Sex-positive feminism isn't constantly shoving sex in unwilling people’s faces

Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. To support my work toward decriminalizing and destigmatizing everything sex please buy a subscription, follow me on OnlyFans, or just share this post!

~~~~~

I feel like we can all agree that we, as a culture, are super weird about sex. On the one hand, sex is absolutely everywhere, including places it doesn’t seem like it would fit. Like it’s kind of odd that for a minute it was common practice for companies to hire lingerie models to explain their IT software at trade shows.

But then sex isn’t in the places you’d expect it to be. Like the online platform dedicated to making it easy to share and look at pictures of beautiful people and places which will delete your account if you show a nipple.

There are lots of perfectly legitimate reasons a person might have for not wanting to be inundated with sexual content and messaging. Perhaps they are a surviver of sexual trauma or abuse. Maybe they’re asexual and bored by it.

Many people seem to believe sex-positive feminism promotes constantly shoving sex in unwilling people’s faces.

The first thing wrong with this idea is that it ignores consent. Sex-positive feminism differentiates sex from rape via consent. Sex-positive feminism does not promote non-consensual sexual behavior of any kind.

It’s also confusing sex-positive feminism for the idea that sex is inherently good or healthy. It’s not like sex-positive feminists think booth babes making boring trade shows better. I mean, I personally would prefer more lingerie models pretty much everywhere I am. But that’s because I like lingerie models. It’s not because I think booth babes are objectively or inherently good. I also don’t think booth babes are objectively or inherently bad. Sex-positive feminism holds that sex (and booth babes) are inherently morally neutral.

Now, as we’ve previously discussed, consent is a spectrum, not a binary. One big tension in sex-positive feminism is the desire to not violate anyone’s consent around sex while at the same time holding that sex is inherently morally neutral.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I was extremely triggered by tomatoes. Any drawing, mention, video, or photo of a tomato just absolutely wrecked me for days emotionally.

What lengths should I expect the rest of the world to go to in order to protect me from getting triggered? Probably none, since the cost to everyone would be much greater in total than the benefit to me.

So why do we go to such extreme lengths to protect people from accidentally encountering a drawing, mention, video, or photo of sex?

As far as I can tell, we put sex in a special category for two reasons. First, because there are way more people who get triggered by sex than by tomatoes. And second, because we think sex is inherently morally different from tomatoes.

But sex isn’t inherently morally different from tomatoes. Many people ascribe more moral weight to sex than tomatoes. And many people do not. The ones who do are not more correct than the ones who don’t.

So we’re stuck in a shitty catch-22. If we don’t show sex it stays hidden and continues to trigger people. And going to great lengths to censor sex creates all kinds of negative ramifications. If we could talk openly about and show sex accurately people would have so much better information and less useless shame around sex. For instance, men wouldn’t freak out about their penises and women wouldn’t be ashamed of their vulvas if everyone knew what average adult genitals looked like. Americans wouldn’t be so shockingly ignorant about sex and reproduction if we could talk frankly about sex online without fear of censure.

But if we show sex, thereby normalizing and destigmatizing it, we violate some people’s consent.

Ultimately, I would like to see society move toward normalizing and destigmatizing sex. I’m not saying we should foist BDSM porn on everyone immediately. But I do think we should make it easier for individual users to filter out sexual content rather than relying on platforms to perform blanket censorship. And we certainly should not bring back obscenity prosecutions as some are trying to do.

There are always going to be people who really do not want to encounter sexual material and they should be given tools to help them avoid it. But for everyone else, I think pushing sexual material into the shadows only harms us on net.