If you can stand the whorephobia, transphobia, and sex negativity, I recommend reading Sheila Jeffreys’s The Spinster and Her Enemies, a history of early sex-positivity from 1880 to 1930. What this book makes clear is that in our culture sex-positivity has a distressing tendency to collapse into compulsory sexuality.
What happens in a lot of cases is something like this: in conventional patriarchal culture, there are people women are supposed to fuck (their husbands) and people women are not supposed to fuck (everyone else). There is a socially legitimate reason for a woman to say ‘no’ to sex to anyone who isn’t her husband. And while there might not be much concept that women can say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands (remember that marital rape only became illegal in every US state in the nineties), most husbands are not rapists, genuinely love and care about their partners, and have no desire to have sex with their wife when she doesn’t want sex. While this is a terrible system in a lot of respects, it did reduce the harm of compulsory sexuality for many women.
Unfortunately, in this system, the natural way to do sex-positivity is to expand the set of people women are supposed to fuck. It is limiting to only have one person you’re supposed to fuck! Now you are supposed to fuck all your friends, or all the people in this intentional community, or everyone! Isn’t that great? We’re helping!
And, of course, if you’re supposed to have sex with a lot more people, then you’re much more likely to have sex with a rapist, or with someone who grew up in a culture that doesn’t give a shit about consent and who doesn’t have any reason to care about your emotional well-being. You’re a stranger, after all.
The worst excesses of the free love movement in the sixties birthed radical feminism, which instituted the rule that sex that one person involved did not want is rape. Most alternative sexuality communities seem to work under a similar rule today. This is a serious improvement, which I am not going to criticize.
However, I worry that a lot of alternative sexuality culture lends itself well to compulsory sexuality in more subtle ways. A lot of rationalist parties have cuddle piles at them. So what happens if you don’t like cuddle piles? Well, you can sort of awkwardly sit near the cuddle pile, trying to talk with people there, or you can join the cuddle pile, or you can just accept that you are not going to get to talk with the people in the cuddle pile this party. None of those are really satisfactory; all are alienating.
Another example: I tend to have sex with my friends; hookups are a common part of early-stage friendship for me. Now, of course, I would never exclude someone from being my friend just because they don’t want to have sex with me. But there’s the implied expectation, the knowledge that everyone else is doing it– and it is probably true that, all things equal, being willing to have sex with me makes me more likely to be your friend than not being willing to have sex with me does.
Or think about the sex-positive slogans. “Sex is nice and pleasure is good for you!” Can’t you just hear someone saying “come on, sex is nice, everyone likes sex, why are you saying no?” And there’s this lovely quote from the Ethical Slut, where a hippie girl says “I believe it’s okay to have sex with people you love, and I believe in loving everybody.” And I relate to that quote, and I like it, but part of me just imagines someone thinking: So why am I not willing to have casual sex? Does that mean I don’t love everybody?
But this is a problem that’s hard to fix. The only way to completely fix the cuddle pile problem is to not have cuddle piles. But you can’t fix “some people are coerced into doing Thing” by saying “no more Thing!”– that’s as much of a violation of autonomy as the thing you were trying to fix in the first place. The ideal is that people do things they want to and don’t do things they don’t.
One might say that this only seems like a problem in alternative sexuality communities because our communities are marked, not normal. A tacit expectation that people fuck their friends is exactly as much of a problem as a tacit expectation that people fuck on the third date– it’s just that we think of the former case as a Weird Sex Thing and the latter case as normality. I think that’s part of it, but compulsory sexuality in altsex communities is still a concern. Mainstream sexual norms evolved because most people were basically okay with them: most people don’t have a huge problem with third-date sex and never having anal. Of course, “people do things they want, don’t do things they don’t want” is an improvement on “people do things most people want, don’t do things most people don’t want”– but they’re both an improvement on “everyone does what the most extreme people want.”
How can we fix this problem? I think part of the solution is just talking about it and trying to be aware of the pressures in our communities and the way that they make some people feel unwelcome. Another part is to explicitly work on including not just the sluts but the prudes in sex positivity– not just the people who want sex more or in different ways than society approves of, but the people who want sex less or don’t like some of the socially accepted kinds of sex. (Not, of course, that these are mutually exclusive.) And I do wonder if there are any simple changes we could make in communities dominated by kinky, poly, slutty, cuddle-prone etc. people to make them more welcoming to vanilla, asexual, monogamous, low-libido, not-in-favor-of-cuddling-strangers etc. people, without sacrificing our own needs and values. Does anyone have ideas?
