Against Sex Positivity: A First Draft Of A Likely Shitstorm
My life is one ordered almost entirely under a regime of “sex positivity,” and it is still a life lived under patriarchy. The sex positive has failed in its mission, because of its fundamental failure to implicate the deepest structures of patriarchy. It was smart to negate the sexuality pushed by some feminists – to fuck as if separatism can truly ever be enacted. It seems almost obvious by now that sex work and sex trade and pornography should not be especially stigmatized and that slut shaming is no radical option. But patriarchal relations keep happening, among the most “sex positive” no less than anyone else. I find myself in a position similar to many 70s feminists; just as free love was a lie, sex positivity is a lie.
I have been a part of so many accountability processes that have desperately sought to leave the world of identity politics, of “oppressor raped/assaulted/bad fucked oppressed person,” and because of the deep taboo against “going there” could not implicate the structure of sex itself. The specter of “positive sexuality” remained and the discourse remained stuck in a moral/political imperative to purge “negative sexuality.”
Amongst radicals, queers no less than anarchy-bros, there remains the deeply held belief that I am “naturally” going to have sex, and as such am available to have sex. I am valorized because I am beautiful, because I am young, because I am white, because I am kinky, because I am promiscuous. Because I am pretty and I fuck, I either have value there for the taking, am expected to “enjoy” another’s value, or am expected to switch between the two roles. Likewise, those bodies seen as unwanted or unavailable are systematically excluded and shit talked.
I am surrounded by the gaping holes of sex positivity and as such, where a certain remnant of “positivity” is not useful, seek to abandon it in its entirety, and in doing so must abandon any attachment to sex as something good.
“We condemn even the most consensual sex for being the gendered event
it is. Regardless of how seductive each little object might be, our focus
remains the narrative, the totality of social relations: constitutive lack.”
Letters to Chris Kraus: Kiss Me, Fuck Me, Or Rape Me
…
I see no hope in simply expanding what is “beautiful.” Thus far it has only allowed for a more diffuse mechanism of “beauty,” definitions expanded just far enough to get us to reproduce its logic, make us feel we have a stake, but never enough to undermine the mechanisms of exclusion. And it never will. “Beauty” is meaningless without the ugly; the good must express itself onto the evil in order to be legible. A world in which everyone is beautiful is a world where everybody is their own boss. Which is to say, in which everyone is a worker, with their exploitation managed only by a social relation.
Reblogging mostly because this post hit me hard. I don’t know how much I agree with it; there are some weird essentialist notions. It’s painful to see an attack on something that I take for granted; I constantly critique problematic, heteronormative, cissexist, sex-as-commodity models of sexuality, yet I never question that more positive, egalitarian, explorative fun sex is what I should be striving for.
So again; in a sense, I’m posting this because I don’t agree with it, but I was intrigued to hear the perspective.
That last paragraph is the one I feel the most affinity with; I am seeing more and more that “alternative” depictions of bodies are systematically co-opted under the guise of inclusion, but only at the demands of the market, only to sell more. It seems like rather than (or alongside) controlling the masses through vitriol masquerading as helpfulness, the new (or simply retooled) strategy is to increase the scope of bodies that can be airbrushed, stamped, branded, and thus owned anew.
