[cw: discussion of social pressure into sex; brief quotation of justifications for rape]
I think a lot of people understand sexual politics as something like this:
That is, on one side, there is the people who are “yay sex!”, like sex-positive feminists, kinksters, stereotypical frat boys, and Cosmo magazine, while on the other side there are people who are “boo sex!”, like abstinence-only sex educators and Jerry Falwell.
This model leads to various tiresome forms of Bad Feminism. For instance, as far as I can tell, this model is the origin of the Tumblr-popular idea that we need sex-positive feminism to say that sex is good for many people, and sex-negative feminism to say that sex isn’t always good for everyone. Conversely, this model leads to the classic sex-positive failure mode of “you’re sex-positive! That means you have to have tons of sex, right? Why aren’t you having more casual sex? Why aren’t you comfortable with me talking about my partner’s genitals?”, as well as the idea that Hugh Hefner is an ally to sex-positive feminists.
But I think reality works something like this:
That is, the fundamental distinction is between people who think that someone other than you gets input into your sex life (a group which includes Jerry Falwell, the abstinence-only sex educators, stereotypical frat boys, and Cosmo magazine), and people who think that only you get input (sex-positive feminists and allies).
My mental model of Leah Libresco is telling me to say that this model is intended as value-neutral and empirical and not intended to cause insult to those more on the sexual constraint side of things than I am. In particular, I hope the religious will find “God gets input into how you have sex” a more accurate characterization of their beliefs than “ew, sex is gross.” I don’t want this to be interpreted as Good Sexual Liberationists and Bad Sexual Constraint Havers: I myself am not all the way towards sexual freedom; I think it is good to have social norms in favor of physically and emotionally healthy, mutually respectful sex, which is outside input into one’s sexual choices.
Sexual constraint leads to both sex-negativity (the idea that people shouldn’t have certain kinds of sex) and compulsory sexuality (the idea that people must have certain kinds of sex). Therefore, in general, the yay sex vs. boo sex model predicts that yay sex people tend to have more compulsory sexuality (sex is great, therefore you must have it) and boo sex people more sex-negativity (sex is terrible, don’t have any). Conversely, the sexual constraint vs. sexual freedom model predicts that compulsory sexuality and sex-negativity are positively correlated:
And I think they are positively correlated!
A lot of abstinence-only sex educators make an argument something along these lines: “people say we’re sex-negative. But we’re not actually sex-negative! We think sex is great! God wants you to have an exciting and fulfilling sex life. That’s why he’s decided to save it for marriage.” In fact, abstinence is often sold as improving your marital sex life: because you approach the marriage bed without habits learned from, expectations created by, or trauma inflicted by previous partners, you can explore sexuality together. For more about this reframe, I highly recommend the book Making Chastity Sexy.
Christian sexual constraint has a dark side. Many Christians argue that, following I Corinthians 7:5, it is actually morally wrong to refuse your partner sex. Popular evangelical self-help books say “God grants the marriage partner full access to his spouse’s body for sexual gratification. And remember, indifference is unwillingness.” (More, equally horrifying quotes at the link.) This makes no sense in the yay sex vs. boo sex model: if evangelical Christians are anti-sex, why are they coercing people into sex? It makes perfect sense in the sexual constraint model: just as you have no right to say “yes” before marriage, you have no right to say “no” afterward.
On the totally opposite end, let’s look at Cosmo!
Cosmo is ridiculously pro-sex: every issue is filled with the Thousand Best Ways To Please A Man or the Thirty Kinds Of Orgasm You Must Have or the Two Hundred Tips To Make This Summer The Hottest You’ve Ever Had. Never in Cosmo is it imagined that women (or men!) might prefer to catch up on Hannibal rather than trying the Lusty Leg Lift. And this continues to specific sex acts: if your partner doesn’t like dirty talk or blowjobs, or you don’t like cunnilingus or swallowing come, you just need to improve your technique! It is very rarely suggested that maybe people could just not have sex they don’t like.
But this fascination with sexuality combines with a horror of any sexuality that is remotely non-normative. Formerly, this was lesbians: I fondly remember the issue where a woman who fantasizes about sex with girls was told that this shows she needs to have more sweet, gentle, loving sex with her male man boyfriend who is a dude. But then Cosmo got a new editor and now we’re getting, like, True Confession: I, A Lady, Cheated On My Girlfriend With Another Woman, which is good for LGB rights but really bad for my amusing Cosmo reading.
Fortunately, Cosmo remains terrified of kink. Most articles about BDSMy things are interspersed with gentle reassurances that this doesn’t mean you are really kinky, it’s okay, you don’t have to be a dominatrix, why don’t you tie up your partner with toilet paper so it’s less scary. And then consider what’s simply unthinkable: Cosmo doesn’t run articles about sneeze fetishes, or balloons, or furries, or the rest of the glorious diversity of human sexuality. And before you say “but most people aren’t into furry sex!” I would like to point out that most people are also not into putting a doughnut on a man’s penis and eating it and yet here Cosmo is. To Cosmo, anything outside a tiny sphere of human sexuality is not just forbidden: it’s unthinkable.
Assuming you accept my model, how does this change sex-positive practice? Most notably: inclusion of people who don’t want to have sex is not optional. Allyship to asexuals, gray asexuals, and low-libido people is not optional. Prude-shaming is just as important to fight as slut-shaming. Talking about orgasms or genitals in a uniformly positive way is fucked up. Talking about not wanting to have sex as something people just need to get over is fucked up. Assuming that everyone else is as comfortable with sexuality as you are is fucked up. Sex-positive events or websites that include lots of stuff for sluts and a token “some people don’t like sex and that’s fine!” for prudes are fucked up and they are failing at the goal they are advocating.
Thing of Things 
Thank you. Thank you a lot.
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I like this a lot.
