Sex positive feminism

[username7891]

I've been reading some interesting things recently. A mother said that because of sex positive feminism, she doesn't mind her teenage daughters posing half naked online.

In my opinion sex positivism doesn't mean that exploiting women and girls for sex is feminist. I don't believe stripping or sex work is feminist; pandering to the male gaze and selling your body isn't feminist.

I saw myself as sex positive in the sense that for centuries women have been shamed for being sexual beings. Women are derided and called derogatory names for having a healthy sex life. I'm pro women taking control of their sexuality and enjoying sex.

I saw how this was twisted by the patriarchy to mean that anything a woman did sexually was empowering. Now porn, twerking and pole dancing are feminist acts despite the exploitation inherent in the sex industry.

Young girls and women are 'sex positive' because they're posing sexually half dressed on Instagram.

Yeah it's awful isn't it.

I saw being sex positive like you did, and I genuinely thought that better sex ed would teach teenagers that girls have as much sexual agency as boys, that they want and need pleasure the same.

But like every single gain of feminism it has been appropriated and subverted to serve men.

yes, I think the term 'sex positive feminism' is lost to us, we need a better one

I thought it was going to be a thread about feminists that are positive about the other sex. 😂

I saw the way sleaze became empowering in the 90s. It was during the era of the lad and ladette. Everything was 'ironic'.

It was ironic to look at porn and go to strip bars. Sexism was ironic. Women were taken into the office of FHM magazine and asked to strip for photos in front of staff, because it was ironic.

Sexual exploitation was a bit of fun. 'Get your tits out for the lads!' It was empowering for women to get naked and stripping was empowering, after all women were making lots of money.

No one noticed that the only professions where women out earned men was sex work and modelling.

Everyone was equal as long as women acted just like men. If you didn't you were a 'girl'. There was nothing worse than being called a girl.

Fish can't see the water. The issue with sex positive feminism is that it is supposed to support women to discover and enjoy their own sexuality. But young women swim in a sea full of male gaze, porn, sex work, stripping, objectification. There is no room to discover their own sexuality when male sexuality is being shoved down their throat at every turn.

I honestly think the days of The Joy of Sex, and then lads and ladettes was better because there was at least a nod to the idea that women were supposed to enjoy it. Now, it's all strangulation and BDSM and women enjoying sex is secondary to being edgy and not 'vanilla'. Vanilla being sex where there was an outside chance of having an orgasm.

I'm not sure much has changed. Sam Fox's mother sent off her first lingerie shots for her to become a topless model when she was a teenager. She appeared in the Sun at 16. There were other page 3 16 year old topless models before it became illegal.

My original post was about a comment I saw from a mother of teenage girls who said it was sex positive feminism for her daughters to pose seductively on the internet.

Young girl's internet use is sometimes unmonitored and they are vulnerable to online predators and being persuaded into taking nude photos. Things can get out of hand very quickly.

There are endless men out there trawling the net for young flesh, I can't get my head around parents who think it's harmless fun. But when I was a teenager it wasn't unusual for young girls to have much older boyfriends. There always seems to be a way in for predators.

Regarding porn, girls and women are encouraged to swing from the chandeliers because it's sexually empowering. Again, the patriarchy has its hooks in women's sexuality. They've been sold the idea that it's not exploitative and kink shaming is wrong.

Funny how male led movements rely on women being kind.

Sex positive feminism has always seemed an absurd phrase to me, just an attempt to smuggle in the idea that feminism as such ( without the decoration "sex positive") is somehow "sex negative".

Although a minority of feminists in the past have (understandably) despaired so intensely of men's capacity to refrain from abusing women in heterosexual relationships that they have given up entirely on the idea of heterosexual sex, that was never "sex negativity" - just a more-or-less evidence-based negativity about men.
And most feminism - for the whole of my life (and I am in my sixties) - has been wholly sex positive. Shaming women for enjoying has always always been seen by mainstream feminism as just one aspect of the control of women via confining gender stereotyping.
It was always men, throughout my younger life, who deliberately misperceived feminists as being anti-sex. Just one of the stock weapons they used to ridicule feminism and pile hatred onto it.
What they always really meant by "anti-sex" was something like: "This woman is not sexually available to me on my terms therefore she is a frigid bitch."

As usual, the powerful strand of pure misogyny in men's perception of feminism was put through the wash, converted into a pretence of theory and magicked into the idea that the 'cool feminists' (ie the ones young enough not to have wised up about just how much men are capable of hating women whom they deem to be witholding approval and sexual availability from them) had invented a new form of feminism, one that had suddenly discovered that women had a right to enjoy sex.

This new "Sex positivity" (like its earlier incarnation in the 60s and 70s, when it was referred to as an aspect of the "permissive society") involves the pretence that, in order to authentically express their sexual nature, women have to do sex like men do sex. It denies them the space to be sexual on their own terms: unless they are available on tap in the ways that men need them to be, they are frigid, sex-hating, man-hating.

True feminism is the home of a more authentic form of sex positivity for women - by upholding their right to be sexual on their own terms, at their own pace and in defiance of the commodification and pornification of male-dominated sexuality.

"This woman is not sexually available to me on my terms therefore she is a frigid bitch."

I was called, at 15, by an adult man who was trying and failing to sexually assault me, a 'frigid slut'. Neatly showing both his stupidity and the irony of female sexuality. I was both a slut for being attractive, and frigid for denying him.

I've said it before. If men were respectful, safe, non-judgemental and decent in bed, I would certainly have had a lot more no-strings sex when younger. It was men, not feminists who taught me not to risk my safety and reputation for shit sex.

great post @ReadWithScepticism I really wish we had a name for truly sex positive feminism

Sex positivity, as it is currently practiced, is a scam to get women to give pleasure to men. It is not feminist at all.
This scam started with the so-called sexual revolution in the 60s and 70s supposedly benefitting women, when it was really mostly men who derived a benefit. It made women believe they had to be sexually accessible to prove they were "liberated." Yes, it gave us the pill and abortion rights and those are essential, but that was to enable men to have sex without consequences, not for our benefit.

Yes, you're considered a slut if you say yes and a slut if you say no. Dealing with male sexuality, in most cases, is a no-win situation for women.

Sex positivity is a scam to remove agency and the ability to say no, yuck, gross, weirdo etc to anyone about anything.

Agree with @ReadWithScepticism

True sex positivity wouldn't have an agenda, so would appear in such infinite variation it couldn't be reduced to a label - rather than the mono long hair, filled pink lips, plastic boobed, fake tanned, hairless variant where anything involving touching another body resembles the actions of vigorously unblocking a toilet.