Indeed. I agree.

Anyway, thank you for saying what I’ve been thinking for a long time.

Heina,
Dworkin didn’t say anything of the sort; many misogynists think it was Catherine MacKinnon, but it turns out she never did either.

Co-signed.

Way too often, my experiences in sex-positive feminism were about being “brave” enough to “confront” “issues” within myself so I could “fix” them (enough “scare quotes” for you?). “You don’t even like sex!” I would be accused [typically by cis het men], at which point I either had to either agree with them that I was still suffering from the repression of my fundamentalist upbringing, or I had to produce sufficient evidence short-notice to disprove their assessment of my sexuality. This, more often than not, required engaging in some sort of sexual activity, or promising to “confront” whatever “issue” within myself before they lead to another situation where orgasms were inhibited.

You know what really doesn’t help? Being told that “but sex-positivity is about enthusiastic consent!” Sex-positive feminism is at almost every opportunity being sold as sexy-positive feminism. What isn’t being celebrated are the situations wherein people want to have less sex and fewer orgasms. We aren’t regularly reminded that it’s okay to be too tired, or have a low sex drive, or find our relationship with our partner(s) less sexually exciting than it used to be without needing to “fix” that. It got to the point where I seriously questioned whether I could label myself as being on the asexuality spectrum before realizing that I don’t have to appropriate an identity to legitimize my experiences, that I can just have a low sex drive a lot of the time because that’s the way my body works, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

This is actually a topic I wind up thinking about a lot. I think it is good to talk about, and discuss sexuality, even the problematic aspects, but I also think it should be done very carefully, and I think accusations of shaming should be taken very seriously. Not to say that every accusation is true, or valid, but I do think they should be considered seriously, and we should be careful how we talk about these things.

For my part, I’m a male with some… very dominance oriented kinks. It’s not something I like to admit to, even here, in case it gets traced back to me. And I do recognize that they’re problematic. But, on the other hand, I spent years feeling like a terrible, sick person. I hadn’t done anything wrong, I did my best to good person, and a good ally, but I always felt like there was this horrible, evil part of me. So my response, on several occasions, was to seek out feminist perspectives on BDSM. And I did, in fact, find some good stuff, but I seem to remember finding a lot of stuff that just made me feel worse. It’s very hard to critique sexuality without shaming a person, and the takwaway I got from some places was that I was okay. It was just those thoughts and fetishes I had that were evil. Almost a sort of “love the sinner, hate the sin” type message. It still made me feel something was wrong with me, and that my preferences were wrong.

This only really changed when my long term (female) partner confessed to some compatible kinks that went back a long time, before we’d even met (I admit, I got freaking lucky on this one). Seeing how happy it made her when she found out we were compatible there was the only thing that really made me stop and wonder if I was so awful.

Obviously, none of this is the fault of feminism, or any specific feminists. My feelings of guilt and shame were caused almost entirely by me. But it is really easy for someone who is already having a hard time dealing to feel shamed by a critique. This isn’t to say not to critique. My motto is to critique and examine everything. But I do feel this is a place where it should be done carefully, and complaints of kink shaming should be listened to, and considered. It’s entirely possible that you might listen to them, think about them, and decide that, no, that guy really is just an asshole (As appears to be the case in all the examples in the post above.)

Having said all that, I didn’t see any shame in this post, and the fact that it’s been floating around in my head for a couple of months now goes to show it was thought provoking. The above is not a criticism of this post, or this comment thread. But possibly some food for thought, while we’re on the topic.

The premise for my piece is:

Sex-positivity might mean something different in an academic and/or political sense, but I will address the ways in which self-identified sex-positive people manifest that particular ideology. In other words, I’m exclusively dealing with sex-positivity as it exists, not as we hope it exists.

So I don’t really care too much about theory, more about practice.

I disagree that I was discussing alleged “bigots” in my piece. The sentiments I find so troubling are found among leaders and thinkers in sex-positivity, not just some marginal “bigots.”