is impatience, incompetence, alienation, severe social dislocation, or asociability, which takes us back to my original point about WTF with prostitution. Once the nominally domineering veneer of misogyny/coercion/patriarchy is stripped away you’re back to looking at… some real lame dudes blinking owlishly in the daylight and wishing desperately someone hadn’t turned over their rock.

And it seems to me that if you really want to tackle prostitution then the avenue that’s being seriously underutilized*** is pure, blunt, authentic, merciless, and humiliatingly-pitying mockery.

So… really… what am I missing here? (And it’s ok, I really might be missing something so it’s not like I’m going to laugh at anyone for piping up with answers or alternate viewpoints.)

[** If it’s coerced it’s wrong because slavery and indenture is wrong regardless of the work-product. If it’s a choice then, well, it’s a choice. —fl]

[*** Underutilized possibly because of distractions about whether or not it’s possible that prostitutes, like colonics workers, have agency. —fl]

This ever happen to you where some cliché pops into your head and then some really silly variation pops up right next to it? For no good reason I was thinking “He’d give you the shirt off his back…” and right next to it popped up “Why never the shirt off his chest?”

I dunno, but it was a fun photo to take, except I had to be more careful about the buttons than I thought I would.

HNT:

Happy HNT (or Half-nekkid Thursday!)

So yesterday during a brief lecture on what was meant by “sex-negative” culture, our professor presented a very cool statement about food:

Try to imagine the following world: Accurate information about food is freely available and exists for all ages in appropriate ways. Talking about what sorts of food you like and negotiating with a dinner partner is a simple and relaxed experience. Different preferences, whether personal or cultural, are important for the information they provide and are no more or less important than hair color or family history, unless people are trying to figure out what to eat together. Some people prefer to eat with the same person indefinitely, others prefer to eat in a group and still others eat with a variety of partners as the mood suits them and nobody is ever forced to eat anything or with anyone. Each person is an expert in their desires and needs around food and their choices are respected.

Now what was missing from the presentation was the source of that quote. Once I got home and started Googling around I’m pretty sure the source must have been The Language of Sex Positivity, by Charlie Glickman, from Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, Volume 3, July 6, 2000. It contains the preceding paragraph and adds a nice follow-up…

While there are many examples of how our world is different from this food-positive one (as anyone who becomes vegetarian in a family of meat eaters knows,) it isn’t too hard to imagine this place. Now go back through the last paragraph and substitute “sex” for “food” and “have sex” for “eat.” How much more difficult is this world to imagine? How much more work would it take to make this happen?

On the other hand, our professor’s version contained a modified version of the first that didn’t require us to imagine…

Try to imagine the following world: Accurate information about sex is freely available and exists for all ages in appropriate ways. Talking about what sorts of sex you like and negotiating with a sex partner is a simple and relaxed experience. Different preferences, whether personal or cultural, are important for the information they provide and are no more or less important than hair color or family history, unless people are trying to figure out what kind of sex to have together. Some people prefer to have sex with the same person indefinitely, others prefer to have sex in a group and still others have sex with a variety of partners as the mood suits them and nobody is ever forced to be sexual or have sex with anyone. Each person is an expert in their desires and needs around sex and their choices are respected.

Our professor suggested that for all of society’s bragging about this or tisk-tisking about that, the fact that the two versions of the paragraph have highly different implications suggests that we have a sex-negative society. And I would add that the simple fact that we’d consider making the comparison in the first place is evidence of the same thing.

I adore food/sex analogies — I think they’re each wonderful metaphors for the other.

Photo by Flickr user morganthemoth. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So today in class during a professor-led discussion of the concept of “sex-negative” culture one of my fellow students said that, fairly or unfairly, feminism is seen as sex negative to a lot of people.

Our professor (the sex-ed professor, not the women’s studies one) immediately said that if that’s the impression it’s an unfortunate one. And, I might add, that if our women’s studies professor had been there she would have quickly cited one of several studies showing that not only do feminists have better sex than non-feminists, their partners do as well.

