Sax negati

All below from here: 

Why Reclaim ‘Sex-Negative’? 

When many feminists call an act ‘sex’, they are often careful to distinguish it from other acts which may appear superficially similar, acts during which one partner violates another’s boundaries. They call the latter ‘rape’ instead of ‘sex’ and treat the two categories as mutually exclusive. In doing so they rely on an analysis of rape which understands it as an act of violence, power and hostility. By implication, sex is none of those things.

This analysis places them in a minority. In a rape culture, rape is also called sex, even though it is not nice. Sex acts under coercion are called sex. Sex within marriage is called sex. Pornography does not depict (at best) a kind of genre theatre of power and vulnerability centred on the image of the woman-as-whore, it it said to depict sex, even though the actors are likely to find the paycheck (if there is a paycheck) much nicer than the sex. Sex over unnegotiatable power gradients and sex over severe power gradients in which no effort is made to offset power – it’s all called sex.

Feminists do not own the word ‘sex’. It will not mean what we define it to mean. It will, pending the overthrow of patriarchy, continue to mean what it has always meant.

This particular feminist separation of sex and power/violence is beneficial in that it allows feminists to conceive of the kind of sex we would like ourselves and others to have the opportunity to have. The cost of thinking in that way is that we can forget how, out in the real world, rape, power and sex are experienced at best on a continuum and at worst helplessly intermingled.

If we do not use our own special language, in which sex is what is nice, and everything else is not sex, it should be plain that we must at least consider the possibility that sex, as it is typically experienced, is often not nice.

What other recreational activity is defined like this? It’s neither radical nor prosaic to say that rock-climbing is intrinsically nice; it’s just a bit odd. You can love it, I can hate it, but that does not give it an objective value. Someone who doesn’t like it is not wrong or bad, they’re simply not invited rock-climbing.

But there are words for people who criticise sex. If an individual states or implies that they do not like sex for themselves (whether they are asexual and/or whether they have personal reasons to criticise sex) they are called a prude. They may also be called frigid or damaged or be accused of being gay (when turning down sex from people of a different gender) or straight (when turning down sex from people of a similar gender). But it is when an individual articulates a political criticism of sex that the heavy guns are wheeled in. The name used for this kind of person and their politics is sex-negative.

Who would be sex-negative? It’s like being anti-choice, or pro-death. It’s practically being anti-nice! The words are meant to stop us in our tracks, and to some extent they have. But I would like to brave those words to look at what we might mean by an authentic sex-negative feminism (hereafter: sex-negative feminism).

Not the opposite of sex-positive feminism, and not the woman-policing of the right. A feminism which articulates a radical critique of sex and which dares to consider the proposal that sex may not, inherently, be nice. And perhaps, in much the same way as Easton & Hardy set their sights on ‘slut’, we might reclaim that bad word ‘prude’ while we’re at it.

Tenets of a Sex-Negative Feminist View of Sex

A sex-negative feminist observes:

That society is male-supremacist and that male supremacy extends into every aspect of experience, including sex

That, under patriarchy, sexuality is invested with qualities of power and/or violence, as exercised by men, or male proxies, upon women, or female proxies

That, under patriarchy, power and violence – and apparent vulnerabilities to power and violence – are in turn typically invested with sexual qualities

That, under patriarchy, men are considered to have a right of sexual (and otherwise) access to women, a right which it is compulsory for women to grant and for men to exercise, the burden of meeting this compulsion falling unequally on women

That a sex-negative feminist must stand against these issues and may be proud to be called a prude, if she does not shame other women

The remainder of this article will discuss each of these tenets in turn and end by contextualising sex-negative feminism alongside other views of sexuality, as well as clarifying some of the bad press which sex-negativity as a mode of analysis and a politics has received.

As with any reclaimed term, others have reached this ground ahead of us. We can’t fully detail what sex-negative feminism is without addressing a few misconceptions as to what it is not:

Sex-negative feminism is not a repudiation or even a rebranding of historical and present-day radical feminism. It is, to all effect, that same radical feminism – I am simply interested in whether we can take back the label of “sex-negative” by clearly setting out what it stands for.

Sex-negative feminism is not the political activity of Right-Wing Women, described by Dworkin in the following quote from the book:

From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority in order to gain some protection from male violence. She conforms, in order to be as safe as she can be.

This strategy requires each woman to submit not only to her husband/warden, but to wide-ranging and restrictive moral rules for women, enforced on women by both men and other women. Women who do not meet this code are ‘ruined’ and are understood to have brought any consequences on themselves. If they had followed the code, then – according to the view of right-wing women – they would be men’s wives, in an arrangement of marriage sanctioned by the State: as safe as women may be.

Also see here for similar points

Sex-negative feminism is not the opposite of sex-positive feminism. While it’s true that many present-day sex-positive ideas were formed in response to the second-wave critiques of intercourse and pornography, the fundamentals of sex-negative feminism are not a reaction against that reaction. While some sex-negative feminists may fail to distinguish between right-wing anti-sex moralism and our political criticism of sex, we do not need to oppose them simply because they are mistakenly opposed to us. Women are not our targets.

Sex-Negative and Sex-Positive Feminisms and Popular Woman-Hating

Having described sex-negative feminism in detail, I would like to contextualise it alongside other feminisms and other cultural forces.

While thinking about this subject, I’ve found it useful to think of there being four primary forces which interact in primarily-White Western discourses around sexuality. I’m going to borrow a little bit of postcolonial theory at this point and say that this is not intended to be used as a map. Maps are for those with a god’s eye view, those who believe that their limited perspective can be totalised and used to describe the terrain. This is a viewpoint. Particularly, it is a view up from where I stand, up through the layers of feminisms and anti-woman philosophies which loom over the sex-negative position. As a viewpoint, not a map, it makes no pretence of being complete, but I’m sharing it in case it can illuminate.

