On Sex Positiveness

[oneangrygirl]

Lucky: I received this in an email from a colleague last week...if you don't want it posted let me know.


On Sex Positiveness
Lucky Nickel

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Sex Positive! What a great new buzz word to start off the millenium!

The first time I heard the words were in regards to Radical feminism. A "Sex
Positive Radical Feminist." Well by Goddess, I'm a Radical feminist!

And because I am, I started to get a tickle in my head. I don't know, maybe
it was just the feather in my hat....

I looked at the words again: Sex Positive Radical Feminist. Is this some
kind of new and improved Radical feminism, I wondered? And are there other
kinds of Radical feminists, I puzzled? Are there Sex Neutral Radical
Feminists, for example? How 'bout Sex Negative Radical Feminists? And who in
the world would identify themselves by the latter two?

Color me paranoid, but I started getting a mighty bit suspicious. Just what
is meant by the words "Sex Positive" and why is it being connected with
Radical feminism?

I decided to hang ten on my keyboard and surf the net to see if I could find
any clue as to what was considered the meaning of these words. In doing so,
I stumbled upon this interesting one:

"What exactly is this thing called sex positivity? It's a public denial that
sex is an ugly thing and should be hidden. It's a movement based on
pleasure-as-revolution and radical self-expression. It's also a theory of
social justice: the idea is that the experiences of sexual and social
freedom will teach us to seek more fundamental kinds of freedom, such as
economic equality."

So let me get this straight, women are just going to copulate their way into
equality and liberation?! And copulating will promote social and economic
freedom? Hmmmm, I wonder why no one has ever thought of this before?!

Well... probably because they have. Goodness knows humans have been having
so-called sexual revolutions since the beginning of time. Because I'm pretty
sure humans have been having sex since the beginning of time. In fact, the
last time society had a so-called sexual revolution wasn't all that long
ago. Unless the 1960's are considered a "long time ago." As I remember it,
people were waving the same banners. It was considered radical and
revolutionary. And women were supposed to be liberated and freed by it.

But that's not what happened. What it did was allow men free and easy access
to sex without that real drag of protocol, courtship and responsibility. The
same old thing still occurred for women though. Women got pregnant. Women
had babies. Women were still expected to take care of the children, do the
household chores and wash men's streaked underwear. Women were still
expected to take a back seat to men, and were denied leadership and any kind
of important roles. Well then, just who exactly did this liberate and free?
Well it sure wasn't women!

It didn't take women too long to figure out that they had been conned.

But time and time again, women's history and their lessons learned are
erased and forgotten. As a result, each new generation of women is conned
into thinking that they are discovering sex as something new. All each
generation winds up doing is re-inventing the wheel once again and
discovering the same old hard lessons that countless generations of women
before them have found out. The benefits of these Sexual Revolutions and Sex
Positive movements were never meant to benefit women or to free or liberate
them. They were designed to allow men free access to women's bodies while
still retaining their male privilege and benefits and positions of power and
dominance granted to them under the patriarchy.

I next stumbled upon this quite detailed definition of "Sex Positive":


"Generally speaking, 'Sex Positive' means rejecting the dominant view of sex
as somehow something shameful (especially for women), and embracing any and
all consensual sex practices between one, two, or more adults as healthy,
and without needing apology, justification, and (for some) social
contextualization. Rejecting the accumulated cultural baggage the surrounds
it, and enjoying sex for what it is, however you do it, with whomever you do
it. It means looking at the diversity of sexual practices..... including
homo/bisexuality, genital-to-genital, oral, anal, digital to genital/anus,
S/M, B/D, the spectrum of fetishes to be found among humans, the use of sex
toys, masturbation, group sex involving any or all of the above, et al....
as being positive and not feeling that one need be ashamed of any consensual
sexual practices between adults."

Ok. Think I got it! Sex Positive means anything consensually sexual goes, as
long as orgasm is the aim. And if women can just get with the program, and
get rid of all that darn shame that just ruins everything, by gawd, women
will be so much freer and better off. And, and, and... Hold on right there!