Also my Jesus-hate will be on topic for once! The concept of the “marriage debt” exists in Catholicism and ugh ugh ugh. In their defense normal Catholics don’t really bother with it and most Extraordinary Form types still interpret in a way similar to Dan Savage’s GGG ideas I. E. If your partner wants sex, you should say “I don’t want sex but I’ll put up with it if you insist” and then your partner will either say “OK I will just sit here with my rosary trying not to fap” or “OK I will have sex with you and thank you for putting up with it.” But you can interpret it in a very rare way if you are so inclined.
Also I think the reason Cosmo doesn’t run articles on sneeze fetishists is because there aren’t that many of us. Furries, there are more of, but we are hipster fetish. (Also it’s a convenient fetish in that your partner will frequently satisfy it by accident.)
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Well, a third of the people I’M dating are sneeze fetishists. 😛
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BD
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Accidental furry sex?
Please clarify.
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I think queenshulamit means sneezing.
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Yeah sneezing is a thing that happens by accident, accidentally falling into a fursuit and forgetting to take it off before sex is… Less usual.
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That makes sense. (esp. if they have honeymoon rhitinis)
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You could of course date a hairy person who has an aversion to frequent grooming.
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To be fair, the marriage debt works both ways: just as a husband can demand sex of his wife, so the wife can demand sex of her husband, and he gets as little right to say “not tonight dear” as she does. Though that’s something I am not happy with, and I think Dan Savage and his Good Giving Game model is much too close to the same idea of “you can’t say ‘no’ once you’ve decided to have sex with someone’: “If you’re not wiling to dress up as a banana and hop around on one foot licking the inside of a tin of anchovies, don’t be surprised when your partner has a bit on the side with someone who will do this”.
Had I a partner who would make such a thing ‘make-or-break’ in the relationship – I’m leaving if I don’t get this – then I’d say “Sure, enjoy what you enjoy, good luck to you, and there’s the door; the world is wide, find someone who’ll do this, and I’m not going to force or beg you to stay”. Fortunately, I avoid all such possible conflicts by not having any partners at all. Had I known asexuality was a choice, I’d have ticked that box on the range of options pre-birth. I only wish I’d known earlier that I was indeed asexual, and not merely demonstrating “just more weird anti-social bad crazy stuff”.
Ozy, I really like you and I don’t know why; I think you and I have such differing opinions on such a range of things, I am sure you would find me an appalling Neanderthal and I am constantly surprised by how I nod in an approving manner about “That Ozy, sensible person!” 🙂
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There is totally a lived-experience difference for me between what I think of as Dan Savage/GGG and what I think of as subtle social pressure into sex, but it’s *really hard to describe*. So I understand people who just want to throw it out. 🙂
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Ozy: Apologies if this is going off topic too much, but, well — this is very interesting! This is saying something about just where the border is — i.e., it’s somewhere around here. This is what we need to be getting at! (OK, except really what I want to focus on is much lower-level things, not sex, I get the impression that with sex things are actually usually pretty clear, but people tend to focus on sex and that’s what this discussion was, so I’ll go with it.)
In particular, this suggests to me that if it takes that much to rise to the level of even “possibly subtle social pressure”, this suggests that the things I worry or used to worry about as being pressuring (see e.g. here or here) are nowhere near so. This is a point that, in general, needs to be made much clearer!
(Yeah I’ve been harping on this point a lot lately. Oh well.)
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To be clear, when I refer to “subtle social pressure into sex”, I’m not referring to anything my partner is doing wrong (usually). I’m referring to the feeling of “well, I am a Bad Person if I don’t agree to [sex act I don’t want to do].”
I think “come on, honey, be GGG” is basically always jerk behavior.
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Oh, I see. That makes sense. “Social” in that sense. Should have realized. Yes that seems like a distinctly harder problem to do something about (since it’s not an “identify the bad people” problem).
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I would really appreciate it if frat boys were no longer used as the go-to example of male sexual hedonism. Speaking as a real live frat boy (Phi Kappa Psi, Wisconsin Gamma’12), the stereotype is also incorrect (as stereotypes tend to be) and carries consequences for the named group (as stereotypes tend to do). My big brother, for example, was falsely accused of rape, and the unwillingness of the campus to believe him was explicitly tied to his fraternity membership. Meanwhile, the conversation we had within the chapter about the incident was highly nuanced, with every position you could imagine being represented.
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Sorry! I went to a school without frat boys so I simply have the stereotype. Although not having frat boys didn’t exactly stop my college from having a horrifying level of people being pressured into sex they don’t want, so… I really ought to have known better. 🙂
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Thank you for the acknowledgment. 🙂
To clarify a bit about how fraternities work, “fraternity” is a description of an organizational structure where members (usually all male, though it’s sometimes used in a gender-neutral way) pledge themselves to the group. They often incorporate group rituals, sometimes run charity functions, usually maintain alumni networks, and host events. If you look at that description, it’s vague enough to suggest just about any kind of subculture you could imagine…which is exactly how fraternities end up working in practice.
Fraternal governance can be divided into levels. (I’m going to describe PKP’s here because it’s what I’m familiar with, but as far as I can tell other frats work similarly.) You have a national governmental structure that sets policy all chapters are expected to follow, which is itself a complex bureaucracy with a board and everything; you have State advisory bodies that look after the well-being of the chapters in their States; and you have the chapters themselves, which are composed of current students at a given college or university. Current students and alumni play important roles at every stage, and shape the way different chapters operate.
The best analogy for how this works that’s coming to mind right now is the Girl Scouts, which I’ve also been a member of. There’s a national organization (the Girl Scouts of America); different Councils (I was a member of Blackhawk Council if I remember correctly); and different troops. National policy definitely shaped the Scouts, but what most former Scouts I know judge their experience on was their troop, because that’s who they had contact with. It’s the same principle for frat boys and their chapters.
