sex

Is All Pickup Advice Sexist?

Miri, , , , , , , , , , 121 Comments

I was reading an article that started out with the question, “Is all pickup advice sexist?” So of course I immediately started thinking about that. (I proceeded to write the following without having read the rest of the article, and when I did go back and read it, I realized that I and its author basically agree on everything. I love it when that happens.)

If you’re unfamiliar with pickup advice/pickup artists/the seduction community, it generally refers to advice targeted at straight men who would like to meet and “pick up” women for casual sex. For a less charitable explanation, see this Twitter account that collects actual quotes from pickup forums.

I don’t know if all pickup advice is sexist because I am a skeptic and I would need to either review all pickup advice or see a large representative sample of it to come to a conclusion, and that’s impossible. However, I think I can offer three reasons for why pickup advice so often tends toward sexism.

First, pickup advice is meant to be generic; i.e. “here’s how to pick up chicks” or at least “here’s how to pick up this subtype of chicks.” There’s no way to give advice on how to “pick up” an individual person because, well, people are extremely different. So pickup advice must by necessity use stereotypes and generalizations as its basis, and because all you know about your “target” is that she is a woman, the advice uses stereotypes and generalizations about women and what women like and how women’s sexuality works.

But there is no such thing as What Women Like or How Women’s Sexuality Works. Assuming that there is is sexist. And while pickup artists may still pay lip service to the fact that there are some minute differences among women, the entire thing is predicated on the notion that there are “tricks” and “techniques” you can use to “get” women.

(And that’s not even getting into the coercive and rapey elements of pickup advice.)

Second, pickup advice is, for the most part, not focused on establishing a relationship or a one-night stand or anything else that takes the needs and desires of both partners into account. Pickup advice may grant that you shouldn’t do things women explicitly say they don’t want (sometimes), but the emphasis is still on the man getting what he wants from the woman, not on having a sexual experience in which both partners have equal agency. The age-old notion of men dictating the terms and boundaries of a sexual encounter is, needless to say, also sexist.

Even when these types of advice suggest ways to please women, the emphasis tends to be on establishing yourself as Everything She Needs and a Manly Man, not on helping someone with sexual desires of her own fulfill them and feel good.

Finally, when pickup advice does center on things the guy can do to improve himself and how he comes across to others, the advice tends to center on “faking” things, exaggerating stories, and performing a certain stereotypical version of masculinity. It does not focus on genuine self-improvement, on the things that most people will tell you help make you more appealing as a partner: having real interests, being curious about the people you meet, working on developing your confidence in yourself (yes, it’s a process!), having good hygiene (guys, you wouldn’t believe how much more this matters than being “attractive”), and so on.

In this way, pickup advice is sexist because it presumes that women can be tricked into sex with cheap ruses, and because it presumes that the only way for a man to be attractive is to perform stereotypical masculinity.

Many people defend pickup advice as occasionally legitimate “self-help” for men looking to make themselves more attractive to women. I do think there are decent men in the community, and decent bits of advice. However, my take on this view is that genuine “self-help” when it comes to dating should not focus on “picking up” women; it should focus on becoming the sort of person who is ready to be a respectful, attentive, and consent-conscious partner, whether it’s just for a random one-night stand or for a serious relationship.

A big part of this that I would like to stress to any man considering pickup advice is that if everything about you screams “WAHHH CHICKS NEVER WANNA FUCK ME I HATE ALL THESE FUCKING BITCHES,” I promise you that women will stay far away. Being lonely and sexually frustrated is extremely difficult, yes. It’s even more difficult to maintain a positive, open attitude both about yourself and about your potential partners when you feel this way. But it’s important to work on developing this sort of attitude before you try to find partners*.