The forces:

Sex Moralism is hegemonic, historical and contemporaneous, misogynist and anti-sexual-“liberation”. It is the controlled right of male sexual (and otherwise) access to women, in which people acting sexually outside of that controlled system are considered shameful and dirty. It is the sexualisation of feminine vulnerability but it is also coercion of women into motherhood, observance of codes of female ‘decency’ and heterosexual marriage. In the ideal state of sex moralism, all visible, primarily-white women are virgins or mothers to most men and sluts and mothers to the one man who selected them, and the prostituted class is invisible.

Compulsory Sexuality is hegemonic, modern, capitalist, misogynist and post-sexual-“liberation”. It is the universal right of male sexual (and otherwise) access to so-called “liberated” women. Pornographic, it is full-spectrum sexualisation of all women, and of all objects and products as substitute women. It is pinkwashing and cooptive of lesbian and gay movements (and to a lesser extent, bisexual and trans* movements), as long as those movements will agree that women and female proxies must be fucked. In the ideal state of compulsory sexuality, all women are simply sluts.

Taken together, compulsory sexuality and sex moralism form a partial philosophy of women. (Not a complete philosophy: neither of these forces fully describe the situation of slaves or colonial subjects, for example.) They work together to control women, in and out of marriage, in and out of the bedroom, in and out of the brothel. The two systems are not as different as they appear, since they share a comfortable common ground: they both hate women. Even when they appear to be in conflict, you can guarantee that they will settle their differences over women’s bodies.

You could argue about which is actually more powerful; while compulsory sexuality has been in ascendence in the West since the 1960s, in many parts of the world (and indeed parts of the West) sex moralism is still a more potent force.

Sex-Positive Feminism, as I frame it, is a marginalised, progressive force which is present-day. It is a feminist tendency which aims to fight the shaming of women and a woman’s right to independence as a sexual actor. As such, its obvious enemy is sex-moralism, which it directly opposes. And its subtle enemy is compulsory sexuality, which may easily coopt it. 

The job of fighting sex-moralism is straightforward if not easy. The job of resisting cooption by compulsory sexuality is extremely challenging and requires sisterhood and cooperation with sex-negative feminists. Unfortunately, many sex-positive feminists conflate sex moralism with sex-negative feminism and fight them both, leaving them wide open to being coopted into the service of compulsory sexuality.

Sex-Negative Feminism is a marginalised, progressive force which dates from the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 60s and continues to the present day. It is a feminist tendency which speaks honestly about the hard knot of sex, power and violence formed by male supremacy and which aims to liberate women from sexual violence and compulsory sex. 

As such, its obvious enemy is compulsory sexuality, which it opposes openly. Sex moralism appropriates some sex-negative feminist language in its abstinence and anti-sexualisation advocacy but sex-negative feminists do not support the way it uses the language to make antifeminist arguments. Sex-negative feminism’s most complex struggle is with sex-positive feminism, which does not need to be an enemy. As sex-negative feminism does not advocate shaming or controlling women, sex-positive feminism does not need to oppose it on these grounds. 

But when sex-positive feminism is coopted by and advocates for compulsory sexuality, sex-negative feminism must resist, as compulsory sexuality under male supremacy is compulsory violence against women.

As I have outlined them here, neither sex-positive or sex-negative feminisms are totalising systems. Many women’s feminisms embrace elements from both categories, in that many feminists know that women must neither be shamed for sex or forced into it.

If one thing motivated me to write this article, it was this: to give a heartfelt invitation to feminists who centre a sex-positive analysis to stop fighting with and to listen to sex-negative feminist insight. Sex-negative feminists are not the political right-wing. We do not hate women. We are sisters who have a deep analysis of sex, violence, power and compulsory sexuality and have been trying to share it for over half a century. If you do not listen, your feminism risks becoming (or may have already become) rape culture in disguise.

But sometimes, there is less distance between us than we think:

We didn’t have backgrounds that one would normally consider anti-sex. We had liberal backgrounds, liberal parents, liberal educations. Why were we so attracted to the idea of taking a year without sex? I thought about it a lot, and I concluded this: We felt like we didn’t own our sexuality. We felt like our sexuality wasn’t for us. Or at least, that’s how I felt. So many things about the way I was having sex seemed to have nothing to do with me. And if sex had nothing to do with me … then why was I doing it?

When I start to think of the number of times I have been cajoled, pressured, or forced into sex that I did not want when I came into “the BDSM community”, I can’t actually count them… I realized I didn’t feel traumatized because it happened so bloody often that it was just a fact of being a submissive female.

Women as a class and as individuals, overwhelmingly, are oppressed sexually in numerous ways and that our sexual oppression is yet one more rock on the giant pile of many we’ve been stoned with that keep us down, AND hyperfocus on the sexual, or sex-as-entry to being able to bring up feminism at all is part of that… and radical feminists – those most often arbitrarily labelled as against sex and sexuality – KNOW this

Whose are these radical, sex-negative feminist voices? They are Clarisse Thorn, Kitty Stryker and Heather Corinna (each name links to the relevant article), all three of whom are well-known writers and activists in sex-positive feminist circles.

I would like to think there is a new wave of dialogue between sex-positive and sex-negative feminists on this subject. Of the three writers quoted, Stryker is beginning to consider whether “sex is neutral” rather than ‘positive’, and while people widely call Corinna “sex-positive”, she has never described herself in that way.

In part, this article is participation in that dialogue from the ‘other’ side, and where possible I’ve favoured reaching out a hand, hoping to be met.