(Bonus comparison: Fraternities have no relation to each other. PKP is not subject to Sigma Chi’s policies or culture in the same way that the Girl Scouts are not related to the Boy Scouts.)
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There are at least 4 wisconsin gammas I know of who read this blog now.
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Are you among us, soosoos, or just someone who knows the WiGams? I only know of me and one other.
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@ninecarpals Speaking of others: hi! Wisconsin Gamma #1515 reporting in. Small world?
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@Milonysus
Itty bitty! This is Gaston speaking. 😀
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Maybe instead of constraint vs. freedom, the axis should read externally imposed vs. internally imposed constraint/freedom. (Other than that, I totally agree.)
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[self harm cw] Is a Catholic who self harms in an attempt to stop having gay thoughts experiencing internal constraints or external ones?
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Good question. Both? Somewhere in between? (Sorry if that was something you went through. I was raised Catholic, but luckily had a rather unconvincing Catholic education.)
(Also, it doesn’t make much sense to talk about externally-imposed freedom, does it? I think I just wanted the concept of benign self-imposed restraint to be more visible.)
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“Sex-positive events or websites that include lots of stuff for sluts and a token “some people don’t like sex and that’s fine!” for prudes are fucked up and they are failing at the goal they are advocating.”
OK concrete suggestions to be more prude inclusive?
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I don’t know if I would count as a “prude”, because the term is kind of vague. Does “prude” mean, “a person who wants other people to stop having certain kinds of sex” ? In that case, I don’t want to include that person, because he’s an asshole. Does it mean, “someone who is made uncomfortable by discussion of sex ?” In that case, yeah, we should respect his preferences, but it that means stopping all discussion of sex everywhere, then forget it. If that’s what he wants us to do, then he’s still an asshole. But if the word means someone who, like myself, is turned off by most things people would consider kinky (such as BDSM, fursuits, and possibly sneezing though I didn’t even know that was a thing), then sure.
I don’t want to tell you what kind of sex to have or how to discuss it, so please don’t recite long speeches at me describing exactly why the kind of sex I happen to like is boring and stupid. I think that’s a fair trade.
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But simply not reciting long prude-phobic speeches at you is rather a low bar, right?
I am already not prude-shaming people people, but I suspect that the task of incorporating sex-averse or sex-repulsed or simply asexual people into my sex-positivity involves more than just the absence of bad actions. I suspect, in fact, that I’m currently not very good at it, and I’d be interested to know what it looks like when it’s done really well.
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Good point, I have no idea. The absence of bad actions would be enough for me; and I suspect it would be enough for most people.
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Links to websites and resources for the less promiscuous would be beneficial.
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I run an asexuality blog and we talk about this all the time, albeit for an ace audience. Here’s one thing I wrote, and here’s another filled with links.
It’s really helpful to remember that sex-averse people aren’t necessarily trying to take away your precious sexuality. Like, we know there’s a conflict between people who maybe want more sex in public spaces, and people who want less. Sometimes that can be hard to negotiate, but hey let’s negotiate it instead of ignoring one side entirely.
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“…but hey let’s negotiate it instead of ignoring one side entirely.”
Given that public sex is illegal in most places, whose side exactly is being ignored here?
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You’re taking what I said too literally. I mean that we have all these shared resources and spaces like websites, communities, and media, and those spaces can have varying degrees of focus on sex or sexuality.
In general, it can be hard to negotiate all our collective preferences–I mean, that’s the central problem of every community ever. But there are also some really easy steps, like acknowledging and understanding diverse preferences and designating separate spaces when necessary. This is something ace spaces have to negotiate all the time too, because even aces are very diverse.
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This is true and necessary and Ozy’s post is a good argument for why it’s true.
I guess my more general point was that I do often feel that most of the spaces in my life are either run by or overrun by people who would prefer that I not be a sexual being, and that sex not be a thing discussed explicitly or joyfully. Even people who want to have sex with me, it seems, would rather do it within certain implied bounds of propriety, and without having to think or talk about the variability in those bounds.
So when you talk about acknowledging people’s preferences, and your specific example is acknowledging the preferences of people who would prefer less public sex, I guess it gets a reaction out of me because I feel that the people who would prefer less public sex have already won – in general, the people who would prefer that we squirrel sex away in boxes of propriety have won.
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I agree with intruige. I think it’s wrong that I can more easily talk politics or religion in polite company that sex.
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To the extent that there isn’t enough open conversation about sex, that can’t really be blamed on sex-averse aces. But nonetheless everyone brings it up this up whenever sex-averse aces are brought up. Shouldn’t that be part of a separate conversation?
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“Don’t bother because you can’t create a political movement around advocating for two groups of people who’s interests are categorically aligned against one another.”
Alternately,
“Demolish the entire social justice concept of viewing things in terms of ‘normalization’ or ‘cultural constructs’ or ‘hegemonic social orders’ or ‘microaggressions’ in favor of a classical liberal view of society as a socially secular place where we meet up, bump elbows awkwardly and hurt each others feelings a bit but with an understanding that this is inevitable, then go our separate ways to live our separate lives. If you do this, suddenly these groups interests aren’t misaligned anymore.”
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Off the top of my head…
Publicize that things like asexuality and demisexuality exist. And arrange for people to learn the words, since they make it practical to explain things. Nurse Cthulhu has written eloquently on the subject.
Keep things separated. If lots of people have an interest in make-outs and not in intercourse, then make-out parties should be a thing. There can also be make-outs-followed-by-intercourse parties, but they shouldn’t be the only parties, and both sets should be clearly labelled.
Maybe include low-sexuality people on The List of people not to be assholes to, though I’d really much rather throw away The List and just not be assholes.
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Can we find a different term than “prude”? I know “I don’t care what you do but stop insisting on telling me all about it” is too long to use in everyday discourse. “Prude”, though, has such negative connotations that it’s hard to hear yourself described by it without reflexive twitching.
