Sexual freedom is safety
If you learn nothing else from me, know this.
Restricting sexuality does not prevent violence.
Sexual coercion, at best, facilitates abuse. Often, it is abuse.
Full stop. There are no exceptions. There is no nuance.
Legal, cultural, and social restrictions on sex put everyone – except abusers – in greater danger.
I just read that the Trump administration has put pressure on Romanian authorities to allow Andrew Tate to travel. Tate currently faces criminal charges, including sexual misconduct and human trafficking, in Bucharest.
President Trump, if you’ll remember, is a rapist who bragged about getting away with sexual assault.
Also, Andrew Heaton just had me on his podcast. You can watch the video here:
Heaton is a well-read, smart, feminist guy. Even he did not know that sexual permissiveness correlates strongly with low rates of violence against women.
Plus, I just ran across the name Louise Perry again. I read her turd of a book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, with the Feminists for Liberty book club last year (or the year before, I forget). In it, she argues that the sexual revolution put women and girls in greater danger.
First of all, the sexual revolution ushered in greater permissiveness in laws and norms for women and sexual minorities. But it did not actually change behavior very much. Premarital and extramarital sex was very common before the invention and widespread adoption of oral contraceptives. And today, if anything, the average American has less sex and fewer partners than our parents and grandparents at the height of the tumult in the 60s and 70s. So the first reason it’s literally impossible to definitively say that “casual” sex or “promiscuity” puts women in greater danger is that the average American woman isn’t having any more “casual” sex becoming any more “promiscuous” than her mother or grandmother did.
The second reason I know Perry is full of shit is that rates of violence against women (and men) are WAY DOWN since 1970. In fact, violent crime in the US began to fall right around the same time pornography moved online and became free and ubiquitous. How is it, exactly, that promiscuity (which hasn’t increased) is putting women in greater danger at the same time that women are safer than we were before the sexual revolution?
Also, if sexual permissiveness puts women in other countries in danger, it’s doing a piss-poor job of it since, again, women are safer in countries where we are more free, sexually and otherwise. Countries with less sexism are less violent.
In fact, sexual permissiveness and individualism better predict low rates of violence than the strength of a country’s rule of law.
wrote: “Researchers who have examined wide and extensive global data sets have found that one factor seems to act as a shield for violence and warfare: gender equality.”Lastly, it’s extremely telling that Perry spends a weirdly large number of words describing how a woman should dress and act in a nightclub in order to prevent rape when the vast majority of women and girls are raped by their fathers and uncles, pastors and priests, teachers and coaches, and family friends.
In 2023, the committee for the International Affairs Symposium at Lewis & Clark invited me to debate another expert on how legalizing sex work will impact sex trafficking.
In the “woke” 2010s the Christian Nationalist, anti-feminist, whorephobic right-wing ecosystem realized they needed a rebrand. Morality in Media renamed itself National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). Efforts to shame and legislate women into sexual compliance became “anti-trafficking.”
Anti-porn activists and organizations, including NCOSE, raised millions of dollars which mostly went towards creating, distributing, and marketing films aimed at raising “awareness” (read: more money). They didn’t even raise awareness correctly, grossly misrepresenting how sex trafficking actually works.
If you were an alleged rapist, it’s obvious why you’d want to make a movie that misinforms viewers about your backstory and about who’s raping who and how, especially since you can get tons of money and kudos while doing it.
But it’s all just extra… something for me to watch these organizations and activists not even be bothered to pretend to be bothered by an actual convicted rapist helping an actual alleged sex trafficker and rape advocate avoid having to face his accusers in a court of law.
I know I can get really into first principles and elegant systems. But in this case, it really, actually is this simple.
The people who want to tell women and sexual minorities what we can do with our adult bodies are abusers and abusers’ useful idiots. Full stop.
Sexual coercion is not about safety for anyone but abusers. It’s about sexual coercion, scapegoating, and social and legal control.
And for you anti-porn feminists, Log Cabin Republicans, and modesty/purity culture Christians, let me assure you. No amount of compliance will keep you safe from the kind of person who is willing to shame or force you into sexual compliance.
Nothing you can wear will keep your stepfather from raping you. No amount of foregone sex will keep your boss from grabbing you by the pussy. No porn ban will prevent your husband from sabotaging your birth control.
Every person who tells you that women have to or can’t do X, Y, and Z “for your own good” is full of shit. Every time. In every place.
Some of the people who want to control what you’re allowed to do with your body will rape you and hope you swallow mercury, vomit blood, and then die “in order to save my mother from disgrace.”
Others may or may not know they are full of shit. Their brainwashing may go deep. Or maybe they’re fully self-aware and grifting for dollars, power, or just more raping with impunity. But they’re full of shit regardless.
I am not brimming with rage about efforts to restrict women’s sexuality because I am so invested in being a slut. This isn’t about sluts, or even women. It’s about Sam Nordquist. It’s about Alabama.
I’m angry about how long it took me to even begin to question what I’d been taught about sex and gender. I’m angry at the adults who lied to me as a child and who are still lying to kids now. I’m mad that people still claim that slut-shaming, homophobia, transphobia, mononormativity, kink-shaming, porn bans, etc. are for our own good. They put women in greater danger. Sexual freedom is strongly negatively correlated with violence, including violence against women. Countries that prohibit female genital mutilation, allow divorce, allow same-sex relationships, and allow women to inherit property are safer places for women to live.
Disempowerment is rarely a precursor to greater safety and less abuse. When it comes to sex and gender, make that “never.”
Women and sexual minorities are no threat to anyone. The people who want to tell us what we’re allowed to do with our own bodies are the threat.
If you walk away from this newsletter with nothing else, at least know that.
I've been wryly harping on how QAnon is totally fine with Tate, but I never even made the connection with the purity culture "anti-traffickers."