If you become this sort of person and you put yourself in situations where you are likely to meet people who are similar enough to you to be interested in you, you will be infinitely more successful than someone who reads every single pickup guide in the galaxy and then heads out to bars and plies women with alcohol.

~~~

*That’s not to say that people with insecurities can never get laid or get into relationships, of course. But there’s a fine line between insecurity and WAHHH CHICKS NEVER WANNA FUCK ME I HATE ALL THESE FUCKING BITCHES.

*Edit* OOPS I FORGOT A REALLY IMPORTANT FOURTH REASON. Here we go.

Pickup advice is predicated on traditional gender roles; namely, that 1) that men are the pursuers and women the pursued and 2) that men want sex more than women, who must be “persuaded” into “giving it up.”

In this way, actually, pickup artists and feminists agree on one thing: many women are unwilling to have casual sex. But they take this premise in two very different directions. Feminists argue that the problem is culture and socialization: women are taught that casual sex makes them bad and dirty, but even women who escape this sort of upbringing must deal with the social consequences of having casual sex, which leads many of them to avoid it even if they do really want it.

Pickup artists, on the other hand, often couch their observations of human behavior in evolutionary-psychological terms and view their techniques as ways to circumvent the ways in which women are “wired.” Or they claim that women who say they don’t want casual sex aren’t “being honest with themselves” and that sort of B.S.. (I’m now reminding myself once again to write an article about how creepy it is when people say things like that.)

Is All Pickup Advice Sexist?
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"Women Just Want Men To Take Control."

Miri, , , , , , , , 64 Comments

[Content note: sex/BDSM]

One trope I often hear about women’s sexuality is that “women just want men to take control.”1 I encounter this everywhere–in pickup artist how-to’s, in pop psychology articles, in Cosmo magazines, in Sigmund Freud’s theories. At its best, it’s a harmless meme that simply reflects the gender roles that our society has. But at its worst, it’s rape apologetics.

In a rather old Newsweek piece, Katie Roiphe (she who claims that date rape is just bad sex that you regret) uses the 50 Shades of Grey series and the TV show Girls as evidence that, well, women just want men to take control. She also goes on to make a terrible argument that the reason women just want men to take control is that they have too much power in the workplace now, or something. (She also seems to think that the reason people are ashamed of these fantasies is because Feminism Has Gone Too Far, not because, newsflash: non-vanilla sexuality is really stigmatized, and so is all sexuality, actually.)

Anyway, I could write multiple articles about why this piece by Roiphe pissed me off so much a year ago and continues to piss me off, but for now I will focus on one reason: her implicit assertion that women ultimately just want to be dominated.

Some women want men to take control. Some women don’t want men to take control. Some women want men to take control, but only under certain circumstances. Some women want men to take control, but only in their fantasies. And some women aren’t interested in having sex with men at all. And that’s important to point out, because when you say things like “women want men to be X/do Y in bed,” you’re completely ignoring the fact that some women don’t give a single flying fuck about what men do in bed.

First of all, statements like “Women just want men to take control” are wrong because, well, plenty of women don’t. I don’t have the statistics on me, but any cursory conversation with women who trust you enough to talk about their sex lives will reveal plenty of these mythical women. And no, don’t say that they’re “not being honest with themselves” or “just don’t realize what they really want.”2 Yes, people are, at best, mediocre judges of their own selves. But they sure know themselves better than you do!

Second, now that we’ve established that some unspecified percentage of women don’t want to be dominated: even if there are many women who want men to be dominant in bed, that still doesn’t excuse not asking. Many women also like oral sex, but that doesn’t mean they want it ALL THE TIME AT EVERY MOMENT THEY’RE WITH YOU. Ask! And it doesn’t have to be something like “Do you grant me permission to forcibly hold you against the wall while I remove your clothing without your aid and perform acts of my own choosing upon your sexual organs?” It can be, “I really want to take control tonight. Is there anything you don’t want me to do? Just say [safeword] if you want me to stop.” Better yet, though, would be to talk about this beforehand, at some point when you’re not naked or about to be, and ask your partner if they’re interested in this and what boundaries they have about it.

The reason this is important, aside from the consent part, is that we use the words “dominant” or “take control” to mean many different things. For some people, “take control” may just mean initiating everything that happens that night, choosing what stuff you do, being on top, etc. For some people, “take control” may mean tying their partner up and shackling them to the bed and doing whatever they want to/with them unless and until they say the safeword. And for some people, “take control” means that your partner is your 24/7 slave who does absolutely anything, sexual or otherwise, that you demand. If you’re someone who uses the former definition while your partner uses one of the other definitions, you might find yourself having an unpleasant miscommunication unless you talk about these things.

And that brings me to my third point: even if you’re 100% sure that your partner wants you to “take control,” you don’t know what they want that to look like until you ask. If you don’t ask and just do and happen to do something they want, good for you. But most likely you’ll do something they don’t want, which means they’ll be bored, annoyed, or even upset and violated.

Fourth, even if your partner wants you to take control, and even if you do happen to be on the same page about what you want, getting explicit consent is still a really good idea. Why? Because it sends the message that you care about your partner’s comfort and agency.

As one of those infamous women who want their male partners to be dominant almost all of the time, I’ll tell you this: I would be appalled, disgusted, and turned off if a partner just assumed that I want them to be in control and started doing it without having asked me or heard from me that this is what I want. Of course, it’s different with long-term partners because they know each other’s quirks and desires, but if we’re just starting out, you’d fucking better ask first. If you don’t, I might enjoy it at the time, but I’ll be left with the really uncomfortable feeling that you actually didn’t really care whether I wanted to do that or not. These tend to be the people I do not see again, because I can’t trust them not to cross my boundaries in the future.

Sure, they got lucky: they didn’t get explicit consent, but it turns out I wanted to do that anyway. But what about when they fail to get explicit consent for something I don’t want to do? How are they going to know what I want to do and what I don’t? Why should it be my responsibility to stop them from doing things I don’t want once they start to do them, rather than their responsibility to ask first?

Fifth, what Katie Roiphe and others who try to understand Women’s Sexuality from romance stories fail to grasp is that sometimes fantasies are just fantasies. Many people think that if you fantasize and get off to something, that must mean that that is Who You Really Are Sexually and you must want to act out that fantasy ASAP. Actually, no. (Sometimes I hesitate to tell partners about fantasies because then they’re immediately like OH OKAY LET’S DO THAT I’LL GO TO THE SEX STORE AND BUY THAT THING when I might not actually want to.) But there are plenty of valid reasons you might choose not to do something no matter how hot it is to think about: it’s unsafe, you have physical limitations or disabilities that make it impossible, you’re worried about how it’ll make you feel, you can’t afford to buy something that you’d need for it, you don’t really want to do it with any of the partners you currently have, you don’t want to go through the hassle of negotiating it, you don’t think it would be as fun in real life and you’d rather just keep it as a nice thing to think about, and so on.

Finally, another thing that Katie Roiphe et al. don’t get is that women who have fantasies about submission aren’t necessarily having them for some reason like Men These Days Aren’t Aggressive Enough or Women Have Too Much Power In The Workplace And Feel Too Powerful. I can think of many reasons fantasies about submission might be fun. Submitting to someone requires a degree of trust that many find sexy. The idea of being so into someone that you’re willing to let them control you is a powerful idea to many people. Submitting means being vulnerable, exposing yourself, and some people find that hot. There’s also something about relinquishing control that’s comforting–especially, I might add, to women, who often find themselves stigmatized for being dominant and upfront about their sexuality. Being dominated is a way to enjoy sex without having to open yourself up to the possibility of being shamed for expressing your desires.

On that note, it’s important to recognize that the reason we’re seeing all these stories about female submission but not male submission is not an accident. It is extremely taboo for men to express a desire to submit to a female partner–perhaps even more taboo than it is for women to want to dominate. If someone wrote Fifty Shades of Grey with the gender roles reversed, would any man want to be caught reading that book?

But men who want to be submissive, sometimes or all of the time, are not rare. If you date men and you’re open-minded and supportive of your partners’ sexualities, you have probably met them. If you are Katie Roiphe and you spew outdated gender stereotypes like a broken toilet spews…you-know-what, then men are very unlikely to “come out” as submissive to you.

I think that the dismantling of gender roles would bring about an increase in the number of men who are openly submissive, and an increase in the number of women who are openly dominant. But dominant men and submissive women would obviously still exist, because playing with power can be fun.

The science of sexual desire is still quite nascent, so we don’t really know what actually causes people to like what they like in bed. But, honestly, I don’t know that we’ll ever be able to figure out, and that doesn’t really bother me. The most important thing is to not make assumptions about what someone likes based on their gender, or based on anything else. As humans, we have been gifted with the ability to communicate our desires clearly rather than relying on clumsy guesswork. Let’s use that ability.
~~~

1 When I typed this phrase into my phone at like 3 AM one night to remind myself to write this blog post, I initially typed “men just want women to take control” by accident. HMMM.

2 Remind me to write another piece about why people who claim that others are “not being honest with themselves” or “just don’t realize what they really want” really creep me out and raise a bunch of red flags.

"Women Just Want Men To Take Control."

Tell Kickstarter Not To Fund This Gross Book About How To Get Laid By Assaulting Women

Miri, , , , , , , 15 Comments

Screen Shot 2013-06-19 at 5.41.24 PM

[Content note: sexual assault]

There’s a project that’s just gotten funded through Kickstarter. It’s a book called Above the Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome With Women and it’s being written by a Redditor and pickup artist named Ken Hoinsky. Predictably, the book promises to help men meet and hook up with women.

Some quotes from the book:

5) Get CLOSE to her, damn it!

To quote Rob Judge, “Personal space is for pussies.” I already told you that the most successful seducers are those who can’t keep their hands off of women. Well you’re not gonna be able to do that if you aren’t in close!

All the greatest seducers in history could not keep their hands off of women. They aggressively escalated physically with every woman they were flirting with. They began touching them immediately, kept great body language and eye contact, and were shameless in their physicality. Even when a girl rejects your advances, she KNOWS that you desire her. That’s hot. It arouses her physically and psychologically.