I mean, I’ll go “Why yes, I AM a prude” if pushed to it, but it does tend to be confrontational in such cases. If anyone has a better or more neutral term, I’d enjoy hearing it.
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I think the “constraint” vs. “freedom” axis applies to lots of social policies and agendas, not just to sex.
As far as I can tell, many social justice agendas tend closer toward the “control” axis. For example, if you happen to be female, then they want to control your choice of employment (and if you choose “homemaker” then you’re a traitor), or your choice of recreation (if you watch the wrong movies or play the wrong games, you are normalizing the patriarchy).
Similarly, fundamentalist Christians likewise want to control your behavior; they just want you to do different things. If you are female, then “homemaker” is your only option (and if you do anything else you’re a traitor); and your recreation should consist of wholesome God-loving activities (though Christian movies and Bible-based games could still be allowed).
In general, authoritarianism is a universal human trait…
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In… limited… defense of the social justice agenda types, where the fundamentalist Christian prescription for the world is “thou must do X,” the social justice prescription is “thou must not do X.” The set of “not X” is broader than the set of “X.”
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“Authoritarianism” (probably not the right word, since the modern concept didn’t exist until the 20th century) in sexual matters is as close to a human universal as there is. All societies have rules and norms about when, how, and with whom one should or should not have sex.
Radical feminism and abstinence-only education are two sides of the same backlash against the sexual revolution. Optimistic as I am about most forms of social progress, I suspect the desire to control other people’s sex lives will be the last to fall.
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probably not the right word, since the modern concept didn’t exist until the 20th century
Are you sure you’re not thinking of totalitarianism? While the word “authoritarian” only goes back to the mid-19th century, the concept is older. (Arguably, totalitarianism as a practice predates the 20th century as well, at least sporadically, with the French First Republic under the Committee of Public Safety probably being the prominent example, but it’s a lot more sporadic, and not really conceptualized in a general way.)
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Is there perhaps a middle ground on the social justice positions there? Could we acknowledge that XYZ action might be normalizing racism/sexism/whatever in some way, but also acknowledge that doing XYZ doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person?
For instance, I think that my moving into a neighborhood that is dominantly white probably contributes to segregation a la the Schelling model. However, I don’t think that I really have an obligation to move to a more diverse neighborhood in order to combat that.
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“Doing XYZ doesn’t make you a bad person”, however, often means “it’s not your fault because everyone unconsciously does XYZ, but now that it’s been pointed out to you you have an obligation to stop it. If you’re *still* doing it after I point it out, now you’re being *consciously* racist/sexist, and that does make you a bad person.”
“It is okay to keep doing XYZ” is actually a pretty unusual meaning of “doing XYZ doesn’t make you a bad person”.
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@ Jiro
I don’t think “stop right now!” and “it’s fine, keep doing it” capture the entire range of possible intended meanings.
How about “Please consider if there is some way you might avoid doing XYZ at an acceptable personal cost”?
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Don’t ALL ideologies imply that some choices are better than others, and some choices should be stopped altogether? Isn’t that kind of what ideologies ARE?
By “authoritarianism” you appear to mean “believing things”, which, yeah, is a universal human trait. (Even postmodernists spend a lot of time going on about how, since every viewpoint is valid, the vast majority of currently-popular viewpoints are invalid because they’re jingoistically insisting that some viewpoints are invalid.)
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I think the main difference between an ideology and authoritarianism is saying “I like X and hate Y, and I’m going to teach more people about why X is good and Y is bad” vs. “X is good and Y is evil, so I am going to make X mandatory and Y illegal. Also, death to Y-lovers !”.
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“Paying your taxes is good and murder is evil, so I am going to make taxes mandatory and murder illegal. Also, death to murder-lovers!”
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But that doesn’t let me lambast my political enemies, because both sides are doing it! Completely useless 😛
(Also, um, there is no ideology that doesn’t ban certain things – except certain truly insane forms of “Anarchy”, and even there it gets iffy.)
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@Ozy:
Yeah, exactly. “Taxes are good because they pay for roads, so let’s levy some” is a reasonable position (though of course we could argue about the precise amount of taxes and what to spend them on). “Taxes are good because I said so, pay them or die” is pure authoritarianism.
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Yes yes yes. You are right about this in every way.
Moving to a constraint vs. freedom model makes so much more sense than ‘sex-positive’ or ‘sex-negative,’ and has the added benefit of being much harder to misread as “I think all sex all the time is positive and there’s nothing to question about it!”
Which is a dumb misreading, but one that people manage to make over and over.
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So a while ago somewhere on TV Tropes I ran into a thing like ‘everything not forbidden is compulsory’. At some later point it occurred to me that that’s kind of what our culture’s ‘meta rule’ for sex looks like. So a lot of changes just move the line among what is forbidden and what is compulsory, without actually dealing with the meta-rule. Which is a problem. And, like you say, if we want to fix this problem, we have to address both sides – the forbidden and the compulsory.
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So what do you call someone in favor of freedom for themselves and constraint for others?
Both in my hometown and where I am now self proclaimed sex-positive feminists were thick on the ground. And you’re exactly 50% right about them: they were strongly in favor of only you having input in your sex life… provided you were a member of a Protected Class. Everyone else got sexual constraint from both barrels.
I’ve been lucky that my taste in women is varied enough that I’m not called a racist very often, although I still to this day catch shit when I date asian girls. Being straight and not interested in experimenting on the other hand has resulted in the paradox of being castigated both as a homophobe and a closet case. And as for acceptance of kink… from the reactions I’ve gotten when things leaked out it’s clear few of these people were expecting male doms and female subs.