Hmmm....

Just why does this look like a fantasy come true for men, rather than for
women? Just why was "especially for women" put in parentheses? Does this
imply that somehow women have the "wrong" and/or a "negative" attitude about
sex? Wrong and negative to whom?

I had an "ah ha" moment. "Now I'm getting to bottom of it all," I thought.
It can only be considered wrong and negative by men. It is once again men's
standard women are being held up to and compared to. It is being viewed that
apparently men have their act together in the sex department and women do
not. "Well why isn't it the other way around," I pondered? Why isn't it that
women have their act together, and it's men that have gone overboard?

So I turned to Germaine Greer to see what her take was on all of this. From
"The Whole Woman" I spied this excerpt:

"This insidious process was floated on the lie of the sexual revolution.
Along with the spurious equality and flirty femininity we were sold sexual
"freedom." One man's sexual freedom is another man's -- or woman's or
child's -- sexual thraldom. The first tenet of sexual freedom is that any
kind of bizarre behavior is legitimate if the aim is orgasm. Men who nail
each other's foreskins to breadboards are not to be criticized or ridiculed,
still less humiliated or punished. An individual who get his kicks by
shoving live hamsters into his rectum must not be reviled, though he may be
prosecuted for cruelty to animals. Political correctness forbids me to
identify such a paraphilliac as male, but if he turns out to be female I'll
eat the hamster.

The sexuality that has been freed is male sexuality which is fixated on
penetration. Penetration equals domination in the animal world and therefore
in the unregenerate human world which is part of it. The penetrated,
regardless of sex, cannot rule, OK? Not in prison, not in the army, not in
business, not in the suburbs. The person on the receiving end is -- fucked,
finished, unserviceable, degraded. Not actually, you understand, but
figuratively, which, language being a metaphor, is what counts. When a male
soldier calls a female soldier a split, he identifies her as a fuckee and
asserts his dominance over her. Penetration has but little to do with love
and even less with esteem. In the last third of the twentieth century more
women were penetrated deeper and more often than in any preceding era. The
result in Britain is epidemic rates of chlamydia, genital warts and herpes,
especially in women aged between sixteen and nineteen, together with a rate
of teen pregnancy second only to that of the U.S. What the penis could not
accomplish was done for it by the outsize dildo and the fist, the speculum
and the cannula. If penetration was the point, it certainly got made."

Guess I'm not the only one that sees through this farce of "sexual
revolution" and so called "liberation" and knows to call it anything but
freeing and liberating for women, nor does it allow women to emerge with
political, economic, social or cultural equality with men. In fact, it does
the opposite and is harmful to feminism by suggesting that feminism is
centered around the sexual liberation of women rather than the eradication
of institutionalized sexism and hierarchies based on sex.

Although the main center and focus of Radical feminism is to go to the root
oppression of women and to question gender roles and distinguish between
biologically-determined behavior and culturally-determined behavior of men
and women, Radical feminism also emphasizes sexual and reproductive
exploitation of women. It is in this sexual and reproductive exploitation of
women that we find much of the root cause of male domination and men gaining
from women's subordination. And we know this condition to be one that cuts
across class and race as well as cultures and national boundaries.

Of course I am also aware of the critics of Radical feminism. Radical
feminists take a lot of heat for their stance on pornography and thus, sex
in general. Oh, I think I've about heard it all. Radical feminists are
prudes, Victorian, against sex, hate sex, hate men, yada, yada, yada.

But Radical analysis and critique have never stemmed from a "moral"
position. In her critique and analysis of sex positiveness, specifically
pornography, Catharine MacKinnon in "Feminism Unmodified" asserts that there
are 5 cardinal dimensions of a liberal defensive edifice. They are:
Individualism, Naturalism, Voluntarism, Idealism, and Moralism.