Decide that you’re going to sit in a position where you can rub her leg and back. Physically pick her up and sit her on your lap. Don’t ask for permission. Be dominant. Force her to rebuff your advances.

Sex

Pull out your cock and put her hand on it. Remember, she is letting you do this because you have established yourself as a LEADER. Don’t ask for permission, GRAB HER HAND, and put it right on your dick.

Guess what! That’s sexual assault. “Forcing” her to “rebuff your advances” is sexual assault. “Grabbing her hand” and “putting it right on your dick” unless she’s consented is sexual assault. And while many people do indeed find it arousing when someone desires them, sexual assault is not arousing; it is assault, it is violation of others’ bodies, and it is a crime.

Wow, the year is 2013 and I really did just have to say that.

The idea that deep down, women want to be raped is some bullshit we can thank Sigmund Freud for. But it’s time for it to go.

Now, I know that some of you dudes are gonna be like “Yeah but it might help me get laid!” Sorry, but that’s completely fucking irrelevant. The reason crimes like sexual assault are crimes is not because committing them doesn’t benefit anyone, it’s because we’ve decided that they either 1) hurt others or 2) hurt society or both. Claiming that it should be okay to sexually assault someone because then you might get laid is like saying that it’s okay to steal because then you’ll get free stuff. (The point isn’t that sexual assault is equivalent to theft, but rather that the reasoning is just as morally and intellectually bankrupt.)

And no, it’s not enough to say that it’s the woman’s “job” to just “keep saying no.” It is your job not to touch people without their consent. If you can’t do that, then you’ve failed to meet the minimum standards for being a decent human being. Sorry!

Of course, Hoinsky knows he’s being a creepy asshole. These guys always do. He’s been spamming a Jezebel writer about it, hoping to get written up on the blog because “I showed it to my brother’s Jezebel-addicted ex-girlfriend and she went on a 3 hour diatribe about it. Your readers will eat it up!”

Giving attention to a person like this makes me feel desperately in need of a shower, but it’s also pretty important to me that this project not get funded. Here’s where Kickstarter comes in. Every project funded through the site has to be approved first, and the site approved this one. However, Kickstarter’s guidelines prohibit “offensive material (hate speech, etc.).” As we have seen with Facebook, sometimes companies don’t seem to realize that sexual assault is offensive and advocating sexual assault of women is hate speech. So, it seems that Kickstarter has fucked up a little here.

Sign this petition to ask them not to release the funds for the project. Also, go to the project page, scroll all the way to the bottom, and click on the button that says “Report this project to Kickstarter.” You might literally prevent a few sexual assaults. And if not, you’ll at the very least send a message that this is 2013 and this shit isn’t okay anymore. Not that it ever was.

Tell Kickstarter Not To Fund This Gross Book About How To Get Laid By Assaulting Women

[interview] Greta Christina on Writing Dirty Stories

Miri, , , , , , , , , 17 Comments

[Content note: BDSM]

Greta Christina has a new book of kinky erotic stories out. It’s called Bending and I read it and it’s great. So I interviewed her about the book and the process and ethics of writing porn.

If you’re curious why I refer to them as “dirty stories” and not “erotica,” Greta herself explains in the introduction:

These are not ‘erotica’ — except in the sense that ‘erotica’ has become the term of art in publishing for ‘dirty stories with some vaguely serious literary intent.’ These are not tender stories about couples in love making love. (Except for that one that is.” These are not sweet, gentle, happy stories about unicorns fucking rainbows. (Except for the one about the unicorn fucking the rainbow.)

Here’s the interview!

Greta Christina's Bending! Get it from Kindle, Nook, or Smashwords.
Greta Christina’s Bending! Get it from Kindle, Nook, or Smashwords.

1. What’s your favorite thing about writing dirty stories? What’s the most challenging thing about it?

I have two favorite things. The first is the challenge as a writer. Can I shape my sexual fantasies into writing, in a way that other people find compelling? Sexuality can be so personal: our own fantasies are so exciting to us, but just describing them doesn’t automatically make them exciting to other people. Even if our fantasies overlap with other people’s fantasies, even if what pushes our buttons pushes other people’s buttons — just a description of what happens in the fantasy isn’t enough to make it exciting. Not to me, anyway. I have to find the real core, what exactly it is about this fantasy that makes it hot for me. That’s really interesting. It’s like therapy.

The other favorite thing is that it gets me off. Sinking deep into a sex fantasy, spending hours with it, closely examining it to find out what makes it hot… it makes my clit hard just thinking about it.

The most challenging things are very closely related to my favorite things. It’s very difficult to write porn that really captures the essence of what makes a fantasy exciting. Often, when I first flesh out a dirty story, I find writing it totally exciting and compelling… and then when I come back to it later for revisions, it just seems flat. I could feel the emotional and psychological resonance myself when I was first writing it, but I didn’t get it onto the page. So I have to look at how the characters are feeling about the sex they’re having, what it means to them, whether their lives will be any different because of this sex. I have to find a way to convey what it feels to be this person, or these people, having this sex.

Plus I have this thing about wanting my porn to be interesting and exciting… even for readers who don’t share my kinks. That’s one of my favorite things as a reader/ viewer of porn: if porn can get me off even when it doesn’t push my particular buttons, if it get show me what’s exciting and intriguing about sexual acts that don’t normally interest me, that is pure win. I want to give that to other readers. But it’s hard.

Also, getting back to how writing porn gets me off: If I whack off too early in the process of writing a story, I lose my momentum, and have to come back to it later. It’s a challenge to hold off on masturbating long enough to get a good chunk of the story out.

2. That story about the unicorn and the rainbow. What inspired it?

“The Unicorn and the Rainbow” was totally written on a dare. I perform in this regular erotic reading series in San Francisco, “Perverts Put Out,” and a couple of years ago I read a fiction piece, which I prefaced by warning the audience: “This is something of a disturbing story, it has elements of borderline consent and other content that some people may find unsettling.” And then I added, “But when do I ever come to ‘Perverts Put Out’ with a fiction piece and *not* say that? When do I ever come to ‘Perverts Put Out’ with a fiction piece and say, ‘This is a really sweet story, this is a gentle, happy, loving story about unicorns fucking rainbows?'”

And at the break, about a dozen people came up to me and said, “I really want you to write the story about unicorns fucking rainbows.”

Challenge accepted!

3. Do you believe that writers of erotica have any ethical obligation to encourage consensual sex and to discourage sexual assault? If so, what is the extent of this obligation? How can writers balance it with their desire to write stories that express fantasies that many people have, including fantasies about non-consent and manipulation?

That’s a very large question, and a tricky one. I don’t think I can give a complete answer to it in a brief interview. But I’ll do my best.

