[Note: This post at least temporarily revives a long-dormant RealAdultSex.com category, Guest-Blogging Topics. This post offers my rough take on the core meaning of the term “sex positive.” If you’ve got different ideas as to what “sex positive” means then by all means please feel free to air it out either here in comments or on your own blog if you have one. (If you don’t have one but would like to start now they’re astonishingly easy to setup.) —fl]

In comments to my “But Are You Positive?“ post SugarMag asked

Figleaf, I am very confused by your question. OK so, sex positive means pro sex, right?

The short answer is no, sex-positive really doesn’t mean pro-sex. For instance there are plenty of people (oh, say, traffickers in sex slaves, or their customers) who are chirpy/cheerily pro sex. And, perhaps more surprisingly, there are plenty of sex-positive people who would never consider having sex themselves.

It’s also absolutely the case that, just as certain Victorians used words like “enlightened” to justify sexual activities that weren’t enlightened at all, and just as certain individuals in the 1960s and 1970s used words like “liberal” to justify exploitive behavior, it’s inevitable that certain people would use “sex positive” as leverage for some pretty seriously negative behavior. So just saying you’re sex-positive, or complaining that someone else isn’t, isn’t going to cut it.

So what exactly is it supposed to mean then? Well, I’ve gone out and done a little Googling around to confirm it but my sex-ed professor last quarter did a pretty good job of consolidating both what constitutes “sex positivity” and, even more important maybe, what constitutes “sex negativity.” I’ll cite some further reading at the end of this post but for now I’ll just crib from my (admittedly sparse) lecture notes:

Sex positivity:

• Sexual behaviors are pleasurable, not just for procreation
• Sex is for pleasure; it’s a form of play
• There’s an absence of shame
• No one makes another feel bad about wanting something sexual. (Whether they agree to engage is entirely separate.)
• Agency not objectification for all parties
• Everyone always has the freedom to decline
• There’s a gender and orientation-free perspective. (This doesn’t have to mean you have to be polymorphous, just that you’re accepting of those who are.)
• No moral judgments about masturbation, virginity, asexuality, and celibacy
• Sexuality is an element of health — appropriate amounts are good for mental and physical well-being
• Sex safety (a.k.a. “safe sex” or “safer sex”) is strongly endorsed
• Developmentally appropriate sex education is strongly endorsed
• Contraception is strongly endorsed where pregnancy is a risk and is not desired.
• Accepts porn under specifiable conditions
• Uses inclusive language
• Respects unique and individual preferences (what’s true for you or me isn’t universal)
• Comprehensive definition of sexuality

And notes for what constitutes sex negativity:

• shame and blame oriented
• privatizing
• prohibitions
• controlling

In other words, with sex negativity you wind up with people actually caring more that you have sex, how you have sex, with whom you have sex, and how often because in the context of shame and blame, for instance, it’s not just that you might be “doing it,” it’s that you might be doing it “wrong,” or, in a lot of ways worse, you might be doing it “better!” (That might give me a double opportunity for shame and blame, right? I could shame you for having it and blame myself for not enjoying it as much!)

Although, of course, thanks to the privacy angle we’re not supposed to discuss it, we pretend we don’t have it, and so we wind up in situations where we won’t actually talk to our partners about the sex we have with each other, but! We will talk about sex with our partners, or about the sex we’re pretending to have, in locker rooms, powder rooms, and, of course, on magazine covers. In terms of prohibitions we don’t just prohibit the big stuff like sex with those who can’t or won’t consent, we publish lists of “turn ons and turn offs that might surprise you” in magazines and call it educational. And finally, in terms of control? Oh, from that you get everything from archetypes chastity belts and threats of castration to divorce case law involving “alienation of affection,” to the domestic abuse of cloistering, to really trivial, ostensibly “pro-sex” things like pages-long how-to check lists and guides to this or that or the other sex act that can’t really be memorized, may not be that accurate (see “your experience or mine aren’t universal,” above), and in any event create myriad ways to “do it wrong.”

So that’s the extremely roughed-out version of what “sex positivity” does or doesn’t officially mean. But rough as it is I think it helps clarify that it really isn’t just another way to say “pro sex.”

Notes:

• What does sex positive mean?, by Cory Silverberg of About.com
• Easton and Liszt’s The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities
• The term may have been first articulated in its modern sense in Carol Queen’s Real Live Nude Girl: Chronicles of Sex-Positive Culture
• If you have other good sources let me know in comments or email and I’ll add them to this list.