I don’t think it was intentional but it’s certainly a predictable dilemma. People using the cover of morality or ideology to pressure one another into relationships (rent-seeking in the sexual marketplace is as it were) is hardly new after all. But for that same reason it’s hard to see this as anything but a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
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This is silly and you should stop telling lies on the Internet.
No one expected male doms!! If you’re not simply writing down your masturbatory fantasies (and I have to congratulate you on combining your sexual conquest fantasy with a victimhood fantasy in a novel if implausible way) then you’re such an unreliable narrator that your entire worldview is essentially a masturbatory fantasy.
No one expected male doms and female subs. Not getting over that one any time soon.
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Hate to disappoint but my fantasies are quite a lot more interesting than that.
While it’s certainly fun to cast me as Baron Munchausen maybe you should actually look around at your own camp first. A lot of the people protesting 50 Shades right now (including some of my friends) are ‘sex positive’ feminists who think that erotica showing a man dominating a woman reinforces patriarchal gender roles. I know religious listeners of Savage Love who will tell you to your face that playing out a rape fantasy makes you a monster. It’s really not hard to find this sentiment.
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@Pat B: Eh, the criticisms I’ve seen FSoG have not really been about domination as such. More about stalking and other non-negotiated, out-of-the-bedroom abusive behaviors. It’s possible we’ve been seeing different criticisms, though.
The “rape fantasies are evil” stuff is bullshit, though.
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@Anonymous,
Err… what?
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“provided you were a member of a Protected Class. Everyone else got sexual constraint from both barrels.”
This gets at something interesting – this “constraint/freedom” model works in theory, but in practice the spectrum is lousy with hypocrisy. If humans were rational and consistent in their philosophies it’d make sense, but most philosophies are made up of 20% well-thought-out arguments and 80% general squick/squee factor.
Given that hypocrisy, the number of kink-phobic and transphobic sex-positive feminists and the number of freewheeling pole-smoking Ted Haggards is unsurprising.
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I seriously think people should, as a rule, go down a level of principle to see if what they’re currently doing matches their basis for doing so.
e.g. the classic sex-positive failure mode of “you’re sex-positive! That means you have to have tons of sex, right? Why aren’t you having more casual sex? Why aren’t you comfortable with me talking about my partner’s genitals?”
Why are we sex positive? Because sex is something that usually makes people happy, and generally isn’t bad unless done wrong in some way. Our basis for being sex positive is that we want people to be happy, and not feel shame for the harmless things that make them happy. If happiness is the goal, why the fuck are you squicking people out with details about your sex life? That’s antithetical to the principle behind sex positivity, as its been explained to me numerous times.
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Counterpoint: if something I’m talking about squicks you out, why can’t you just exercise your free right to leave? Why is it my responsibility to avoid squicking you out? If it’s something that I feel is part of my identity, by shutting it down you’re rejecting part of my identity, and making me feel othered and uncomfortable. Not to mention that you’re contributing to a culture in which people feel less free to discuss sex, and misconceptions and misinformation abound. In that environment, people are more likely, not less likely, to retreat into following strict sexual norms.
Without free communication about sex, the default is not diversity and acceptance; it’s fear and silence.
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I think both needs can be met with a base norm of “feel free to talk about whatever you wish”, with adaptations made for specific people and situations as they come up. I absolutely consider frank, open discourse an integral part of a healthy society, but I don’t think respecting a specific person’s or specific group’s needs is antithetical to that. A conversation isn’t a cultural statement – it’s two people compromising on what they’re both comfortable talking about.
As for “rejecting part of [someone’s] identity” – I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. Not all aspects of identity are appropriate for every setting.
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Many people do have *particular* hang up regarding sex, thus it seems kind to make a special effort toward everyone’s comfort if you want to get into sexy talk. Easy peasy.
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I generally want to talk to the particular people I’m talking to. That is why I am talking to them rather than thinking to myself or making a blog post. I generally do not want to make people uncomfortable, both because I dislike causing people discomfort and because uncomfortable people make poor conversational partners. Therefore, it is helpful to me to know what topics might make people uncomfortable so I can check in and make sure they won’t bother anyone.
It is also reasonable for other people to request “hey, can we not talk about this?” before they leave, since “I would rather talk with you than talk about any specific topic” is a common preference.
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As a rule of common courtesy, you should avoid squicking out people who you are talking too, regardless of subject, or nobody will talk to you anymore.
I’m not unsympathetic, as many of my non-sexual interests, hobbies, and passions squick out huge portions of the populace, and I find myself having to restrain my enthusiasm for sharing knowledge, because it turns out that people at a dinner party do not want to know that the noise the food just made sounds the same as when you crack open a human skull and peel off the dura mater, or hear the story of the cute little bot fly larvae that was embedded in your friend’s skin during tropical fieldwork. To me, these are just fascinating anecdotes and I can’t fathom why everyone just turned pale and nobody wants to eat anymore.
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I could. If you insist on demanding I either listen to you talk about your partner’s genitals or I leave, I will probably take the latter option. I will do so despite lacking any personal squick towards sex because that’s a disrespectful way to treat someone, and it clearly communicates that the comfort of others isn’t important to you. Even if it’s framed as competing needs,* that’s an absolute stance where my comfort isn’t even considered.
*in general, I dispute that framing. There are plenty of spaces designed specifically to talk about sex; not talking to some people about sex does not inhibit access to them.
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@intrigue
Same reason you can’t leave for a place where people aren’t squicked out by what you’re talking about. Specifically, that shared spaces need to compromise between mutually exclusive comfort needs. Never being able to talk about sex is oppressive to people who want to talk about sex; never being able to avoid talk about sex is oppressive to people who don’t want to talk about sex.
Society is actually torn about sexual freedom/constraint, at the moment. While public sex (and public nudity) is still illegal, scantily clad images, and scantly covering outfits, are both legal, and (depending on the weather) common, respectively. Your standard family-friendly supermarket will have popular magazines proudly shouting SEX (how they will improve it for you) at everyone. Sexual liberation still has a distance to go, but actual prudes are having a pretty terrible time.