I’m not sure if I think other writers have that ethical obligation. But I certainly feel it myself. Especially since so much of my porn fiction is about non-consent, borderline consent, manipulation, abuse of power. I actually wrote an entire blog post about this, while I was first putting the book together: On Writing Kinky Porn in Rape Culture. do think artists — and not just creators of erotica, all artists — have a responsibility to try to avoid contributing to culture in a toxic way. But I don’t think that all art has to represent a Utopian ideal. Bor-ing!

Here’s how I dealt with this in Bending. I talked in the introduction about the difference between fantasies of non-consent and the reality of non-consent. I put a consensual SM resource guide at the end of the book, reiterating that these stories are meant to be fantasies and not a how-to guide, and directing people towards actual how-to guides. And I made the non-consensual content very clear, in the description of the book and in the introduction and in all the promotional materials… so people who don’t want to read about that stuff know to avoid it.

As for other writers… I don’t know. Did the creators of Ocean’s Eleven have an obligation to open the movie with, “This is just a fantasy, we do not recommend that you knock over casinos in real life”? That seems silly. But then again, rape and sexual abuse of power is very widespread in our world. Knocking over casinos isn’t.

4. Has writing dirty stories changed how you think about sexuality, kink, consent, etc? What have you learned from the process?

Again — large question! I could talk about that for pages. I promise I won’t, though. I’m just going to pick out one thing.

Before I started writing dirty stories, I was very interested in acting out non-consent fantasies in real life. (With consenting partners, obviously!) I was pretty blithe about it, actually — “la la la, I have fantasies about this all the time, why wouldn’t I want to act it out?” — and it was one of the great frustrations of my sex life that I hadn’t found a partner who was willing to do that with me. But writing kinky fiction has given me a lot more respect for the potential landmines in acting this stuff out. It’s important to me that my porn be believable, that it feel like it could be really happening with real people… but it’s extremely hard to write non-consent porn that’s realistic and believable, and that isn’t a horror show. Struggling with that made me realize how hard it is to translate some fantasies into reality — even just in the form of fiction. And that made me more cautious about venturing into those waters in my sex play, and gave me more respect for my partners who didn’t want to go there. I’m not saying I never would do that — but I would go in very slowly, and tread very cautiously, if I did.

5. Do you think stories like yours have the power to destigmatize kink and BDSM? How so?

I don’t know. I hope so, but I don’t know. And I would hope that these stories might also help destigmatize porn/ erotica as well. I would hope that people reading these stories would recognize that smart, thoughtful, insightful, non-fucked-up people can be into this stuff. But I suspect that people who stigmatize kink — or porn, for that matter — aren’t going to read these stories.

6. One of the sections of Bending has stories in which religion is used to manipulate and coerce someone sexually. How did your own views on religion shape these stories, if at all?

Again — a very large question! I’m actually doing an entire guest post on this topic on JT Eberhard’s WWJTD? blog later on in the blog tour, on June 10. The tl;dr: I didn’t write religious porn at all until I became an atheist. Being an atheist writer and activist put religion much more on my radar — including the darker, more fucked-up elements of religion, and its huge potential for abuse of power. Which, of course, I passionately oppose in real life… and which, of course, my fantasies and my sexual imagination immediately began lapping up.

7. Which story is your favorite? Yes, you have to pick one!

“Bending.” No question. “Bending” is the novella that makes the foundation of this collection — and I worked harder on it than I’ve worked on almost any piece of writing in my life. (With the exception of Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless. Funny thing, how hard work pays off. Not always, of course — there are writers who have struggled for years over work that never came out right — but often.

And I think the length made a difference as well. Having the space, in the novella length of “Bending,” to really get into the depths and the details and the richness of my characters’ sex lives and sexual feelings, I think made it more powerful. Plus, in a novella, there’s space for the characters to really change and evolve. In many of my short stories, the stories end when the main character is about to make a change in her life. They end when the main character is about to open a new door, or close one behind her. In “Bending,” I was able to take the main character, Dallas, through that change. I think that gives it a richness, an extra dimension, that’s hard to get across in a shorter piece.

8. Which one was the most difficult to write?

And again — “Bending.” For all the same reasons that it’s my favorite. I worked harder on that piece than I’ve worked on almost any piece of writing in my life.

If your interest has been sufficiently piqued, Bending is available for purchase on Amazon, Smashwords, and Nook, and will soon be available as an audiobook and a paperback!

Also, if you want to see the other stops on Greta’s blog tour, here’s the ongoing list.

[interview] Greta Christina on Writing Dirty Stories

[blogathon] Against Pokemon-Style Polyamory

Miri, , , , , , , 16 Comments

This is the sixth post in my SSA blogathon. Don’t forget to donate!

When I first started exploring and getting into polyamory about a year ago, one of the things that appealed to me about it was this idea of having “different partners” for “different needs.” It made a lot of sense to me and seemed like a rational, ethical justification for dating multiple people with everyone’s knowledge and consent.

You’ll see this rationale repeated and defended in various books and articles about polyamory, and it generally goes something like this: we all have various needs and desires when it comes to sexual/romantic relationships. Often, one person can’t possibly fulfill all of these needs and desires for you. Maybe you have a particular kink that the person you love just isn’t interested in. Maybe you thrive on the excitement of casual sex or brief relationships but still want to have a long-term, serious relationship. So you look for different partners to fulfill your different needs, and the fact that a given partner can’t be everything you want in a partner doesn’t have to prevent you from being seriously, passionately, and healthily involved with this person.

So yeah, that all sounds good in theory. But in practice, it has started giving me an uncomfy feeling over the past year. I couldn’t put my finger on why until I read this great post on Tumblr:

The idea that we should look to a single person to fulfill all our needs offends me, but so does this notion that we each have some exact checklist of needs, and that the path to fulfillment is assembling just the right combination of partners.

Someone reblogged it and added this: “People aren’t Pokemon where you are trying to build a team. Or trying to collect them either :B”

And suddenly, there it was. All of my discomfort perfectly articulated. What I’d encountered was Pokemon-Style Polyamory–the idea that polyamory is about assembling some ideal collection of partners to conveniently fulfill all of one’s needs and desires.

A screenshot of a first-generation Pokemon game, showing a team made up of Raichu, Gyarados, Lapras, Moltres, Exeggutor, and Nidoqueen.
Looks like a pretty strong team!

There are a number of problems with this idea. First of all, it might not be practically possible. While it’s often said that polyamory requires a lot of self-awareness–which is true–being able to literally make a list of all your “needs” might not be feasible for most people. For people with very specific sexual preferences, it’s possible to be like, “I need a partner who’s willing to Dom me,” or “I need a partner with whom I can explore [X Fetish].” But sexual/romantic relationships are rarely this simple.

