Hi, I’m Jeannette and this is the 17th issue of The Sex Beat, a newsletter documenting my research on sex. If you no longer want to get this newsletter, please unsubscribe here.
When I first started my podcast about sex in 2016 (it was also called The Sex Beat, I’m lazy that way), I got very interesting responses from people.
Besides the people asking for advice and/or wanting to share their stories privately (as well as one suggesting that I offer phone sex services lol), I also had men asking if I’d like to meet and hook up.1
In all these conversations, there were the assumptions that I would listen without judgement and/or that I was open to sexual invitations. The other assumption that still persists is that I was “sex positive”.
What is sex positivity?
It’s such a trendy phrase. In the last few years, I’ve seen the rise of sex education advocates or even sex toy stores that claim to be sex positive. I’m not assuming, they put it in their social media bios.
Broadly, sex positivity is about believing that sex is a positive thing in life.
A sex positive person believes that it’s healthy and normal to explore sexual behaviour, gender, sexual identity etc without judgement or shame. It also values consent, open conversations and fear-free knowledge.
This sounds great and all, but here’s the thing – the existence of sex positivity means that there is sex negativity. And here’s what an article in healthline says about it:
“…unless you’re actively working to become sex-positive, you’re sex-negative.”
A sex positive advocate based in Malaysia wrote in an Instagram post (slide 4) that, “Someone who is sex negative assumes that human sexuality is inherently dirty, dangerous, disgusting, unnatural, uncontrollable, harmful and risky.”
She also writes (slide 7) that, “If you believe that it’s important to have healthy and shame-free conversations around our bodies, you are sex positive.”
I guess this is generally a good thing.
Sex positivity urges a person to be unashamed of, to love, to explore their bodies and ask for pleasure. It encourages discovery without fear, expression and exhibition without shame.
This sounds great and all but…
Here’s where I become apprehensive about sex positivity. It wants to emphasise intimacy, but also establish boundaries. It wants to normalise, attach labels, and draw lines.
My question is, why can’t we be a little more nuanced? Why can’t we be comfortable with ambiguity? With contradictions?
Why can’t I hate my body and demand pleasure at the same time?
What if I want to be religious and cover my body or approach sex according to the rules of my religion?
Why should I expect a very vanilla person to be completely non-judgemental of my kinks? Along the same lines, why should I expect a person with very different preferences to accept my body the way it is?
Also, and maybe it’s just me, I wonder why I would feel shame about any of it.
I’m apprehensive about sex positivity because it sometimes feels like it’s too focused on the physical and that it’s trying to eliminate all the “bad” feelings that could possibly come with sex and sexuality.
Ultimately, what I don’t like about it is how it’s turned sex into a divided issue.
Although I might be classified as sex positive, my issue with it is that it makes things too black and white, when really most of life is shades of grey.
Why does sex have to be positive or negative?2 Why can’t it just be?3
Did I meet them? Let’s just say, the podcast was a classic case study of how content is useful for inbound marketing 😆
One day I’m going to start telling people that I’m food positive. Let’s mix expensive Chardonnay with Sprite and drink it in the cinema. Let’s soggify our cereal with orange juice and enjoy it.
I also wrote something along these lines about pornography – Disclaimer Required: Why is pornography so controversial?