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Obligatory comment, but: It is also worth noting the prevalence among otherwise freedom-promoting (or apparently freedom-promoting) people of the notion that if you ever (especially as a straight male) make anyone uncomfortable in a sexual way (especially a woman) you are an objectifying sexist creep. That’s pretty damn constraining!
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Other commenters have already summed up my (generally positive) opinion of this piece, so I’ll ask (sincerely and in good faith): why can’t Hugh Hefner be sex-positive?
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I think the fact that both these models tend to group together very dissimilar things on either end indicates that they are both oversimplifications. No need to limit yourself to just one axis! Plotting them both in a 2D space might yield some useful insights.
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Great post.
Quote: “I think it is good to have social norms in favor of physically and emotionally healthy, mutually respectful sex, which is outside input into one’s sexual choices.”
Yes, and social conservatives agree with you. The bone of contention, I would imagine, is that social conservatives think “emotionally healthy” means “within a committed relationship” – pretty much exclusively. They think women who pursue short-term sex were either emotionally damaged to begin with, or become emotionally damaged as a result.
I wouldn’t put the case quite so strongly myself, but I do think most people want restrained (not constrained) sex lives – monogamy is modal – and perceptions of “high-partner count” sexual freedom are mostly outliers and pluralistic ignorance. (No judgement here – to be clear)
I also have a strong belief that pair-bonding is a super-important component of family formation – and pair-bonding, for most people, involves fidelity and socio-sexual restrictedness.
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Well, riffing off Scott’s idea that liberalism reflects an attitude of plentitude and conservatism reflects and attitude of scarcity — I’m not sure if we really know the *natural* level of human preferences for poly versus mono. Myself, I’ve always been naturally poly. My wife, on the other hand, was pretty happy with monogamy precisely until she tried poly, which she found quite wonderful. Now she dates far and wide and loves her sexy life. So it seems plausible that tons of folks choose monogamy cuz they don’t really imagine they have another choice.
And of course tons of folks are monogamous in name only, since they frequently cheat. That seems to be commonplace. It’s possible that such people would be much happier in a poly arrangement, if such was a active possibility in their lives.
In any case, it is easy to see how a society under pressure might choose monogamous relationship structures, socially enforced, but where a society of plentitude might let a thousand relationship forms bloom.
Myself, I’d prefer the society of plentitude with tons of cool, queer sex. YMMV.
It seems good to be open about this stuff, to give folks the vocabulary to talk about what the really want and to explore their options before they commit.
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Co-signed, mostly. Although there might not be an “natural” human preference – it could be the case that environmental conditions feed into developmental pathways which influence whether a person is mono or poly.
What does concern me a little bit, though (and makes me a bit of a social conservative) is the lack of examples of post-agriculture societies that practise poly, a strong association of societies that practise polygyny with strong controls on female sexuality and high rates of male-on-male violence – and are hardly associated with plenitude.
Polyamoury is still in it’s experimental stage – I have strong doubts it’s viable as a mainstream tradition.
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I’m totally on board with having a sexual freedom movement instead of a sexual positivity movement. I think that’s what we de facto have, despite some tangled terminology, but that might just be my good luck not to have run into the darker parts.
But I do think “boo sex” is an existing meme that’s worth fighting. Think of…
* STD testing not being included in standard medical exams, because doctors don’t want to insult their patients by calling them “the sort of people who could get STDs”.
* Enough people not wanting to live near sex toy shops that it depresses land value (or enough people *thinking* this, which may itself depress land value, and certainly influences zoning laws)
* High-sexuality people identifying as “evil”, “wicked”, or “dirty” in large numbers. Harmless? I suspect not. I suspect taking any real ideas about goodness seriously becomes harder.
* People who feel violated simply for being sexually *desired* with no interaction
I feel like there are more examples, but I’m not thinking of them right now.
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When I first heard the word “sex positive,” and read a brief description of sex-positive activism, I got the impression it was shorthand for something like:
“Sex is something lots of people want to do and enjoy doing. Therefore we should encourage people to have sex and fight against restrictions on sex. There may be some people who don’t enjoy sex, and that’s fine, but in most cases sex is a positive for people.”
The idea that someone might interpret sex positivism so literally that they would think everyone should have sex whether they want to or not didn’t even occur to me until I read this blog. I just assumed everyone would go to the meta-level and understand that “sex is good” is short for “giving people what they want is usually good, and most people want sex, so sex is usually good and we should encourage it.”
Saying “sex is good and positive” like saying “a cobra is a poisonous snake.” There are some people for whom cobras are not poisonous, because they have built up a resistance to the venom. But everyone understands that even though this is true, the statement “a cobra is a poisonous snake” only needs to be correct for most people to be true. They also understand that I am not in any way insulting or maligning cobra-venom-mithradatists by saying “a cobra is a poisonous snake.” Similarly, it really should be obvious that nobody is maligning asexual people when they say “sex is good and positive.”
If I was to start a campaign warning people not to bother cobras, I would think everyone would understand the campaign did not apply to mithradatist zookeepers, and would not try to stop zookeepers with immunity to cobra venom from bothering cobras. Do people really assume that sex-positivism applies to asexual people too? Why?
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If you think my point is just “don’t malign asexuals” you have seriously missed my point.
Your framing of sex-positivity is I strongly disagree with. I disagree that we should encourage people to have sex. I also disagree that we should discourage people to have sex. I think we should mostly stop having opinions about other people’s sex lives, and let people find the level of sex that makes them happy, whether it is no sex or lots of sex.
I don’t think that “sex is good and positive and you should have lots of sex! Unless you have the Official Asexual Badge that means it is Okay to not want lots of sex!” is a remotely helpful way to go about things. There are lots of people who have low libidos, or who are grossed out by sex, or who need to get really comfortable with someone before they have sex, or are just not that interested, and all of those things are fine.