Further, except in the case of specific sexual preferences or relationship configurations, how exactly does one shop around for a partner who fits their specifications? Suppose I really love cooking with a partner, but my primary partner doesn’t really like doing that (this isn’t true, he totally loves doing that). Am I really going to go on OkCupid and specify that I’m looking for a partner with whom to go on dates, have sex, and cook meals? While I could certainly do that, the likelihood that anyone else out there is looking for that specific thing is pretty low, and unlikely to work–because most people want more from a partner than just someone to sleep with and cook meals with.

Or to make it even more abstract: suppose my partner’s not the best at listening when I’m going through something difficult that I’d like to talk about (also false, but suppose). How do I go about finding a partner for the specific purpose of being a good listener (and also being, well, a partner)?

So there are at least a few practical challenges to such an approach. I’m not saying it wouldn’t work; just that it would be pretty hard to make it work. I’m sure it’s been done.

The more important challenge to this view, though, is an ethical one. Ultimately, what rubs me the wrong way about this approach to polyamory is that it feels objectifying. Rather than looking for partners in order to be close to people, have fun with them, build lives with them, have a single fantastic night with them, etc., you’re looking for partners to “fulfill” particular “needs.” You’re kind of treating them like objects.

That’s not to say that the end result could never be a mutually satisfying, respectful partnership in which you see each other holistically rather than just as means to ends. But it’s an instrumental view of sex and dating. “I need this, so I will do this to get it.”

Personally, if someone wanted to date or hook up with me because of a specific trait that I have that fulfills one of their needs–say, that I’m a good listener or am willing to do X or Y in bed or like going on dates that involve concerts and museums–I would probably say no. I would feel objectified. I want to be seen as a whole person, as the sum of all of my traits, not just as a way to fulfill a particular need that someone has.

(Of course, many poly folks might say that not being limited to one person–or seeing more than one person–is a “need” that they have, so they are poly in order to fulfill that need. I think that’s a different sort of justification, though.)

Although this view had once appealed to me, when I read that Tumblr post I immediately realized that this is not why I’m poly. I’m not poly because I have different “needs” that I must assemble an optimal set of partners in order to fulfill. I’m poly because I love more than one person at a time. I dream of more than one person at a time. I want more than one person at a time. And it feels awful to limit myself to just one when the world is so full of people to love, and life is so short and so ultimately meaningless unless we create that meaning for ourselves.

I want to emphasize that if this works for you and your partners and nobody feels used or objectified (unless they want to feel that way), go for it. It’s not my place to tell anyone how to set up their relationships. I don’t think this approach is Bad or Wrong. I just think that this is an approach worthy of thinking carefully about and being cautious about, especially if this is how we explain and promote polyamory to others.

Extra moderation note: I am not interested in debating whether or not polyamory is healthy/natural/”moral”/feasible. If you want to argue about that, you can do it elsewhere. Because if you tell me that polyamory is unhealthy or never works, you are literally denying my lived experience and that of many friends and colleagues. Not cool. For some people, polyamory is unhealthy and doesn’t work; for others, monogamy is unhealthy and doesn’t work.

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[blogathon] Against Pokemon-Style Polyamory

Where Feminism Fails: The Ongoing Need for Men's Rights Activism

Miri, , , , , , , 12 Comments

So, this might be kind of awkward given my past writing and activism, but it’s time for me to come clean: I’ve decided to become a Men’s Rights Activist.

I’ve realized that feminism’s biggest failure–much more important, in fact, than its historical disregard for women of color, poor women, and trans* people–is that it does absolutely nothing to address issues facing men. It starts right with the name “feminism.” If feminists really cared about equality for everyone, men included, they would’ve obviously called it “equalism” or “egalitarianism.” But they didn’t, because at its core feminism is only about helping women, perhaps even at the expense of men.

Of course, some might argue that the reason for the name “feminism” is that the movement started out to correct a perceived imbalance of power between men and women. However, if such an imbalance ever existed, it was unquestionably skewed in women’s favor. How could women really be societally disadvantaged when they were the ones who got to sit around at home while their husbands worked to support them?

The actual supposed “gains” of feminism, too, clearly privilege women at the expense of men. For instance, feminists have now made it possible for women to legally get abortions. That’s great for them, but what about for the fathers of those unborn babies? What if they don’t want them to be aborted? Why doesn’t the father have any say? Conversely, a woman who gets pregnant accidentally can choose to keep the baby even if the father doesn’t want to have a child. Yes, it’s the woman’s body or whatever, but it was the father’s sperm. Doesn’t that count for anything anymore?

Feminists also seem to believe that it is the responsibility of men, not women, to prevent themselves from harassing and assaulting women. They claim that men are not, in fact, controlled by their penises and are perfectly capable of choosing to get consent first or just ignore their sexual urges, just like women. Clearly, feminists are misandrists and think terribly of men. A more empowering ideology–men’s rights–would hold that men are completely powerless over their own sexuality and need women to dress modestly, avoid drinking in their presence, and make sure to say “no” loudly and clearly if they don’t want to have sex, even if they happen to be passed out.

Feminism has also historically ignored the issue of friend zoning, which primarily affects male-identified individuals. It’s ridiculous in this day and age that a man could treat a woman well–be a good friend to her, even–and get nothing in return (that is, no sex). If feminism is all about “fairness” and “equality,” it would’ve addressed this problem by now. Similarly, on dating sites such as OkCupid, women receive many more messages from men than the other way around, and men’s messages to women rarely receive a response. This suggests that female privilege is alive and well in the 21st century. How are men supposed to get laid when everything about modern dating gives women the upper hand?

Frankly, it appalls me that female feminists aren’t spending more time addressing issues that primarily concern men rather than women. After all, the best activists are those who haven’t personally experienced the issues they’re working on, so it’s not exactly reasonable to expect men to do this work themselves. Men should certainly be allies to women who are advocating for men’s rights, but if feminists really care about helping men as well as women, they’ll pick up the slack.

Unfortunately, rather than improving the status of men in society, feminism has actively made men’s lives worse. The truth is that until feminism came about, men simply weren’t facing all these issues. They didn’t have to feel so much pressure to be strong, “masculine” breadwinners. They weren’t expected to provide for their wives and children. It was understood that men could be just as adept at raising children and maintaining a household as are women (whereas nowadays you always see commercials in which stupid, clumsy men ruin the laundry or feed the kids cheez-its for breakfast or whatever). Before feminism, men weren’t the ones who got drafted into the military, who were expected to die for their country while women stayed safe and comfortable at home. Men who were raped and wanted to press charges were actually taken seriously.

If this sounds like a drastically revisionist version of history, maybe that’s because it is. Maybe it’s time to question the assumption that freeing people from strict gender roles could possibly free men from them as well, and that encouraging people to believe and support survivors of rape means that they would also believe and support male survivors of rape. Maybe it’s time to stop pretending that helping women succeed in their careers would mean that women would earn more money and be able to support their families as much as men can.

