Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Amber Rhea of Being Amber Rhea talks about how most of the euphemisms for female genitalia double as insults that imply “weakness, uselessness, and contemptability.”

So, yeah, I will continue to get my panties in a bunch about pussy being used as an insult. Because it is NOT OKAY, and it IS important – not something to be “overlooked.” Likewise, years ago I stopped using “bitch” as an insult – there is no need to use a gendered insult when the non-gendered “asshole” or “jackass” or a million others will do. Plus I just hate the word. It makes me bristle and rankle and feel really bad inside. If I hear someone use it whom I consider a friend, suddenly I find myself questioning how much I should trust them.

And I will not abide those who roll their eyes and insist this is a minor issue and I’m – wait for it, here it comes – too sensitive.

If you give a shit about the status of women in society, you will STOP using those insults. That’s all there is to it.

She said it here.

Yes. Absolutely. It’s not just disgraceful it’s stupid.

I’ll go a step further and say you probably shouldn’t call yourself “sex positive” if you use any gender- or genitalia- or sex-act-specific terms as insults.

And yes, this goes waaaay back for me.

[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.

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]