It has taken me a while to get used to the idea of cuddle piles, and I still haven’t figured out the method for asking to join them, despite being very in favor in principle and this being a community that understands social problems.
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The usual solution to this kind of thing is “see what everyone else is doing, then copy them”. I don’t know if you actually have to say anything at all before you join the cuddle pile…
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That doesn’t apply here. It is fairly common for an existing community to have standing agreements about cuddling that new arrivers are not party to, and acting as if you are will not go over well.
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If it’s a big pile, “Do you still have some room?” works well. If there are fewer people, I haven’t figured out the best way myself. People seem to ask 1-on-1 for specific actions. (“Do you want to spoon me?”, “Can I caress your back?”)
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I don’t have any solutions, but thank you for raising the question.
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I have no solutions, apart from “Let ‘I don’t want sex/not that kind of sex’ be an acceptable option for people”. It’s a problem in wider society, but if someone/a group/a movement has made “expressing my/our sexuality freely, even unconventional sex, even controversial sex” a large part of the identity of that person or grouping, then someone who’s “meh” about sex can be perceived as threatening.
Because if that person can do perfectly fine without sex, why can’t you? (goes the social narrative scolding the unconventional person). I think it’s perceived as judgemental – I’ve seen plenty of “how dare you tell me not to have sex/that I’m a slut/sex is dirty” when the topic of not having sex in the ‘liberated’ manner is discussed – and that triggers a defensive reaction.
Even if the person saying “I don’t want sex” means nothing more than “I don’t want sex, you do what your thing is”.
Unless asexuality/aromanticism/hey I’m vanilla and I see no problem with that is accepted as “an alternative view of sexuality” and welcomed, then there is not going to be the concepts available for people to identify what they’re experiencing, much less have it become part of the mainstream. And alternative sexuality culture seems like the ideal place to have those discussions and raise that awareness. If not there, then where else? It sure as hell isn’t going to happen in sex ed classes in school where they’re more concerned about preventing STIs, teenage pregnancy, and teaching kids about not using gay slurs than “but if you don’t want to have sex, ever at all in your life, that’s perfectly fine and you don’t need a pill or therapy to fix you”*.
(I also think alterative sexuality communities are a leeetle bit puffed-up about how non-straight/non-vanilla they are, which while understandable – if you’re getting represented as deviant decadents and perverts in the mainstream, you need some way of propping up your self-esteem – certainly doesn’t help with the ‘but you don’t have to ‘have sex like a man’ to be a good feminist’ angle).
*I may be slightly pissed-off here because I’m mumble-mumble years of age and had no vocabulary or concept of what I felt – or more relevantly, what I didn’t feel – until a few years back when I got onto Tumblr and stumbled across people talking about ‘asexuality’. What that? Did some Googling, had my “Well, duh!” moment of revelation about “Hey, that could be me!” and then aromanticism which was “Hey, that is definitely me!”
All I’d seen in mainstream converse about the topic was “women not having/desiring sex is down to (1) frigidity which is a medical problem that can be fixed (2) hey you can throw off the shackles of the patriarchy and claim your independence by losing your sexual repression, indeed being a good feminist includes taking on the male model of casual sexual encounters with no strings attached!” which were no damn help with “I don’t want love and marriage and sex and I don’t think there’s something wrong with me for that, despite what you are all saying”.
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There is a more general problem of the problem you identified, Misefeargach. People tend to have the perspective of “a person must think everyone should have the same actions, behaviors, thoughts, beliefs, feelings, whatever that they themselves have.”
There are two ways, one can have this perspective: One can think that everyone would be better off if they do, say, think, etc. the same things one does. One can also think that someone doing, saying, thinking, etc. something different then oneself, the other is criticizing oneself. As an example: “that person doesn’t eat beef therefore, since I eat beef, that person is thinks that I’m a heartless monster.” The other person may think this or they may simply not like the taste of beef or something else.
Needless to say this attitude is wrong and damaging. The behaviors ect. that are best for one person may not be best for a different person. It is a common attitude in US culture including most if not all of its subcultures. I don’t know if the attitude is cultural or instinctual. It is this attitude (both in oneself and in others) that leads to the problems discussed in the post and in this comment. As long as this underlying problem specific problems will persist (but there is a choice of what the specific problems are and their severity).