Or maybe I’m full of shit and completely incapable of logically justifying this bizarre worldview, and so are MRAs. Happy April Fools’ Day!

Where Feminism Fails: The Ongoing Need for Men's Rights Activism

Stop Hating On Female Condoms For No Real Reason

Miri, , , , , 30 Comments

Every time I do this I feel like I’m a really lazy blogger who’s just going for the low-hanging fruit*, but I feel compelled to once again criticize a Jezebel article.

Tracie Egan Morrissey, whose writing is usually quite good, has written a post called “Stop Trying to Make Female Condoms Happen.” The post is what I can only call a screed against female condoms–a strange target for an online takedown.

Morrissey writes:

After never really catching on in the 30 years since its invention, the female condom has received a redesign with the hopes that women will change their minds about wanting to line their vaginas like a waste paper basket.

She then notes that female condoms absolve men of the responsibility for providing birth control, which they hardly ever have to do:

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that these methods afford us the ability to control our own bodies. But putting on a condom is like the only time that men are ever held accountable in their role of preventing pregnancy or the spread of STDs. They shouldn’t be exempt from that obligation. And it just seems like female condoms enables them to think that they are. Or worse: to not think about it at all.

On a different note, female condoms are just ew.

It’s a short post; that’s about all there is to it. In the process, Morrissey ignores a whole slew of relevant facts about female condoms:

  • Female condoms are made not out of latex but out of polyurethane or nitrile, which means that people who have latex allergies can use them.
  • Because they’re not made of latex, you can use them with oil-based lube in addition to water- and silicone-based lube.
  • Many male-bodied folks say that female condoms feel better than male condoms because it’s less restrictive and there’s more friction on the penis.
  • With female condoms you don’t have to worry about losing your erection or having to pull out immediately after you cum, and they’re also much less likely to come out than male condoms are to slide off.
  • Because female condoms also cover some area around the vaginal opening, STI transmission may be reduced.
  • Unlike male condoms, you can put them in hours before having sex if you don’t want to worry about it in the heat of the moment.
  • The outer ring of the female condom can stimulate the clitoris.
  • They can also be used for anal sex if you take the inner ring out.
  • Because they’re not stretched tight over a penis, female condoms are much less likely to break, and also, unlike with male condoms, there’s really no chance that the penis will be too big for the condom.
  • If you don’t have health insurance and don’t have sex very often, female condoms can cost less than hormonal birth control (although they do cost more than male condoms).
  • If your partner refuses to use a male condom, they may still be willing for you to use a female condom (a reality for victims of abuse that Morrissey completely denies in the comments section)

Do female condoms have disadvantages? Sure. They can be a bit tricky to put in until you’ve had some practice, and if you’re not paying attention the penis can slip in between the outside of the condom and the vaginal wall, which defeats the whole purpose. As I mentioned, they do cost more than male condoms, although you can sometimes get them for free at health centers. Like male condoms, they can cause chafing and you’ll need lube.

But all birth control methods have pros and cons, and it’s important to know about them in order to make an informed choice. Morrissey ignores both the pros and the actual cons of female condoms, instead dismissing them because “ew.” Which I don’t even understand, because they’re just the inverse of the male condom, so they’re not ickier than that.

The point she makes about male condoms being the only type of contraceptive that male-bodied people have responsibility for is a good one. It’s reasonable to expect that a male-bodied partner help with contraception, and it is really unfortunate and unfair that most of that responsibility falls on women. However, partners can still split the cost of birth control to make it more fair, and furthermore, because many people simply prefer female condoms, it’s not necessarily the case that women are being “forced” to take responsibility for it when they don’t want to.

However, the more salient point, which Morrissey also ignores, is that female condoms can be literally life-saving for victims of abuse and for sex workers, whose male partners may be unwilling to use male condoms but who may nevertheless accept the use of female condoms (and maybe they wouldn’t, but sometimes they do and that makes the effort to increase awareness and access to female condoms worthwhile). That’s why female condoms are being used to help prevent the spread of HIV, for instance.

Not every method of contraception will work for everyone. If Morrissey is so grossed out by female condoms, that’s perfectly fine! She doesn’t have to use them. But a blog about women’s issues should be promoting accurate, helpful information about birth control that will help people make these important decisions, not just knee-jerk reactions like “ew” that have no grounding.

This is especially the case with methods that are less popular and not very well understood even though they could potentially be very helpful to people. Morrissey’s post was actually a response to a news story saying that the female condom has been updated and improved so that they no longer make an awkward rustling sound, except that this actually happened in 2005 and the website Morrissey linked to seems to be a bit slow on the uptake. Even if you don’t like female condoms, isn’t it good that they’re being improved?

In any case, I for one am very glad that people are still “trying to make female condoms happen” for those who may really need them.

*There’s a good chance that this article was just clickbait, in which case it’s feasible that someone might disagree with my decision to write about it. However, it’s good to keep in mind that Jezebel is an extremely popular blog whereas mine is, let’s just say, indie, so whatever relatively meager number of hits I give them will be offset by the fact that a bunch of you have probably just learned a lot of useful facts about female condoms that you didn’t know before. Yay!

And look, at least Kate and I are really excited about female condoms!
Continue reading “Stop Hating On Female Condoms For No Real Reason” →

Stop Hating On Female Condoms For No Real Reason

"We Saw Your Boobs" and Distorted Views of Female Sexuality

Miri, , , , , , , , , , 20 Comments

I’ll leave it to others to thoroughly excoriate Seth MacFarlane’s performance at the Oscars. What I want to address specifically is his gloating “We Saw Your Boobs” video, and the interestingly skewed notion of sexuality that it presents.

If you believe MacFarlane, and others who think like him, sex is a sort of competition between men and women. Whenever women engage sexually with men–for instance, by appearing topless in a movie that is viewed by men–the man “wins” and the woman “loses.” In the video, the women whose boobs MacFarlane says he saw are portrayed as shocked or embarrassed, whereas Jennifer Lawrence, whose boobs MacFarlane notes that we have not seen, is shown to be celebrating.

In this view, women have no agency to experience sexuality on their own terms and for themselves. MacFarlane et al. do not realize that a woman might want to appear topless in a movie not (just) to be viewed by men, but because it makes her feel good or because it increases her opportunities as an actor, or for any other reason.

Of course, that’s arguable, because nowadays in Hollywood female actors’ opportunities are so limited unless they’re willing to appear topless. So for an actor who doesn’t want to do a nude scene for whatever reason but feels pressured to do it because there’s not much of a choice, doing a nude scene is a sort of loss. But not because “hur hur we saw your boobies,” but because in the society we have set up, people often have to do things they find objectionable in order to make a living.

This view of sex as a game or competition is embedded in the language we use to discuss sex–for instance, in the case of virginity. Although men are also sometimes thought of as being virgins or having virginity, traditionally it’s a concept that only really applies to women. Virginity is something that women “lose,” “save,” “give up,” “give away.” Although you could certainly argue that sometimes we can also lose things that are bad and that we’re better off for having lost, it’s still interesting to think about the connotation that it has to say that women “lose” something when they have sex for the first time.

