Seriously, if you haven’t guessed from the title that you may be offended by this then you don’t get to complain.
So, over the years I have blogged on and off about how my definition of sex is quite broad, I’ve become convinced that it’s broader than most heterosexual women’s and definitely broader than most heterosexual men’s definitions. I’m not saying all because I’m not unique and I tend to end up lovers and friends with people who think and define along similar lines to myself (big surprise there).
Lesbians tend to get what I mean by sex, I can’t over-emphasise how much I loved my time in Japan because of the lesbian community there (though I hated the fact that there was such a tight-knit community mainly because of the problems inherant in being a lesbian in Japan) and that was my first time in an all female, all-non-straight environment that I realised I wasn’t the only one with a broad definition of sex.
My Definition of Sex
If it feels like sex to those of us involved, then it’s sex.
No seriously, that’s it. Orgasm not necessary (but frequently a part of it). Clothing may or may not be worn, moved aside or otherwise involved.
Back to the post at hand
I discovered, through attending sex positive classes and salons at Coco de Mer and participating in sex positive discussions with a variety of people I’ve met and friends I’ve made online that my understanding of sex was understood and acknowledged on a reasonably wide scale.
Excerpt from Midori’s rant about ‘Losing Your Virginity’:
‘Here’s a little known pet peeve of mine.
It’s the phrase “losing your virginity.”
…What messages are imbued in that phrase?
That we had something which is now and forever gone, and one is somehow lacking after sex. It implies that sex is only legitimate when it’s genitally penetrative and all other acts are, conveniently or insensitively, inconsequential. It implies that the act of penetration, despite intention and circumstances, defines a new phase of life.
…For people whose first genital penetrative event wasn’t consensual, or wasn’t about sex or pleasure, the phrase often forces them to forever define their sexuality from that incident on.
All this just doesn’t seem right if we want to create a just and humanistic world, which recognizes sexuality as part of the whole personhood. “
Well now I’ve discovered that there’s a whole other section of society and the blogosphere who understand that sex is broader than the penis-in-vagina definition which tends to get thrown around in mainstream society. The feminist, misandrist (no matter how much they claim that misandry doesn’t exist it does, with every piece of evidence that slowly, slowly, slowly our culture is moving on that they ignore) blogs that demonise men and make a truly bizarre heaven out of 1970s feminism.
Brief ramble slightly off topic
Now I can understand the glorifying of 1970s feminism, I do the same with my experience of the lesbian community in Japan. Mainstream culture does the same thing with Britain in the second world war. The sense of community, camaraderie and shared experience that I had with the dykes in Japan was because the dominant culture over there refused to acknowledge our presence. Discrimination was rife, in that oh so Japanese way of completely ignoring our existence. In many ways it was hell to be a bisexual woman in Japan, and gods help me it was so very easy, living in a totally foreign culture, to simply pass. Which I, in the main, did.
It’s great to all be on the same side, to all be pushing for the same thing, and when things are so very very black and white you are all on the same side because there’s a very simple goal you all need to achieve. But once you’ve fought back the Nazi menace and this green and pleasant land is not in immediate danger of being invaded people start to prioritize what they’re fighting for differently.
To all those angry feminists out there who wish they’d been born in time for the 1970s – stop wishing for an easy life! The reason we aren’t all as angry in the West now is because we don’t need to be, we have come so much further than the situations our mothers were fighting against. Refocus – in my opinion the world needs to catch up with female equality and then we can truly start with our problems – still lacking equal pay across the board, patriachy defined notions of the working day, childcare etc.etc.
Back on topic.
But do you know what some of these women focus on? Sex-negative positions trying to demonise penis-in-vagina sex and it’s being the main demon of the modern day.
They are correct in some things, unprotected penis-in-vagina sex is one of the most dangerous (by the statistics) sexual acts you can participate in (if not for pregnancy penis-in-anus sex is actually slightly more dangerous but we can’t possibly have any chance of a gay man being more at risk from SEX than a straight woman!). The way that men and women in mainstream society are brought up to view this sexual act is problematic as it encourages a mercantile/transactional perception of sex. As soon as you have this type of relationship or comprehension of what sex is it is impossible for a male/female relationship to be equal.
BUT
Penis-in-vagina sex is not responsible for that attitude, the accepted cultural understanding of it and sex generally almost certainly is. Penis-in-vagina is a legitimate part of the sexual experience between men and women, to deny yourself an experience because you believe it to be morally/politically bad is to put yourself back about five hundred years in terms of personal freedoms.
One of the main arguments against sexual experiences within the feminist extremist arguments seems to be that old chestnut ‘the personal is political’ – it’s a sentiment that my opinions swing right through the gamut on. Their specific arguments and censorship of the experiences we should aim to have as women and feminists strikes me as being similar to the Christian Church in the Middle Ages just in the opposite direction (I’m sure some historian or other can correct me there).
But do you know what isn’t going to do anything to change this culture’s understanding of sex or it’s habit of placing male/female relationships in a linguistically (and therefore understood) transactional position? Censoring experience, because it is only through positive sexual experience that we can hope to move our understandings on.
