Feminism is the only branch of philosophy to actually criticize what we think of sex, and because of it, it tends to repel and offend anyone in a position of privilege or anyone who bases their worth on defending the privileges of those who oppress them.
Go up to any dude in our dude-centric world today and tell him that his entire conception of sex is based on dominance and submission, rape and coercion, and you’ll get a strangely defensive response of some kind instantly.
This, to the standard feminist, is nothing more complicated than male privilege defending its own; but as a man living in a misogynist world, I have to point out some of the complications that arise from the mixed bag of emotions aroused by contemplating your own misogyny. They may be undercurrents compared to the limitless oceans of selfishness that make up the bulk of a male viewpoint, but underneath every male, no matter how well-trained he might be by our patriarchal culture, there is a human being.
I submit that it is the cultural perversion of sex that corrupts us completely. In our culture, there is no real application of the idea that sex is something rare and magical, sacred and untouchable. We all have a sense of this in our hearts, but how many of us have it destroyed by all the evils of the world before we even get to try it for ourselves?
The sex-positive feminists and their dudely acolytes, who swarm the internet loudly proclaiming their feminism, yelling for the rights of a woman to prostitute herself, are so far from understanding sex as something positive that they have no idea what I’m even talking about when I proclaim sex is something rare and sacred. To them sex is something as common as dirt, as unimportant as any other bodily evacuation, and has no higher meaning than a squirt of spunk over the face of an empowered woman on her knees before them. Sacred! They say. What a laugh.
To the sex-positive feminists, all sex is just masturbation with partners, two people – or more – doing nothing any more special than jerking themselves off with company. It’s a circle-jerk world, boys and girls, together or apart. The mere idea that sex could be anything higher than this simple animal act can only enrage them.
But I say it can be; and it is. It’s a much higher form of communication between a man and a woman than I could ever explain. It’s a mutual exchange that can lead to something nobody can ever fully comprehend or duplicate: the creation of a human life. To reduce this to nothing more than orgasmic degradation is lunacy and madness, and it’s easily shown to be so by looking at how quickly mere animal sex degenerates into dominance and submission, lust and control.
If someone tells you they are sex-positive from behind a stripper pole, or while hooking their way through grad school, you should tell them “You know nothing about sex!”
So many people these days have only enacted pornographic fantasies in the company of another person enacting a fantasy. How many have ever really known sex?
Is sex something sacred or profane? Deep down inside, even the most worthless dude knows that it must be something more than spewing his filthy spunk without reason or emotion.
aroundthebend213 | 14-Jul-08 at 9:08 am | Permalink
Feminist sex is about reproduction? How is this different from right-wing xtian prudery and oppression of women? I’m no “fun feminist ’sex-positive’” type, but this post makes me think you are a little confused.
So does your earlier comment that men enforce 9-year-olds wearing g-strings by “showing lust.” In fact, men enforce submission by punishing women and girls who dont submit, NOT by “showing lust.”
While I’m glad your trying this feminism thing, none of your posts do a good job of imagining or even trying to imagine WOMEN”S subjectivity, and so you are left describing bad-lustful-porny sex and good-loving-reproductive sex from the point of view of men, but there is nothing feminist or even progressive about this, as both categories of sex are developed and reinforced in popular culture and both ultimately oppress and degrade women.
Instead, feminism (as Twisty points out) is about looking at this stuff from womens’ eye view. Just one small example of how your post fails this basic feminist test; what about lesbians?
Fred | 15-Jul-08 at 8:11 pm | Permalink
I didn’t actually define feminist sex, aroundthebend. I just pointed out that sex is an act of reproduction, if you reduce it to one thing that is undeniable.
This blog is a lonely place. It isn’t meant to be a place where men imagine women’s subjectivity. It’s more a place where men can try to figure out what they do wrong to perpetuate a misogynist world.
Maybe you can tell me what feminist sex is. My guess is that any sex that happens outside the realm of male oppression, if such a place exists.
aroundthebend213 | 29-Jul-08 at 11:32 am | Permalink
I hope that sex is not fundamentally an act of reproduction, because if it is, I’ve been a life-long celibate. I don’t know what feminist sex is, but I do think queer people–and people using birth control, for that matter– have sex too!
I also don’t recall the radfems you are reading defining sex this way, but I suppose I could be wrong. its been a few years. It seems a very patriarchal way of defining sex, in addition to one very detached from our social reality.
aroundthebend213 | 29-Jul-08 at 11:42 am | Permalink
I guess I’m saying that the dichotomy between reproductive/emotive sex and porny/foul seed-spilling sex is more what those fundie patriarchal quiverfull people are up to, not feminists.