It’s similar when we talk about “playing hard to get,” which is a role that’s traditionally been assigned to women. A woman “plays hard to get” until she finally “gives in” and lets the guy “get” her–he wins, she loses. (Interestingly, the “hard to get” role is becoming more associated with straight men, as well–thanks to PUAs, the cultural ideal of apathy, and probably tons of other factors.)

(As an aside, it’s interesting and also discouraging that some of the most problematic aspects of traditional views of female sexuality–virginity, playing hard to get, etc.–are increasingly being attributed to male sexuality as well. Equality shouldn’t mean making things suck for everyone.)

Why must women “lose” when they have sex with men or allow themselves to be viewed sexually by men? Because it seems that some people still believe that ultimately, women don’t really want to be sexual. It’s good to remember that views of female sexuality have varied widely throughout history, and until fairly recently one of the predominant views was that women didn’t have sexuality. They “gave in” to sex because men wanted it and because they wanted to please men. When I read The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, a landmark 1976 study of women’s sex lives, for class, I was stunned at how many women reported that their male partners didn’t really seem to notice or care whether or not they were having orgasms or otherwise getting pleasure out of sex. It can’t be that all of those men are just terrible people who don’t care about their partners; it’s more likely that they simply didn’t realize that that could even be a concern.

At the time the report was published, prevailing notions of female sexuality were already beginning to shift. Many of the women who responded to the questionnaire said that they faked orgasms for their male partners because the partners expected them to have orgasms–but only from whatever the men enjoyed (generally, vaginal intercourse).

Of course, there’s usually more than one view of any given thing circulating in a given culture at a given time. Interestingly, an alternate and sort of opposite view of female sexuality from MacFarlane’s is the one championed by Girls Gone Wild, Cosmo, and hookup culture: that sex with men is empowering for women and that if you’re out there flashing your boobs in front of a camera or hooking up with as many guys as you want, you’re not “losing” at all–you’re winning. There’s a reason this sort of ideology is so popular with young women: it appears, at least on the surface, to affirm and empower female sexuality as opposed to treating it as something shameful or even nonexistent. You could view it as a direct repudiation of outdated views like MacFarlane’s.

But ultimately it falls short, because in this view, sex and the female body in general are still things that exist for male consumption, whether it’s the leering guys behind the cameras of Girls Gone Wild or the mythical and almost deity-like “he” constantly being referenced in Cosmo headlines: “Drive him wild with pleasure!” “Find all of his erogenous zones!” “Make him feel like a real man tonight!”

A few nights ago my friends and I were laughing at a book of Cosmo sex tips and someone asked if the magazine ever even mentions the possibility of sex with women. We shook our heads. Although many people see Cosmo as a celebration of independent female sexuality, the fact that it completely ignores the existence of queer women suggests that it’s really just about female sexuality for men.

In this sense, the Cosmo view of female sexuality isn’t actually that different from MacFarlane’s wacky sex-as-competition view. Whether women “win” or “lose” by engaging sexually with men, the reason they ultimately do it is always for the men, and never for themselves or for any other reason.

The irony of MacFarlane’s song is that a bunch of the nude scenes he mentioned are actually rape scenes. The female actors in these scenes weren’t topless in order to titillate (male) viewers, but to depict a cruel and tragic part of reality. And Scarlett Johansson’s “nude scene” was actually not one at all, but rather the nude photos of her that were leaked to the press. She certainly didn’t take off her shirt for MacFarlane’s smug pleasure.

Of Charlize Theron’s nude scene, Salon’s Katie McDonough writes:

[T]he only time we see Theron’s breasts is in a quick shot in the bathroom, following a brutal rape at the hands of a john, in which she examines her badly beaten body. The “boobs” that MacFarlane sang an ode to are made up to appear badly swollen and red from the multiple times she was kicked in the stomach by her abuser. The nudity isn’t there for cheap thrills, it’s a snapshot of a terribly beaten body that should evoke horror — not giggles — from the viewer.

While giggling about a rape scene is several orders of magnitude more egregious than giggling about the fact that a woman showed you her boobs, the common thread is an inability on the part of MacFarlane (and, I’m sure, others) to see the “purpose” of women’s bodies and sexuality as anything other than entertainment and titillation on the part of male observers.

"We Saw Your Boobs" and Distorted Views of Female Sexuality

Is It Wrong To Help Someone Cheat?

Miri, , , , , , 21 Comments

A while ago, a great blog called Polyskeptic had a post about the ethics of helping someone else cheat. Dan Savage had said on an episode of his podcast that it’s definitely not okay, and Wes of Polyskeptic disagreed.

Wes brings up some good points about what exactly is wrong with cheating, and it’s not the sex itself:

The poly community has, shall we say, an unconventional view of cheating. We tend to say that the problem with cheating isn’t the sex, it’s the lying. There’s nothing inherently wrong with having sex with a person in a relationship. The problem is that when a monogamous person cheats, they are being dishonest with their partner. The harm is caused by the betrayal, not by the sex.

The problem with the standard advice is that, once the proposition has been made, the harm has already been done. By turning down the proposition, you’re turning a cheater into merely an attempted cheater. Is that really any better? To my mind, it is not. When someone attempts to cheat, the betrayal has already occurred.

He goes on to say that simply refusing to help the person cheat is not in itself morally good unless you also inform their partner that they propositioned you, because the harm has already been done by the proposition itself. But people have no moral obligation to protect others’ relationships, and since helping the person cheat wouldn’t make the situation any worse than it already is, you might as well do it.

Dan Savage’s preferred option – rejecting the cheater – is premised on the idea that you have a responsibility for the health and quality of that relationship. As I’ve explained above, rejecting the cheater is, at best, not helping the relationship, and at worst harming the relationship. If you accept that you have a responsibility for that relationship (what I call the “be a hero” option), the only moral choice is to inform the cheater’s partner (or at least make reasonable efforts to do so). Any other choice makes you an accomplice to fraud. If you truly think you have an obligation to that relationship (which I don’t think that you do), your obligation must be to ensure that it isn’t being conducted under false pretenses.  Otherwise, you’re helping the cheater to hide their cheating.

It’s an interesting argument, but ultimately I disagree.

First of all, for many monogamous people, wanting to cheat is not at all the same thing as actually cheating. Back when I was monogamous and thought about this sort of thing a lot, I knew that even though I would be really hurt if my boyfriend tried to cheat but wasn’t able to, I would be even more hurt if he tried to cheat and actually did. It’s not really logical, but for some people it really is about the sex.

