the fact that a lot of progressive people truly cannot tell the difference between a woman who is sexually objectified, and a woman who is an active sexual participant is bad bad bad bad bad bad bad
ngl when it comes to discussions of sexual agency a lot of people have not unpacked the fear-based idea that sex is an indulgence that brings about negativity as punishment. its really not much different than pro-lifers who say “well nobody forced you to have sex! you get what you asked for” when it comes to reproductive rights. if you cannot see a woman display any form of sexual expression or desire without automatically looking for reasons that her actions are Harmful Actually, you are a hell of a lot more conservative than you think
i didnt expect this post to get notes but i wanted to expand on my thoughts on all this a little bit.
in recent years ive seen a huge rise in purity culture disguised as feminism. and it fundamentally misunderstands what the patriarchal standard of sexuality for women actually is. the patriarchy does not just want women to have sex with men. it wants women to be sexually malleable. the patriarchal standard is not to be sexy, its to be passive. you may only be sexy if instructed to by a man. you will not be sexual of your own accord.
a woman who knows herself as a sexual being, who has the agency to explore her own desires and boundaries, is actively repulsive the patriarchy. theres a reason every misogynistic man is obsessed with body counts and very very young women. they cannot bear the thought of having sex with a woman who has experience or standards or expectations. the most desirable thing in the world to them is a woman with no knowledge and no agency.
this is why many men will see an attractive woman, desire her, and become angry when she still exists in public as an attractive woman once they are in a relationship. he assumed without a single doubt that her attractiveness was FOR HIM. she was a product advertising her features, he bought her, and now that he owns her, he doesnt want anyone else to share his possession.
all this is to say, women who acknowledge themselves as the sole owners of their sexuality, are not a product of the patriarchy. they are not catering to misogynistic men, they are not trad wife propaganda. in my experience, they are actively good for women. bear with me.
from my personal experience, i think a lot of women who call any female sexuality degrading are not really having in depth conversations with women who have sex with men. they are not talking to their friends and mothers and grandmothers or any of the regular-private-citizen women around them about what their experiences with sex actually are. but im a neurodivergent woman with a special interest in sex, and i will absolutely talk about it.
i wanna clarify that im a feminine woman who has been in a relationship with a masculine man for 12 years. we are “school sweethearts”, we own a house together. we are both bisexual..but we’re not stupid, we know full well that most people see us as some kind of heterosexual goal. this combined with my willingness to talk openly about sex has made me somewhat of a safe space for other women who have relationships with men.
i cannot fucking believe i am doing a “let women be straight” here but in discussions of patriarchy, we do have to acknowledge that many women are going to be horny, and they’re going to be horny over men. we cannot responsibly say that women having sex with men is degrading and just draw a line under that. we know full well that the abstinence-only approach does fuck all for anyone. education and open discussion is a powerful tool against oppression. people are going to fuck, so we NEED to give them the tools to do so in a way that is healthy and positive for them.
to be quite honest i dont think people who have issues with candid discussion of sex are really understanding..the situation. girl, so many women are scared of their own desires and vaginas. some of them have never considered the fact that they can derive their own pleasure from sex, that there is more to be had than just the satisfaction of doing someone a favour. thats how a lot of them are having sex by the way. it is something men are doing TO them, not something they are active participants in. the enjoyment they have been socialised to believe is the only acceptable form of desire, is not sexual or physical, its in the act of allowing a man to get his own pleasure. we’re taught that the best thing we can be is selfless.
the women i have spoken to have such an ingrained puritanical belief that to be a woman and to engage with any kind of sexual content is to be tainted. im not talking about overtly erotic media here, im talking about educational resources. there is shame about learning their own anatomy. one of my best friends will not go to the gynaecologist because she cannot get over the idea that it is an inherently sexual and therefore dirty act for someone to see her vulva. her shame is preventing her from accessing medical care. it fucking breaks my heart to see a woman i love so much struggle like this.