I also don’t think “sex is good and positive” is remotely a helpful way to talk about sex. I think that, to a first approximation, everyone is going to have (yes, consensual) sex that is bad and negative. And we need to have a framework that people can discuss those experiences in, or at least acknowledge that they happen! The best way to make sure that people keep having bad and negative sex is to be like “la la la la la all sex is good and makes people happy and the only concern is restrictions on sex.” Actually admitting “hey, this happens, and it sucks, and you don’t have to have sex that makes you feel bad” is a step towards making sure that the sex that happens actually is good and positive.
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>>>There are lots of people who have low libidos, or who are grossed out by sex, or who need to get really comfortable with someone before they have sex, or are just not that interested, and all of those things are fine.
This is one common reason why people do not want to have sex, and find the sex they do have unpleasant. The problem is that there is a second reason as well: There are many people who have internalized sexual-constraint-type ideologies. These people, if they had been socialized in a better world, would enjoy sex quite a lot. But instead they convince themselves that their sexual experiences were bad experiences, not because they were, but because of an inverted version of the Halo Effect. Unconstrained sex is bad, therefore it must feel bad.
Such people need someone to tell them that the sex they are having is good, and that the wrongness they feel is due to their internalizing a toxic belief system. The problem is, as you point out, that sometimes this advice gets pointed towards people who don’t want to have sex because they have low libidos, or are asexual, or need to find the right person, or some other reason. In their case the advice is harmful, because it misidentifies why they find sex unpleasant.
A good analogy might be giving advice about self-criticism. There are some very scrupulous people who criticize themselves too much. There are also some very narcissistic people who criticize themselves too little. They need different types of advice, advice that’s good for one group is harmful for another. You could lay out both sets of advice and say that one set is for one group and one is for another. But people aren’t always good at determining which group they are in.
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@Ghatanathoah,
I like your second reason and it’s good to point those people out. Folks raised under a fundamentalist religion or Scott-Aaronson-esque progressive ideology risk picking up neuroses about sex that way. It is likely that in an environment with more nuanced perspectives (in general, not just sexually) scrupulous people would enjoy a much better quality of life.
Still it seems like most people who say they had a bad experience with sex (at least the ones I’ve met) actually had quite bad experiences. Even putting aside the big-ticket items like rape or STDs there are quite a lot of ways you can have a bad enough time to reasonably decide you need to take a long break. Sex is a full contact sport after all with the added benefits that come with intimate emotional relationships.
Telling people their bad experiences were in fact good experiences which they have misinterpreted seems like poor form on a number of levels. It might be more productive to identify reasons why experiences tend to be bad and issue forewarning. Common sense advice like “make sure your partner is well lubricated” or “just because you say you’re just casual doesn’t mean that you won’t develop feelings” is more useful (and to their credit a lot of sex-positive folks do provide it).
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Ghatanathoah, I’m glad we have people who can say it straight and tell people when their preferences are inauthentic.
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@Alex Godofsky
Accusing people’s preferences of being inauthentic is obviously a dangerous slippery slope. And it’s obviously been used as an excuse for doing a lot of awful things to people.
But that doesn’t mean no one has ever had an inauthentic preference. Just because evil people use inauthentic preferences to justify doing evil stuff, doesn’t mean inauthentic preferences don’t exist. If things didn’t exist because evil people used them to justify evil stuff, fascists, communists, terrorists, criminals, pedophiles, and poverty would all be things of myth.
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Part of the “Everyone should be having sex” pressure arises out of the idea that the only reasons someone might not like or want sex have to do with (a) psychological distress of some kind, what 50s and 60s Freudian pop-psychology rejoiced in diagnosing as frigidity (see Hitchcock’s Marnie for a whole stew of repulsive attitudes about compulsory sexuality, none of them probably intentional) (b) molestation or sexual assault or rape (c) religious or other social repression from which you simply need to be liberated by being told how great sex is and how it’s perfectly normal to want and to have sex – the downside here, of course, is the connection being made that NOT wanting sex is abnormal (d) medical problems.
There’s an episode of House which fails immensely when discussing asexuality; granted, the whole point of “House” is ‘medical mystery of the week’ which relies heavily on setting up ‘what is causing this and how do we treat it?’, but when they treat “not wanting to have sex” as “that’s because you have a brain tumour but once that’s treated, you’ll be normal again” – then yes, that’s problematic sex positivity: everyone wants sex, everyone tries to have sex, and if you don’t, you’re lying or sick or there’s something wrong with you.
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It’s possible to believe that people are “supposed” to want sex (as in, we are built to want it, and if we don’t then something has malfunctioned), without making any moral judgment against people who don’t, or compelling them to seek treatment. Not everyone commits the naturalistic fallacy.
IIRC, that episode of House ended on a note of uncertainty about the patient’s quality of life after treatment; it didn’t strike me as such a clear-cut example of asex-shaming. Especially since House was on the pro-treatment side, and the fucked-up nature of House’s moral compass is kind of the point of the show.
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@stillnotking,
The problem is that the House universe entirely confirmed House’s prejudices by presenting it as fact that the two asexuals were sick and lying respectively. I find it particularly damning that Wilson offers the more “asexual-positive” view in the show, and his view amounts to, “they were happy, even if deluded”.
So sure you can hold the view that asexuals are not morally wrong, it’s just that they’re just deluded/sick/lying. But isn’t that belief still factually incorrect and harmful?
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House never struck me as a preachy show, but it’s been a long time since I saw that particular episode.
“Sick” is a loaded word. I don’t think asexuals are sick, and I assume most of them are neither deluded nor lying. I think they are sexually malfunctioning individuals, in the same category as intersex or allosome disorders. (The malfunction may be neutral or even positive from the individual’s POV; it’s only a “malfunction” in the sense of a loss of reproductive fitness.)