If the underlying problem is instinctual then it will exist as long as our species exists and if it is cultural then making a change is almost as hard. I’m aware of the problem and try to avoid the attitude myself in both manifestations. I have been stung by it never the less and I am sometimes surprised when someone else uses this attitude with respect to me. When I encounter this attitude I may (dependent on the situation, of course) try to point out the flaw in a positive, respectful manner. This won’t solve the problem but it makes things better for me.
I should point out that while people may ask you to tell them what you think they need to hear (and not what they want to hear) and even thank you when you do so, forming a habit out of this leads people not to want to talk with you in favor of people who do the opposite. This isn’t a problem when dealing with the minority of people who want to be challenged but take my advice here with a huge grain of salt.
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Isn’t this the whole point of having multiple communities in the first place? If you want to hang out in a community where sleeping with your friends is normal, there are places you can go for that. If you want to hang out in a community where religious chastity is normal, there are places you can go for that too. But not every community needs to be welcoming to everyone–in fact, an implicit requirement that every community welcome everyone effectively prohibits the existence of communities at all.
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The problem is that neither communities nor people are single purpose. The rationalist community that Ozy is part of also happens to be a cuddle-pile community, but for many of its members it is primarily a space for being rationalist. That it is also a cuddle-pile community is great for some people and terrible for others, especially those who don’t want to cuddle but do want a rationality space and don’t have an alternative.
The problem, I think, is that you wind up needing vastly more communities than you have people to sustain them.
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Another problem I failed to mention: a person may want to see someone else (or multiple someones) but find that they are only available in the context of a community that doesn’t work for the first person.
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If you have unusual preferences, you’re going to have a harder time finding people with the same preferences you do. If there are so many people who want to talk about timeless decision theory and play Dungeons and Discourse without cuddling, I don’t see why they can’t have their own (maybe partially overlapping) scene.
It is true that this solution is not perfect and some people will probably have to bite some bullets, but this does not strike me as a fatal objection given that the alternative is essentially “everybody is exactly the way I want them to be.” In any case, the problems of bullet-biting can be mitigated by cultivating membership in multiple communities, and I speak from personal experience here.
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I don’t think that’s the only alternative, though. Speaking from experience, I would have greatly preferred “maybe we don’t have to be this version of this community all the damn time” even before I found it necessary to leave the community in question. For non-central characteristics of a community, this can work very well and allow different groups with slightly different norms to mingle a bit while still remaining distinct.
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Especially for people who, like me, *don’t want to spend all their time in one community, doing one thing.
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I’m tempted to suggest Bujold’s-Beta-Colony-style earrings or other such visible display of sexual attitudes as something that could reduce this kind of friction (/me resists using the word “lubricant”. And fails.)…
…buut I really don’t want to live through the two or three generations it would take for them to become unremarkable. For example:
it would be ideal if we could skip the stage where some of the identifiers become de facto codes for “I am a good potential target for a hate crime”…
…and the inevitable meme-based humiliation of low-status “neckbeard” types who early-adopt the “straight dude looking for casual sex” identifier with heartbreaking earnestness…
…and if we could adopt the majority-honest self-identification-through-earrings described in A Civil Campaign without the creepy Betan top-down-social-engineering vibe…
…and if we could use something other than earrings, ’cause they’re really not my thing.
Other than that, I can’t see anything wrong with the idea!
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How about something like a driver’s license that you keep in your wallet or whatever? That way you don’t have to show it to everyone all the time.
Also, we already have wedding rings. 😉
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Huh? What? … /me looks up from the haze of tasteful-status-indicating-jewelry designing he’d drifted off into.
Ideally I feel like you’d want a middle ground: something you can hide if a situation looks particularly iffy, but that you probably show by default, so you don’t have to remember to flash your “don’t-cuddle-me” badge to defuse awkwardness or whatever.
So we’re one however-many-statuses-we-finally-decide-there-are-th of the way there!
Incidentally, in case anyone cares: I was toying with the idea of something with a spider motif, ’cause my own status is definitely “more afraid of you than you are of me!”
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Necklaces, maybe? Easily slipped into a shirt, no piercings required.
