Defining Sex Positivity

Franklin Veaux has set off on a bold stroll through the minefields of sex positivity, with this post that mostly expounds on what sex positivity is not. As somebody who has long used the term, I found his disquisition useful. I didn’t quite agree with his one paragraph on what “sex positive” actually is, though:

Sex positivity at its core is simply the recognition that there is more than one “right” way to have sexual relationships. It is an acknowledgement that human sexuality is incredibly diverse, that different people have different tastes and relate to sexuality in different ways, and that as long as everyone is having sex with consenting adult partners, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with sex, regardless of the way people relate to it. In short, it’s a deliberate refusal to place one’s own sexuality on a pedestal and proclaim it the “right” way to have sex.

My thought upon reading that was that I’d just boil that down to “Sex positivity is about being non-judgmental about consensual sexual choices.” But upon reflection, I decided that’s not enough.

Franklin’s paragraph, and my sentence, are statements that establish a space by bounding it and excluding things from it. In my sentence, the word “non-judgmental” is key; “acknowledgment that … there is nothing wrong” and “deliberate refusal” are key phrases in his paragraph.

At best, we’re describing a lack of sex-negativity with phrases like these. I think being genuinely sex-positive requires something more. Franklin’s post details many specific things sex positivity is not; mostly, these are specific sexual propositions or arguments that have been claimed to underlie, and be necessary to, the sex-positive position. And I agree with him that none of these, individually, are necessary to sex-positivity.

However, I do think you can’t be sex-positive without — risking tautology here — being positive about some sex. Being “not negative” doesn’t quite get you there. Being “not negative” probably suffices to unsubscribe you from the armies of the anti-sex culture warriors, but you’ve got to take a positive position and celebrate sexuality in some way, I’d argue, to be sex-positive.

Do you have to celebrate all the sex? Of course not. If you’re like most people with pronounced tastes and opinions, some of the sexual propositions and subcultures out there will strike you as boring, frightening, risible, or worse. No matter. Sometimes being non-judgmental doesn’t require much more from you than keeping your mouth firmly shut. “It’s not for me” doesn’t make you judgmental, but if you examine your motives for expressing that sentiment, there’s usually a parcel of judgment to be found. Sex positive people, I’ve found, spend a lot of time celebrating what they are into, and waste very few words talking about the sex that doesn’t appeal.

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One Night Stand: An Anecdote

There’s a very strange article about sex and porn in The Atlantic, which I cannot decide quite how to respond to. On the one hand it strikes me as wrongheaded and sad, especially in author Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s apparent opinion that male sexuality is essentially brutal and violent and, in her word, “extreme”. On the other hand, she has a clearer-than-usual view that men and women are different, and that the modern batch of anti-porn crusaders seem to want a “pygmy race of sexually neutered males” that is not achievable and wouldn’t be “all that enticing” even if it were. It would be easy to pull paragraphs and sentences out of this article and mock them, but on balance, I think I shan’t. Instead, it’s thoughtful enough — and such an intricate piece of interlocking arguments, each needing to be considered with the buttresses of its supporting paragraphs — that I shall simply point you there, with fair warning that it may piss you off if you don’t already have a somewhat negative view of male sexuality.

However, there was an amusing personal anecdote from the article that stands easily on its own while also, I think, serving quite handily to illustrate why I think Vargas-Cooper has somewhat bizarre ideas about male sexuality:

At the heart of human sexuality, at least human sexuality involving men, lies what Freud identified in Totem and Taboo as “emotional ambivalence”–the simultaneous love and hate of the object of one’s sexual affection. From that ambivalence springs the aggressive, hostile, and humiliating components of male sexual arousal.

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced–and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.

And as for our “honest” man, I think he’d have saved himself a deal of trouble and psychodrama by investing in a good pair of nipple clamps.

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