Dec 20 2016
(unedited brain dump for a piece i want to write maybe) (not sure i agree with all this or have the language/feelings worked out entirely) (putting it here in case anyone has thoughts) (email me at jamiekeiles@gmail.com if you want to talk about this)
on twitter i’ve been portending the arrival of a sex negativity moment (i’m not the only one!) so i just thought i’d jot down some thoughts here.
first i guess what i have to say is that yes, there is a branch of sex positivity that focuses on sex education (adult and teen), or sex and disability, or fixing other systemic problems with the way we talk about sex, but the vast majority of sex positive discourse that enters the mainstream is stuff like slutwalk (i organized chicago slutwalk in 2011, ugh) or stuff about cis women ~exploring their bodies~ or being able to wear halter tops to high school or whatever.
i guess my sex negativity feelings (maybe it would be better called sex skepticism?) are grounded in feeling wary about the capacity for such enthusiasm about casual heterosexual sex to ever feel good in our current reality for anyone who isn’t a cis man. i’ve done a good deal of fieldwork on the subject (i.e. had a fair amount of casual heterosexual sex), and honestly…. casual sex sucks for women?
like there are individual great encounters, but for the most part, the young men that the young women are empowered to sleep with are shitty ungiving lovers with bad communication skills. for all that we’ve done to empower women to feel (or maybe more often (?) perform) enthusiastic and unashamed attitudes about sex, we’ve done very little to move the needle on the way men behave in bed or afterward. maybe there are millennial women that are consistently having enjoyable casual sex with millennial men, but i’ve never met one? for every great encounter the women i know are having there is some greater number of emotionally or physically shitty encounters. i’m not referring to rape or anything traumatic… just unenjoyable or annoying sex or post-sex scenarios
this is not to say that women shouldn’t enjoy sexuality, or flirting, or an active erotic life, or sex when we want it, but i think we are over-promising what casual sex can deliver in terms of enjoyment (in 2016), and then passing the burden of sex positivity on to women. now that we are “allowed” to be having casual sex (which we aren’t really… there are still massive double standards) there is an imperative that we are supposed to be constantly seeking it out in order to be enjoying ourselves maximally. (constantly pursuing sex (or anything) comes at the expense of pursuing something else…)
every woman i know (this is anecdotal, w/e) has accepted sex in less than ideal scenarios under the logic that it’s inherently good and fun to have sex, becasue sex is not bad or dirty. if anything, it’s neutral to have sex. good sex is good, but all the other sex is sometimes a hassle, because women are expected to manage all the fallout around it. we exist in a sexual economy where we must constantly police whether or not we are coming on too strong, or not strong enough, or seeming desperate, or transgressing some rule we don’t know about.
obviously the past was worse in a lot of ways, but what it did have was clearer expectations about how people were supposed to behave in hetero sex scenarios. (i’m not saying these were good expectations, just clear ones) in the present sexual economy, men behave the same as they did in past generations, and women have all this new added labor of negotiating indeterminacy. what a drag….
increasingly, my own interactions with “sex positivity” have just felt like a weird new capitalist anxiety where i get to have (usually bad) sex, but i also have to perform all this irritating labor around the sex while men just reap the benefits of more sex.
i don’t think this is something that was maliciously engineered by men or anything. i think this is a paradigm that corporations have had a clear cut advantage in perpetuating in order to sell more things that “help” us perform a constrained ideal of laid back “modern” feminine sexuality
(will write more note on this in the future, i have a lot more to say)