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Another problem is the threat of moral panic; this bears a striking resemblance to the idea that The Teens were wearing bracelets that signalled which sex acts they were available for, which caused several moral panics even without anyone actually doing it. “This signals which kind of stuff you’re comfortable with” is easily mutated to “this signals I will sleep with anyone who satisfies these criteria, this is The Hot New Craze.”
On the other hand, there’s some hope. I think several of these problems could be avoided if it initially focused on nonstandard sexualities; signals of various nonstandard sexualities have been a thing before, if not always consistently used.
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Ludicrous moral panocs over things that would have been positive had they existed, partial list.
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My kingdom for an edit button! (That should be panic, above, obviously)
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There’s something worth digging into about the compulsory aspect.
I know there are people who go to play parties and don’t play. They seem reasonably comfortable with this. Certainly comfortable enough to keep doing it.
I think there can be good conversations where some members are in a cuddle-pile and some aren’t.
Welcoming but not pressuring can be a thing.
I’m not sure exactly how to do it. Maybe someone who’s better at this stuff can fill in some details. Though I’m reminded of Brienne’s observation that she could solve cognitive problems just by noticing them. So simple solution: set up a trigger on “early interaction while cuddling with a non-cuddler” and let the action just be “throw an alert that the strategic-brain must catch”.
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This is unfortunately the same problem as “of course you don’t have to drink! Plenty of people in our group don’t!” which makes me pessimistic about how much progress we can make. If a noticeable percentage of group activities are centered around X it’s hard for there not to be pressure to do X, and I doubt any of us want to give u our cuddle puddles and link parties.
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*Puts on TERF hat.* There are a lot of gynephiles who don’t feel comfortable fucking trans women. How are we going to make sure discussions about the “cotton ceiling” don’t pressure them into fucking trans women?
I suspect that gynephiles would be more willing to fuck trans women if our culture weren’t so transphobic (the way men became more willing to marry sluts once slut shaming was discouraged.) Nonetheless, a lot of transgender women have deep voices that turn disgust gynephiles. And besides, people have the right to refuse any sex they’re uncomfortable with, even if the discomfort comes from bigotry.
As a trans women, it is very painful to be rejected by straight men and gay women but I feel like there needs to be a way to express my pain without pressuring people into fucking me.
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The classical solution to this is to differentiate between coercion, which is wrongful, and the de minimus social pressures that inherently exist in a world where everybody wants different things from each other.
That’s actually a big part of why sex with minors is considered illegitimate, for the record and to connect this to a past thread. Adults are presumed to have the personal fortitude to understand and rationally pursue their own interests in a world where social pressure exists. Children are not.
Of course a big part of the feminist critique of sexual consent is an attack on the idea that women can do that, so, I dunno. I never found those arguments compelling but that’s what’s at issue.
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I’d say that the rules against coercion are to keep things from getring awful, but figuring out how to get good modulation of social pressure is working to make things good.
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Sadly, that seems to be the default way of addressing the problem of coercion, see: niqabs in France, maiden names in France, Greece, and Netherlands, prostitution in most countries, emancipation of minors in most developed countries, the anti-makeup-and-heels discourse, large parts of radical queer discourse, etc. Heck, the compulsory alt-sexuality thing is itself this kind of overreaction to the fact that some people are coerced into abstaining from the sex they want. This makes me kinda pessimistic about the perspectives of addressing the problem in question without falling into this trap again.
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“The worst excesses of the free love movement in the sixties birthed radical feminism, which instituted the rule that sex that one person involved did not want is rape.”
You’re kidding right? On the main thing – that’s not a problem, it’s life.
If all people I like like Basketball and spend a lot of time watching Basketball, and for some reason I don’t like Basketball, then it’s on me to either watch Basketball with them or be soooo awesome they prefer to take up my offer and not watch Basketball and spend time with me reading poetry instead.
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If you are part of a mainstream culture that promotes compulsory pair-bonded basketball watching, and join a free basketball movement that purports to be about free association in basketball-watching but actually pressures you into compulsory multi-partner basketball-watching, you very well may feel betrayed.
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Why are life and problems mutually exclusive categories?
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(Autobiography: I recently got out of a marriage with lots of compulsory sexuality… which I still feel tempted to call an “otherwise good” marriage, but otherwise how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? I’m now hanging out at kink munches, and people there have been brilliant about consent. They ask for my pronouns, they ask whether I want to be hugged, and I’ve been planning some new sexytime activities with people who send me long emails full of what is apparently called “negotiflirtation”.)