and this is the main emotion i feel when having these conversations. straight up despair. women who dont know that sex isnt supposed to hurt, women who dont know they are supposed to feel safe with the person they’re having sex with, women who have never experienced an orgasm, women who didnt know there exists sex other than penetration, sex that acknowledges a woman’s body, not just a mans penis. what the fuck are we doing? as a culture we do need to make space for women’s desire. yes, women having sex with men has always been normalised, but women exercising sexual agency with men has almost never been accepted. marital rape is a very new concept in our culture. despair.
i have spoken to women who are shocked that my male partner cares about me in any way. shocked that my experience of the sex we have is a priority for him. shocked that we will have long serious discussions about sex that are not erotic in themselves (i.e. not dirty talk). shocked that in 12 years he has never treated my body as an object that exists for his pleasure. shocked that he fully respects and actively seeks out the agency i have over my body and sexuality. he doesnt WANT to do something unless he knows i genuinely desire it.
he and i both know that he doesnt get props for this. he knows he’s not doing some incredible act me here. he’s just treating me like a person. he has said that being complimented for treating me with respect feels like being complimented for not deliberately running down pedestrians with his car. “wow its so cool that you didnt do something horrifying!” what would be the alternative?
to some of these women, im the first person to communicate any of this. was it not for my exercising my own agency to have healthy sex and subsequently discuss said healthy sex, these women would perhaps have continued to think that the only form of female sexuality is the passivity that we are socialised into. im teaching these women about informed consent, about vaginismus, about STI testing, about vaginal arousal, about clitoral stimulation, about personal satisfaction, about safety, about FUN. if i believed, through “progressive” neopuritanism or regular old conservative repression, that my desires were dirty, that the sex i had was degrading, that its good for women to hide the fact that we can be sexual, who would have talked to my friends about these things?
and this is where i loop back to the the struggle people have with the difference between objectification and sexual agency. i dont think as a society we really have much of a reference for what female sexual satisfaction actually IS. if every time an adult woman in the spotlight expresses her sexuality we say she’s setting women back 100 years, if we can only see sexual women as degraded, then have we not normalised the idea that sex inherently leads to feelings of degradation? normalised sexual shame and guilt? by doing this we rob women of any reference to healthy sexuality that they can aspire to. we teach them that their sexual desire is essentially synonymous with the feelings one might feel after actually being exploited/abused/assaulted by a man. how then, will she know the difference?
i have a post sitting in my drafts about how i find the concept of sexual repression to be genuinely eerie, because if you feel guilt and disgust for having healthy consensual sex, how can you differentiate between that and unhealthy/harmful sex? when i have sex with my partner, i feel so positive. i feel joy. its fun and beautiful and wonderful. if we had sex and i started to feel shame or guilt, i would immediately know that something was off. i would stop what is happening, i would check in with myself and with my partner, we would have a good hard look at what happened. this ability for emotional discernment keeps us safe.
we should not be desensitising anyone to the genuine objectification and degradation of women by crying wolf every time a woman openly loves her body and her sexuality. if you see a woman in a skimpy outfit and decide she is objectifying herself, i beg you to question what part of her personhood she had to remove to wear her outfit. question whether place that her personhood was removed, was in your own head.
truly, women are not responsible for the abuse we face at the hands of men. if all women became perfectly chaste and dressed conservatively tomorrow, people would still be exploited and raped and abused. if a man takes one woman’s consent as all women’s consent, you will never make him a safe person by policing the women around him. you cannot enforce any standard of sexuality that all women will be happy with. people need to learn that women are not a monolith, we are whole human beings who need agency over our own lives. we need to give women the education and tools to set their own standards, and the safety to come forward, without the deterrent of societal shame, in the event that they are exploited. passivity is dangerous.
i dont really know how to eloquently end all this. i am typing with tears in my eyes. god, i just want people to know how to keep themselves safe. im not fucking speaking in hypotheticals, these women i love have looked in my eyes and told me all sorts of trauma that they were hesitant to even call trauma. how can we solve any of these problems when we live in a culture that cannot for 5 minutes drop the repression and purity that nurtures abuse and exploitation? pushed by people who claim to care, no less? despair.