Now that said the misapprehension isn’t exactly, 100%, completely false… in the sense that there’s a misapprehension, not that feminism is sex-negative anyway.

If I’m not mistaken (and I really could be since I’m a man and since this is my first quarter of anything like formal women’s studies) the issue isn’t feminism but the misapprehension that “sexy” and “sexualized” are the same thing. And again if I’m not mistaken, very, very few feminists have a problem with sexy, as in the deliberate attempt to appear attractive through behavior or appearance in order to arouse one’s self and one’s current or prospective partner or partners, whether one ultimately has sex or not. But again if I’m not mistaken most feminists have a problem with the applique of those behaviors or appearances to individuals and situations where sex is neither intended nor welcome.

Think pre- and post-virginity Britney Spears. And I don’t mean the singer herself, I mean public reaction to her appearance and behavior before and after it became known that she actually was a sexual being rather than an unconscious, untouched no-sex-class naif… who wore her jeans so low she evidently needed to wax her mons and had waxy, pseudo-innocent “Oops I did it again.” Again, we can’t be certain of Spear’s inner life during her performing heyday but we can be certain about the public’s sexualization of her… or, indeed, the ongoing sexualization wherein the once-innocently “provocative” virgin pays for her fall into mere has-a-vagina-after-all womanhood. (And note that said sexualized fall is playing out with all the intensity and perfection and… again on the public’s part… deliberation as was her sexualized rise.)

Another possible point of departure? Yeah, while some separatists and, especially 2nd-wave feminists object to blowjobs, but not cunnilingus, on principle, a lot of feminists think they’re fine when considered as one element in a rich, reciprocal, and mutually satisfactory collection of sexual activities two or more people can agree to engage in. That’s just being sexual. But if, on the other hand, health clubs were to come along and start offering blowjob-ercise classes, and making claims that it wasn’t actually about blowjobs at all-and-how-can-you-even-suggest-such-at-thing™ but instead was about the yoga-like qualities of kneeling and breath control, and that such classes were somehow (somehow!) open only to women? Well, this time I’m speaking only for myself but… that’s sexualizing something that, in the hands of someone like, say, Jennifer of Libido Events would remain possibly eyebrow-raising to some but would nevertheless remain only sexual.

Know what I mean? You want to have sex with someone who wants to have sex with you, have sex. You want to be sexual with yourself or with others, be sexual! If you don’t want to, that’s fine too, and if someone you’re with doesn’t want to then respect that. That, not even coincidentally, happens to be the position both of “sex-positive” culture and virtually all feminism**. Trying instead to, oh, say, sell elementary-school-girl-sized thongs with “little hottie” in sequins on the front and then make a big production about how your corporation helps fund to sex abuse prevention programs as at least one of the major “family” department stores found in nearly all major malls? Sorry, if you found feminists complaining about such antics it’s not feminists who were being sex negative there. Instead it would merely being feminists pointing out how egregiously sex-negative both the sexualization of both pre-teen fashion and child-abuse prevention really is.

So, one more time, this time with a clumsy table.

Again, I’m not speaking as a spokesman for… well… anybody but me although I am trying to convey something I’ve been learning in class. (And if I’m outright flunking the self-imposed exercise, which I’m pretty sure I’m not but you never know, and you’re at all inclined to participate then pointers, however harshly administered, will be appreciated.)

But anyway, this is all by way of attempting to explain the frequently-but-incorrectly stated assertion that feminism is somehow “sex negative” when it seems more accurate to say feminism opposes sex-negativity, especially in terms of the special case of sex-negative denial called sexualization.

[** Note: And, seriously, it’s not like even nominally “sex-negative” feminists don’t want sex at all, right? Not wanting empty-headed, exploitative, heterosexual-even-if-you’re-not-heterosexual sex isn’t the same thing as not wanting sex at all, right? That’s just not wanting to have sex with someone who isn’t authentically sex positive. So, as Heather Corinna’s famous for saying, when it comes to specific individuals “sex-negative” is sort of a red herring. —fl]