I think there’s no substitute for practicing refusal: giving a lot of clear refusals, politely accepting clear refusals, and modeling refusal alongside consent for people who are new to the community. Saying “no” has to be a normal thing alongside saying yes. This means that alt-sex communities need to make refusal a normal and expected thing, by having older members model it in front of newer members, and talk about it explicitly with newer members. They also need to strongly police against defensive responses to refusal: take “no” gracefully or get thrown out of the party.
With the cuddle piles, maybe just have the parties include a cuddle room and a no-cuddle room? Some of my friends might be busy in the cuddle room when I don’t want cuddles, but who said my friends were supposed to be available 24/7?
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There’s a difference between social pressure to do something you don’t want and feeling like you have to do something in order to participate in your subculture or friend group. The former consists of doing things like others thinking poorly of you if you don’t do what they want, maybe insulting you, and so on. The latter is just a conflict between your general desire to participate in a particular group and your aversion to some of its (otherwise neutral) norms. While the former is obviously bad, it’s not clear that the latter is – groups of people have ways of interacting that are enjoyable for them, and if you don’t like it, it’s up to you whether it’s better for you to leave or bear with it.
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Haver a mandatory 15 minute cuddle-break on the hour?
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Good post and good comments thread.
One thing my partner thought was important, is that for complete prudes navigating these situations isn’t so bad. Most good willed people respect such a clear and absolute boundary. But for people who like some cuddling, or some levels of sexuality (but are pretty uncomfortable with any more), not getting roped into the default-level-of-the-plurality’s-comfort is much, much harder.
Your friend who doesn’t want anyone touching him, seriously no touching ever, suffers less thoughtless pressure than your one friend who actually would like a backrub but that’s it nothing else.
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Society in general has the attitude that ‘sex is fun and natural and a necessary part of adult humans, if you claim not to want it you’re lying or repressed’. I’m sex positive, as in I think people should be free to do whatever consensual thing they want. But I’d also emphasize freedom to not do things – and to not want to do things without being labelled ‘prude’ or ‘repressed’.
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Altsex cultures, not to be confused with alt.sex.culture
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How about randomisation, as in the US army drug use surveys? I propose a Sex Dice system.
Pick a frequency with which you’re obliged to decline sex you want, then carry an appropriate die. (Or several dice, if your sex preferences differ greatly from day to day.) When someone propositions you, if you aren’t wildly enthusiastic about the proposed sex, you roll the die. If it comes up on one of a pre-chosen set of numbers, you are *obliged* to say no. (This is important.)
Your Refusal Set is a secret and nobody else is to look at the number you rolled. This gives a complete excuse to decline sex whenever you want without explanation, and makes it obvious that you’re upholding a valuable community norm while doing so, so nobody can pressure you to ignore the die roll. The cost of random refusals can be calibrated for your preferences (and help you discover your preferences!) and never blocks sex you’re highly enthusiastic about.
Example: Alice wants to have sex with Bob. Bob rolls a d12 and gets a 4. He normally refuses on {5, 7}, but right now he’s feeling cross with Alice about some triviality he doesn’t want to discuss, so he shakes his head ruefully and they shift easily to a new topic.
Example: Charles really likes sex! He doesn’t ever want to be forced to say no. He picks the null set, but to hide this fact, he also uses a d100. He still benefits from the ability to say no without justification, his use of the die-roll system strengthens the community norm, and he pays no price beyond feeling a little awkward the first few times he rolls.
Example: Diane asks Elaine for sex. Elaine isn’t sure about she feels about lesbian sex, so she rolls a d10, gets a 1 and is obliged to refuse, because 1 is in {1, 2, 3}. She realises that she’s more upset than she expected about this and resolves to consent without rolling next time Diane asks – but she can’t ignore the outcome this time!
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This seems very similar to the problem of people who don’t drink, or don’t drink much, belonging to clubs where all the meetings are happy hours. Sure, you can sip a Coke at the bar but many people find that awkward.
The standard solution is to diversify the meetings: set a ratio of one alcohol-free event for every two happy hours, or some such. In my experience the non-drinkers are eager to step forward and organize the dry events. As long as all the Big Important Decisions aren’t taken at happy hours and there’s a healthy frequency, non-drinkers can happily experience a group with zero pressure to drink, that happens to meet 1/3 as often as the group as a whole.
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