Last week, Liss at Shakesville posted a really good analysis of the "sex is natural" trope and how it's harmful to both certain peoples but also has harmful implications for sexual interaction. She said everything about that very well and you can just read that right there while I go off on a different tangent which is:
How useless is that statement? Seriously. "Sex is natural"? Well, yes. Nature has a lot of sex. It also has a lot of not-sex. Nature is having not-sex right now. Look down. Look left and right. Look around you. Is there nature having sex? Are you having sex? NO! (Probably. If yes, I am intrigued by your choice of erotic reading material.) That is also perfectly natural! Not-sex is natural. Either state of being is pretty much natural, so why even bother making the distinction.
And furthermore, there are plenty of sex acts that can be considered unnatural. Nature doesn't generally use contraceptives, for instance. But that doesn't mean they're bad. There's no correlation between something being natural and good or unnatural and bad. The only distinction that needs to be made is if something is harmful or not (which includes if there's been a meaningful level of communication and consent to anything taking place).
Which brings me to another issue I have with the sex-positive movement, or at least, how it exists in context.
The only time I've seen a feminist post get put on /r/bestof on Reddit
was a sex-positive feminist who was yelling about other feminists. The
patriarchy eats that crap up. They can be 'feminist' in a way that means
'these women want to have sex with me' AND they get to talk about how
much the other feminists suck. Wooooo.
On the one hand, yes, this is somewhat correct. A lot of third wave feminism is sex-positive in contrast to second wave feminism which rejected porn out of hand. And a lot of that rejection was both offensive and harmful to porn actresses and made a lot of assumptions about them that were and are very wrong.
That does not mean "porn is good!" People having sex for the entertainment of people who want to watch? Nothing wrong with that action. People watching other people have sex for their own sexual gratification? Still nothing wrong with that! But in the context that it's produced in society, there is something wrong. There's something wrong with the industry that is controlled by men and uses women are a commodity. There's something wrong with fetishization of different body types. There's something wrong with the reduction of a person to sex parts.
In the same way that you can say "GMO crops could possibly provide better nutrition or hardiness in more hostile climates" and "Monsanto is an evil multinational corporation who uses GMO to control the world's food supply", you can say "watching or performing in porn can be a healthy and fun experience" and "the porn industry is potentially harmful to society and people's sex lives." You can say both and mean both. And you should! You should have that kind of nuance to your worldview!
The takeaway is not "don't be sex-positive." Sex-positivity, when considered with nuance, when considered with context and empathy, is good. It's an attempt to make everyone's sex lives better, safer, and healthier. But that greater consideration is required in any movement, no matter how good the intentions.
No comments:
Post a Comment