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I think they are sexually malfunctioning individuals, in the same category as intersex or allosome disorders.
And what is your opinion on gay and lesbian people? After all, they too are malfunctioning when it comes to loss of reproductive fitness.
Imagine any television show nowadays putting on an episode where there’s a gay or lesbian or bi or (now) trans couple, and the resolution of their sub-plot is “Congratulations, you only thought you were LGBT because of this condition but with medical treatment we can fix you to be normal” and their partner is “Okay, so I lied because I didn’t want to hurt their feelings and I’m really cishet and yes, I’ve had normal cishet sex before” and the happy ending is now the pair of them can have normal cishet sex!
Imagine that. Then imagine the fire from heaven descending on the network, the show, the writers, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
I didn’t know about asexuality and aromanticism until quite recently. I did know, from the age of nine onwards, that I didn’t want love and marriage and a family and all the rest of what I was told by everyone from my parents to the commercialisation of Valentine’s Day onwards that I should want, that I would want when I got older.
I got older. I didn’t want it. I didn’t meet Mr (or Ms) Right and fall in love. I never have fallen in love with anyone, even the unrequited love/crush/passing fancy (well, I have had one thing that I would identify as a crush but that was over fast and I was happy when it finished).
Was I broken, sick, wrong? I didn’t know.
Then I found out about asexuality and aromanticism and it was a genuine discovery to have a name, to have concepts, to have something I could say “Yes, I recognise this”.
I don’t think of myself as queer or identify as that, so I don’t identify with that section of asexuals who do think of their sexuality as queeer sexuality. But I’m not going to fight about that.
I am going to say I don’t think I’m broken or wrong. I don’t have that reproductive instinct, but then again, there are many people having all kinds of sex who don’t have it either – that’s why birth control was invented, after all.
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House is very much the anti-hero of the show. If you’re taking moral guidance from him, then you’re Doing It Wrong.
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I’m not sure if this is what you mean or not, but using unmodified words like “built to” and “malfunction” in reference to human beings give *far* too much deference to the Blind Idiot God.
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@Martha: There are a couple of reasons to suspect that homosexuality is adaptive: its relative commonness, and the fact that it’s a refocusing of libido rather than a reduction. None of the attempted explanations of just how it could be adaptive strike me as convincing, but I won’t rule it out.
@Daniel: I am most definitely not deferring to the Blind Idiot God. I’m describing him, which is, if anything, the opposite. I can’t think of a more morally neutral word than “malfunction”, but I’m open to suggestions.
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It’s really not so simple to carve out an exception for asexuals. There are plenty of people who don’t know that they are asexual, or aren’t sure whether they are asexual. There are people like me who are sure they’re on the categorical boundaries. Not to mention plenty of non-asexuals also have negative experiences with sex. Or even people who just feel like their experiences with sex aren’t quite as positive as it seems it is for other people.
Also, after reading so many narratives of asexuals believing that they have to like sex, in many cases pushing themselves to have sex that they don’t like, I have to conclude that it is not in fact universally understood that “sex is good” means only “sex is good if you think it’s good”.
I understand that people aren’t really thinking of asexuals when they repeat sex-positive slogans. For the most part, people aren’t thinking of asexuals period. I appreciate the value of a snappy slogan, but we can’t pretend that the right slogan only ever has positive consequences.
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I pedantically feel the need to point out that cobras are not, in fact, poisonous, and you can eat as many of them as you want with no ill effects (even drink their venom directly, providing you have no cuts or ulcers). They are, however, venomous.
Poison is when you try to eat it, venom is when it tries to eat you (or, more specifically, poisons are primarily for defense, while venoms are primarily for prey acquisition, though each may play secondary roles).
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Ooh, this a surprisingly good analysis, I must say. Great insight.
… of course, “yay sex” and “boo sex” could be argued to refer to political coalitions, in which case they do kind of seem to be correct in some sense.
>But I think reality works something like this:
Your second diagram is really, really unbalanced. It kind of seems like you’re helpfully dividing politics-space into two “halves” – the small subset of liberalism you agree with, and literally everything else ever.
However! I think this may just be a problem with the diagram.
NAMBLA, for instance, are clearly on the “sexual freedom” end; as is the Gay Pride movement (which aren’t actually part of feminism), and … hmm, maybe the whole Mormon polygamist thing – oh! Would you consider polyamory or the old “free love” movement to be part of feminism? They might count.
(Also, literally every “side” in arguments about rape counts, except the affirmative-consent-laws side, which I think counts as “sexual constraint”.)
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Hi Ozy,
I’m unironically a fundamentalist no-sex-before-marriage Christian who believes it’s immoral to deny your partner sex. I read your blog and Scott’s but don’t normally post in the comments because I’m not looking for an argument.
Anyway I’m just coming out of the woodwork to say thanks for putting the effort in to accurately understand and represent the views of people like me, even if you find them horrifying. Sort of a low bar to clear but it so rarely is.
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Hey Nathan,
I’m curious about your ‘immoral to deny your partner sex’ belief. Are you saying that you shouldn’t deny your partner sex over an extended period of time, or are you saying that you should immediately consent every time that your partner wants sex?
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More or less the latter. Essentially, I am the only legitimate avenue my wife has to sexual release – porn or finding another sex partner are not acceptable alternatives from my point of view. So I have a responsibility to take care of her sexual needs myself, and vice versa.
That’s not to say that the moment one of us gets a tingle sex must always result – as always honest communication is important and it can easily be a situation that goes:
“Wanna bang?”
“Eh… Not really.”
“Ok never mind then”
But as I’m sure most people have experienced there are times when you kinda want to get laid and there are times when you really *really* want to get laid. And if your spouse is feeling like that, absolutely, you should suck it up and take one for the team.
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