Reproduction, as currently constituted is as -if not more-oppressive to women as porn sex. Separating sex from reproduction is a trend i support as at least part of whats needed to liberate women and queer people.
I guess I don’t want you to try to imagine women’s subjectivity, but to try to imagine that we have one. It feels a little like an “object permanence” problem–like if men aren’t there its not sex or if men aren’t there women might not even exist!
Fred | 29-Jul-08 at 12:08 pm | Permalink
The question of “What is sex?” can be resolved by answering “it is an act of reproduction” without any political significance. The question can be answered an infinite number of ways if you broaden the definition of sex to “Whatever gets you off”, but then you are left with whatever political viewpoint you choose shutting down someone else’s sex act as being deviant or oppressive.
Reproduction is indeed the primary method of oppressing women the world over! If it weren’t for the physical demands of making babies, we might not have ever had a patriarchy to begin with. Shulamith Firestone taught me this.
I think we could have sex, and reproduction, without oppression.
When I define sex as fundamentally reproduction, I am excluding sexual pleasure, and when you think of sex, you think first and most naturally of your own sexual pleasures, instead of thinking of a messy animalistic physical process that ends all too often in pregnancy, disease and even death.
Something I should have explained further is my own delight in having sex to make a baby with my best friend and wife. It seemed like it was the closest I ever got to sex just for the sake of sex, rather than as patriarchal game that smacks of oppression and male supremacy. So that was in my head, too, and probably merits all these corrections and comments.
aroundthebend213 | 29-Jul-08 at 3:04 pm | Permalink
You cant answer “what is sex” by answering “it is an act of reproduction” wihtout defining most sex and all gay sex as “not sex.” Which seems inherently political and just basically strange to me.
there are also other possibilities for how you might answer “what is sex” –for example sex could be viewed primarily as a ritual or series of rituals that define specific kinds of relationships between adults. this definition would probably work for most apes, not just humans.
We could ask–what kinds of sex reinforce and represent what kinds of relationships?
Then, it seems to me, we could leave aside your whole nasty trail of implicit syllogism that i read this way: misogyny=pleasure: misogyny=bad: pleasure=bad: not pleasurable=good: not pleasurable=reproduction, reproduction=good. Which is disrupted a small bit by your concession that reproduction, as its stands at the moment. anyway, definitely = misogyny.
The trouble comes in around misogyny=pleasure and pleasure=bad, methinks.
Fred | 29-Jul-08 at 7:48 pm | Permalink
I did try to limit sex as the act of reproduction distinct from the pleasure that can be derived from our sexual parts. I usually try not to define things as black and white, good or bad, since I see everything as a continuum rather than a binary.
Misogyny, to me, does not equal pleasure. I find it odd that you chose to interpret me that way. You can read whatever you wish into anything anyone wishes to say, but sometimes the assumptions we make reflect more on ourselves than on the texts we interpret.
aroundthebend213 | 30-Jul-08 at 7:24 am | Permalink
yeah, i realized later that it might make more sense to start with pleasure=misogyny. I think many men coming to feminist consciousness are horrified to think about the “meanings’ of things they find pleasurable. That kind of thing is easy to convert into the whole quasi-religious shame dealio.
I think what set me off was all the nonsense about “orgasmic degradation” and selfishness, “circle jerks”, “animalistic” etc. Thinking of sex and sexual pleasure as shameful dirty and contemptible does nothing to liberate those of us stuck in the sex class and therefore associated with sex; instead it is part and parcel of the nasty ideology that oppresses us. T
This seems different than Twisty’s cute formulation of “sex neutrality,” which I think you endorse.
Fred | 30-Jul-08 at 8:00 am | Permalink
Disassociating women from being the automatic targets of sexual lusts is what I wish I could help all the manly men do. Women are more likely to be realistic about their sexual needs than men, especially the older we get. Men have a sickening tendency to obsess over objectifying every female they see in order to create an almost hysterical state of arousal in constant flame.
I can see now that when I talk to men about how fucked up they are, a woman could read it and take offense.
The pleasure that men derive from misogyny is most like the sick pleasure of pressing a fresh bruise that you never let heal so that you can keep feeling it.
I’m really sex neutral myself. I mind my own business. I rarely comment on gay sex or kinky sex or whatever, since I find it all to be something better left outside normal discourse about how we can liberate ourselves from male oppression. But male oppression is really caught up in creating and sustaining an atmosphere of constant adolescence, isn’t it?
When I talk about being against sex, I usually mean being against the crazy constant parade of sexual obsession that makes us all into objects that fuck instead of people who love and think and have full lives that don’t revolve around sex.