After the orgy comes the catfight

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Fellow Substacker Default Friend and a person who goes by Personality Girl have a new podcast, After the Orgy. For reasons that are obvious to even short-time readers of Sex and the State, I generally avoid things that describe themselves as “neo prude.”

But Default and Personality referred to me obliquely in episode 2, but with enough specificity that a friend of mine was like, “You’re mentioned in this podcast.” And I’m enough of a narcissist and obsessed enough with trads that I gave that episode a listen.

I mean, yes, trads get most things exactly backwards. But they do get a few things right that most people miss. More importantly, they interrogate interesting, important topics most people aren’t willing to.

As for the episode, it’s a little bit painful to hear people who seem quite disconnected from and unaware of the research around sex talk about it at length. I’m no expert, but I know enough to be like… we’ve discussed this. At length. You just weren’t in class that day.

For example, one of them said “I want sex to feel a little bit wrong.” Like, yes. Of course you do. The category “taboo” is one of Americans’ top-five top sexual fantasies.

Or the statement “I don’t think you need affirmative consent for anal sex.”

*stares in consent culture and Irritable Bowel Syndrome*

Standards for consent can absolutely differ for repeat partners. And I, personally, think blanket consent is absolutely legitimate. If your explicit agreement with your partner is they can stick anything in your butt with no warning, I’m happy for and am frankly jealous of your accommodating butt.

But if anyone puts anything in my butt without asking, that’s anal rape. And I think that goes for enough people that it’s the correct default assumption.

The hosts also posited that no one is willing to examine how trauma informs kinks, which is frankly ludicrous. Last year Dr. Justin Lehmiller had a sex therapist on his (great) podcast discussing how some people use race play to work through their trauma around racism. Same goes for people who’ve experienced sexual consent violations. They will often work through that trauma using consensual non-consent play (CNC).

It can be incredibly empowering to replicate a situation in which you had no power in a safe environment in which you are ultimately in control.

The casual slut-shaming was also tiresome. I’m not a fan of people referring to their number of sexual partners as their “body count.” It’s dehumanizing, sex-negative, shame-y, and just kind of weird. (Side note, it also seems unlikely that someone who uses the term non-ironically is much fun in bed.) It’s especially galling when, in the same episode, the hosts accused sex-positive feminism of being “dehumanizing.”

Then there was the totally unsubstantiated claim that shaming is helpful. As we’ve discussed, the empirical evidence says otherwise. I also took issue with the claim that there’s “probably something deleterious” about having 50+ sex partners. I do not appreciate the implication that a "high body count" indicates pathology.

The entire concept of promiscuity is subjective. It just means “has more sex partners than me.” The entire idea that there's a "right" number of people to have sex with is dumb and harmful.

Now, I do believe it's true that sometimes mental illness will coincide with having more sex partners. For example, as far as I know, kids who have more adverse childhood experience (ACES) do generally have sex for the first time at younger ages and do have more partners over their lifetimes. However, there's still nothing inherently wrong with or harmful about having more or fewer sex partners. First, correlation is not causation. Second, even if the two correlate to some small extent, they do not correlate so strongly that it’s safe to assume that someone with a certain number of sexual partners is more or less likely to be mentally unwell. However, this is an empirical question and I’m happy to be corrected if someone has good data.

But the part that really upset me was the accusation that people who have experienced purity culture firsthand are unqualified to talk about sexual shame and stigma.

I would take these statements personally no matter what, because they apply perfectly to me. I grew up in Evangelical Christian purity culture. I openly and forcefully critique purity culture in particular and sex-negativity in general. I also have had a higher-than-average number of sexual partners, which I am also very open about.

Am I going to claim to be objective on purity culture or slut-shaming? I’m not going to claim to be objective about anything, because I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be objective about anything they have any emotional investment in. So if you want an “unbiased” opinion about these topics, yeah, go elsewhere. And good luck, frankly. But if you want an opinion from someone who knows the culture well, fully bought into it for many years, and then decided through a combination of research and life experiences to leave it, well honey, you’ve come to the right place. Pull up a chair. I’ll get you a whiskey.

So this is going to be personal for me regardless. But the fact that Default and/or Personality so clearly alluded to me during this portion of the discussion certainly made it feel more personal.

And, talking to DF later, she admitted to doing the thing where she made me a stand-in for an entire culture that stands in opposition to purity culture. Which she says they do not endorse. And that’s fine. We all do that sometimes.

My very mildly hurt feelings aside, I want to point out that while there's solid evidence that purity culture victimizes everyone, I obviously very strongly believe that the people who have experienced it most acutely are the most qualified to critique it. We are exactly the people who should be talking about it and who society needs to be hearing from.

All that aside, we’re all still learning. And doing it in public is a public service, in my opinion (obviously, as that’s literally what this blog is).

They’ve invited me to be a guest on the podcast. If they still want me after this review and my Twitter comments, I’ll go on. I love to talk about this shit. And who doesn’t love a little drama?

As even casual readers of Sex and the State should know, if I love anything, it’s a good fight.