I have no doubt that many of my sexual leanings are the fault of the patriachal culture I grew up in, but to deny that I – as I am currently – enjoy these things is to deny a nurtured part of me. Cultural improvement/progress/whatever you want to call it is a slow thing. My understanding of myself, my feminist desires within this improving culture is as important as a part of changing that culture as any political action.
Do you know why this has gotten to me so badly?
Do you want to?
Then by all means read on.
Yes, this next bit is personal and potentially upsetting.
(Can’t say you weren’t warned.)
It is really easy to generalise, it’s really easy to asign one person’s faults to their entire social group or gender. It’s really easy to exist within your own hurt, and in doing so you place the blame for your own problems on an entire group of people.
I have always been friends with boys, I like them, but my first sexual experiences were with women. When I was raped in one of my first sexual experiences with a man I believed (I think correctly) that it would be very easy for me to hate men and to deny that any sexual experience with them could be good.
I admit my methods may have been unorthodox and I did go a little too far the other way at one stage but, to base your comprehension on a negative is to become a victim of that negative and the feminist negativity regarding penis-in-vagina sex is phrased in the language of such hatred that it strikes me as a victim talking. The victims of the patriarchal culture that we are gradually changing (and I do believe it is changing) and they’re calling themselves feminists and denying aspects of themselves proposing sex-negative viewpoints that will hold us back in creating a utopian future free of denial, self-doubt and all sorts of badness.
I don’t talk about this much, in fact today is the first time I’ve posted about this on a public forum. There was an LJ entry many years ago but it was friends-locked. So I’m just going to keep going until I stop.
The first site I got directed to today was about rape supporters and had a list framed in sex negative terms that basically announced that all men supported rape. Many men do not understand sex, many, many men have transactional understandings lodged in their heads – so do many women. But to talk about ‘rape supporters’, to equate rape to equate my rape (because gods lets be specific whilst we’re being honest) with having sex with my lover’s penis inside my vagina is to talk out of your arse.
How dare you talk bollocks to try and further what is a vastly important cause?
How dare you use fear and the language of fear and violence and the language of rape to describe a loving act?
Do you know what happens when you are raped? Something which can be wonderful is placed outside of wonderful and loving in your understanding and you have to work to get it back. You have to work to get an experience back to being sensual and loving when for many women it starts out that way.
How dare you use feminism as an excuse for doing what rapists do?
How dare you tell men that they, by sheer dint of existing, are doing what you are deliberately doing in your blog?
And that is why I got so bothered by these blogs.
Apologies if I upset anyone – but I did warn you.
Indeed, a complicated pair of issues, presented in a very OTT manner. But firstly many hugs for the bravery of writing this post.
On the PIV one the suggestion that any man who engages in PIV sex with a woman, no matter if she asks for it, is abusing her trust and placing her life at risk is… well technically correct, but then anything from getting out of bed to drinking coffee has a risk. I just felt they were as you said demonising it in a frightening manner (additionally did you notice in the comments the steller bit of othering where they suggest a poster may be trans and use this has a method of invalidating their opinion?) for no reason I could adequately understand. To take an act between two consenting people and try and dress it up as abuse of trust I find shocking.
The second bit you were posting to I also agree, I’m attempting to do my best to actually confront bits of rape culture when I encounter it, but I couldn’t agree with the stance that blog took on it, the list and the use of it just struck me as being over the top, of broadening the issue in some places to the point where I couldn’t agree with it, and as above to take consenting acts between people and twist them for an agenda.
Essentially what I think I’m trying to suggest is that I felt both articles you linked too twisted situations beyond recognition in an effort to prove something or further something, and at the same time defeated the purpose by rendering it so distorted as to be unrecognisable in places. While there are risks to PIV sex and there is a problem with rape culture I can’t agree with those articles.
I love you.
I find the extent to which radical feminists ‘to a man’ seem to really hate the trans community shocking. It kind of reminds me of the reaction some lesbians would have when I revealed I was bisexual.
Mish> Indeed, but while the dislike irritates me it seems rather a side issue to the level of peril in this discussion, I’m mostly just shocked at the gulf between men and women articles and language like this could produce, it seems to be trying to drive the whole thing into a confrontation. True there are many, many failings in patriarchal culture but is this really the best way of addressing them? By turning it into a distorted view? (rambleramble, comment going nowhere productive, should possibly get more theory down me)
I think I need a while to mull this over and take some time to think about it in order to coalesce my maelstrom of opinions into anything valid and able to articulate. (pretentious sentence is pretentious)
Just commenting to let you know that you’ve been heard and you’ve made at least someone think.
What gets to me about people with those views is how, in their own way, they deny women sexual agency just as much as they claim the culture that they are criticising does. I can feel nostalgic about some of the feminist polemics of the seventies, because for all their faults they were often trying to open up new ways of understanding women’s desire, and reframe the way people thought of sexuality. Telling women that they are doing it rong, regardless of how they feel? Not a feminist action.
(Part of me feels like I need to defend radical feminism now and point out that mostly we are neither transphobic nor misogynistic, nor even sex-negative…we just tend to over-analyse our own privilege and use words like
kyriarchy too much.)
Did you read Clarisse Thorn’s recent attempt at a sex-positive feminism 101?
Nyarrgh. Must try to get thoughts in order so I can project articulate rage instead of inarticulate rage.
Expect postings in the other place soon.