Somewhat similarly, there are plenty of poly folks who are completely fine with their partner(s) seeing other people but nevertheless don’t want to know when they’re having sex with someone else, or even who those people are, because it’s unpleasant for them to hear about and makes them feel jealous. So it’s completely possible to be okay with the fact that your partner slept with someone else, but not necessarily with the knowledge that they actually did.

Second, Wes’ argument presumes that being rejected in an attempt to cheat can never be an illuminating or transformative experience for someone, that the person will just shrug and carry on trying to find another person to cheat with. That’s not necessarily the case. Sometimes you fall for someone else, ignore the problems in your current relationship, pursue a fantasy in your mind with this new person, and finally try to cheat with them. Being told “no” can be a wake-up call that causes you to realize that you want to stay committed to your current partner, that you need to work on your relationship with them, or that you need to leave them.

Of course, sometimes it doesn’t work that way. Some people never do develop that self-awareness. But if I had a chance to help someone develop it by not helping them cheat on their partner, I’d take it.

The idea that refusing to help someone cheat without informing their partner about the proposition is harmful is also strange to me. If you’re an “accomplice to fraud” if you don’t cheat with them, how are you not one if you do cheat with them? While informing their partner would arguably be a more “moral” option than just doing nothing, it also overrides the couple’s right to conduct their relationship without your interference. And, yes, it’s too much effort for most people to do even if they wanted to. How would you even get the person’s partner’s contact info?

Whether or not it’s ethically wrong to help someone cheat, there are tons of reasons it’s at least practically a bad idea. If someone’s willing to betray someone’s trust, they’re probably also willing to lie to you about STIs and birth control, for instance. And although you may not be pursuing a monogamous relationship with this person (at least, hopefully not, since they’re with someone else), even casual, open arrangements can involve violations of trust. That’s why even poly folks tend to have such a thing as “cheating.”

In any case, I can’t quite agree with the view that other people’s relationships are absolutely not your responsibility and that if you happen to participate in fucking up someone’s relationship, it doesn’t matter because it’s not your job to preserve people’s relationships. Obviously you don’t carry nearly as great a responsibility for other people’s commitments than the people who have made those commitments, and obviously helping someone cheat isn’t nearly as wrong as cheating, but the idea that we’re all just individual little islands and carry no obligations to each other seems way too libertarian for me.

Personally–and you don’t have to agree with me or do the same thing–if someone asked me to help them cheat, I would say no, and I would strongly urge them to either ask their partner for an open relationship or think about what’s causing them to want to cheat. I would urge them to do that, and that’s it. I wouldn’t play counselor or mediator, I wouldn’t look up their partner on Facebook and let them know what happened. This would be my way of trying to leave the world and these two people in a slightly better state than I found them.

Is It Wrong To Help Someone Cheat?

"Consent Is Sexy" Is Useful But Also Kind Of Sketchy

Miri, 41 Comments
Consent is Sexy poster
Credit: Take Back The Night at Boston University

I’m at the University of Chicago’s Sex Week, where I’ve seen a bunch of great talks, including one by Cliff Pervocracy! So I have sex on my mind (well, as usual).

I often write about very well-intentioned principles or campaigns that have blind spots and negative implications. Here’s another example.

“Consent is sexy” is one of those cliches one hears a lot in the course of working in sexual health promotion and assault prevention. There are some great things about this idea. For instance, it pushes back strongly against the idea that coercion and domination are hot. I’ll be writing about the eroticization of rape in romance novels soon, so you’ll see what I mean, and I won’t belabor that point now.

“Consent is sexy” also reaches even those people who don’t really care to think through larger issues like gender roles, violence, oppression, and how all of this affects your sex life. Tell them that asking for consent leads to better sex and they just might do it.

But there are also a lot of things that are sketchy or simply wrong about “consent is sexy.”

First of all, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the answer is “no,” and the person who withholds consent can’t always (nor should they) refuse in a sexy way. Sometimes you ask “Is this okay?” and they tell you that it’s not because last time they did that it was rape. Sometimes they say they’re not sure how they feel about it and need to talk it out with you. What does it mean for you to do this act with them? How will you help them make sure they don’t feel degraded by it? What steps will you take to make sure it’s safe?

And often these conversations won’t happen during or right before sex. Sometimes you’ll be on the phone or chatting online. Sometimes you’ll be cooking breakfast or putting on makeup. Sometimes, even though you’re talking about sex, actually doing it will be the furthest thing from your mind.

So repeating “consent is sexy” over and over promotes a false image of what negotiating consent is actually like and puts pressure on people to make these negotiations “sexy” even when they don’t feel like it. Yes, sometimes it really is like, “Can I do this?” “Oh yes please!” But sometimes it’s not and you shouldn’t be afraid to talk about consent just because it might not be “sexy.”

Encouraging people to think of consent as “sexy” also implies that you should ask for consent because it’s sexy. Yes, I realize that nobody who promotes this message actually thinks that, which is why I said “implies.” But nevertheless, the constant stream of “Always ask for consent! Consent is sexy!” coming from sexual health advocates (including myself) sometimes sends the message that it’s the sexiness of consent that makes it such a vital part of healthy sexuality. After all, when you tell people to do something and follow it up with a positive feature of that thing–i.e. “Wear condoms! They help prevent STIs and pregnancy!” or “Visit New York City! It’s huge and beautiful and has lots of museums and friendly progressive folks and delicious Russian food!”–you give the impression that these positive features are the reason why you should do this thing.

I’ll state the obvious: you shouldn’t get consent because it’s sexy. You should get consent because it’s the only way to be certain that you’re not assaulting someone, and not assaulting someone is the only way to be a minimally decent human being. If getting consent is also a huge turn-on, that’s great, but it’s just the icing on the wonderful cake that is not assaulting people.

The word “sexy” is a loaded word because, as much as we may try to reclaim it and redefine it to suit our own needs, it still has a very narrow traditional meaning. “Sexy” screams at you from a magazine cover. “Sexy” is the girl who’s asked for consent and always says yes. “Sexy” is being enthusiastic about everything you do in bed rather than occasionally choosing to do something you’re not that enthusiastic about because you’d like to give your partner that experience. “Sexy” is having an orgasm easily and every time. “Sexy” is constantly thinking of exciting and creative new positions and techniques to try rather than just sticking with the ones you and your partner love.

I want to divorce this view of “sexy” from sexuality in general. Sexuality doesn’t have to be “sexy” all the time. Neither does consent, which is an integral aspect of sexuality.

“Consent is sexy” is a great place to start. It’s the 101 level. But once we’ve shouted about that from the rooftops for a bit, it’s time to move on and remember that not every minute of negotiating and having sex has to be “sexy.”

Edit: After having finished and titled this post, I discovered that Ozy Frantz has already written something very similar and titled it something very similar. I’ve even read it. DERP. Not intentional! I’m retitling my post slightly so that it doesn’t look like blatant plagiarism. 🙂

"Consent Is Sexy" Is Useful But Also Kind Of Sketchy