"It starts with the idea that people, even people who as a group are poor
and powerless, do what they do voluntarily, so that women who pose for
Playboy are there by their own free will. Forget the realities of women's
sexual/economic situation. When women express our free will, we spread our
legs for a camera.

Implicit here, too, is the idea that a natural physical body exists, prior
to its social construction through being viewed, which can be captured and
photographed, even or especially, when "attractively posed" -- that's a
quote from the Playboy Philosophy. Then we are told that to criticize this
is to criticize "ideas," not what is being done either to the women in the
magazine or to women in society as a whole. Any critique of what is done is
then cast as a moral critique, which, as liberals know, can involve only
opinions or ideas, not facts about life. This entire defensive edifice,
illogical as it may seem, relies utterly coherently on the five cardinal
dimensions of liberalism; individualism, naturalism, voluntarism, idealism,
and moralism. I mean: members of groups who have no choice but to live life
as members of groups are taken as if they are unique individuals; the social
characteristics are then reduced to natural characteristics; preclusion of
choices becomes free will; material reality is turned into "ideas about"
reality; and concrete positions of power and powerlessness are transformed
into relative value judgements, as to which reasonable people can form
different but equally valid preferences.

What I have just described is the ideological defense of pornography. Given
the consequences for women of this formal theoretical structure,
consequences that we live out daily as social inequality (not to mention its
inherent blame-the-victim posture), I do not think that it can be said the
liberal feminism is feminist. What it is, is liberalism applied to women."

In conclusion, the Radical feminist critique of sex postiveness has nothing
to do with sex or individuals' attitudes about sex. It's about hierarchies
and the power differentials between those that have power and those that
have been disenfranchised of that power by patriarchal construction based on
sex and ideas on sexuality and how those ideas naturalize, legitimize, and
perpetuate institutionalized sexism and violence against women. Many of
which can be applied to racism as well.

Sex-Positive? A new buzz word to start off the millenium? Hardly. It's
nothing more than the same old, same old. Patriarchally constructed gender
roles and sexual exploitation of women wrapped up in cleverly disguised new
packaging (which isn't even new), in order to maintain the status quo of
male dominance which is designed to further enhance their sexual freedoms
and obfuscate their violence towards women.

[sunnysmiles]

this can also be found on the feminista website! http://www.feminista.com/issues/article ... =6&v=6&n=1

[rich]

That was a great issue.

[sunnysmiles]

yeah... ahem, ahem - rich has a great piece in that issue too!!! LOL http://www.feminista.com/issues/article ... y&number=3

Too bad there haven't been more recent issues in the past few years. Feminista is a great online journal.

[rich]

One of the other writers in that issue is in the most recent Off Our Backs, too.

[Pony]

I really hate this term and wish we could stop using it, come up with something else. I think they are sex-negative, because what they are proponents of is anything but sex, and is actually upholding the very old idea of woman as asexual. If you keep rearranging human sexuality to be this warped and twisted idea of males sexuality (not normal male sexuality, I would say) you are denying female sexuality. Therefore, you are sex-negative.

I remember clearly the scene in a 1980s British movie with Pete Postlethwaite (the great actor who played Daniel Day Lewis' father in The Name of the Father). Postlethwaite's character in the old movie regularly beat his wife to a pulp when he came home drunk, before he raped her. You never saw this, just heard the thuds and groans with a sound track of Vera Lynne singing patriotic songs about Leicester (sp?) Square under the sound of a fist breaking cheekbones. Was this sex? The director I think knew it was not, and was telling us so. Where did we lose this knowledge, that this kind of behaviour was wrong was only gained in the mid 60s or so. Now it's not only right, it's become something we are expected to WANT. To be brutalized, in any of the various ways that deny us our sexuality, in the name of a perversion of sexuality.

I have said it here before; I am done with being civil (ha you say when was she ever?) to the misogynists and women-hating women who give the lie to true sexuality, that might some day result in one of my daughters being injured in the name of love. Will it then be fine for me to be incensed and unforgiving about it? Then, when it happens to mine?