yes, they’re sex negative
By shag carpet bomb • Jan 31st, 2009 • Category: Feminist Fight Club, Radical Feminism, Sex Positive Politicsreading a member of the feminist fight club, i noticed that she said some shit with which i disagree. buying into the premises of the sex negatives, like obama buys into the premises of republicans with his bipartisan bullshit, she said that she hated the term sex positive b/c, she agreed, it made it sound like those who don’t so identify are sex negative.
idiotic.
they are sex negative because, while they might love their kind of sex and having their kind of sex, they have a big problem with other kinds of sex: paid sex, non marital sex, non monogamous sex, rough sex, non-feminist sex, etc. the sex negativity takes the form of wanting to do away with certain kinds of sex and sexuality — namely patriarchal sex and sexuality. it doesn’t matter how they want to get rid of it. they can tell you that they just want you to be conscious of the kind of sex you’re having and maybe think about whether it’s good for feminism or not. they may tell you that they don’t want to discriminate against people who have your kinds of sex. they may tell you that, of course!, they aren’t trying legislate your kind of sex out of existence. doesn’t matter.
they are *still* trying to get you to see and agree that your kind of sex is bad for women and feminism and that you should therefore want to stop engaging in those practices.
this is why contemplating authors like foucault who talk about how we police ourselves is important. it’s helps us to see how normative and ritualistic shaming within a community is its own attempt to wield power — even when said group whines that it is oh so powerless.
when sex negative feminists whine that they certainly do think of sex in a positive way and aren’t you a little hussy for implying they don’t like sex, it’s a big canard. it is a deliberate misinterpretation of what sex positive meant when it was coined. nothing is better evidence of that canard — that deliberate misreading in order to derail the discussion — than in the reaction to amber hollibaugh when she spoke at a memorial for dworkin. (it’s on the old bitch | lab / queer dewd blog if you’re so inclined.)
at the memorial, hollibaugh started to speak and then first thing the sex negatives did was say, “snort. I don’t know why you call yourself sex positive. it’s as if you think i’m negative toward sex.”
now, i guess that would be an easy mistake to make.
and you’d be right if the women at this memorial were 16 and new to feminism.
but they weren’t.
they’d been around, like hollibaugh, since the days when dogs ruled the earth. they’d read the discussions, they’d participated in the debates. and what they said flew right in the face of anything anyone has ever said about what sex positivity means. in other words, it’s a waste of time and energy to have a conversation with these people, who think like that, because they are deliberately misreading in order to try to score cheap debate points among the choir.
it is stupid to engage these people. save your breath to cool your porridge.
ok ok. be like obama and be a mark in their con game. i’ll get the popcorn and ju jus. at least y’all are entertaining.
shag carpet bomb is
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Hi there– Would you mind posting a link back to the Dworkin memorial entry? I tried to find but couldn’t. Thank you!
Hi Penelope,
Unfortunately, the blog where I found it, another radical feminist’s blog, no longer exists and appears to be taken over by someone posting in Chinese. The transcripts for the conference, however, are here:
http://social-justice.politics.ox.ac.uk/events/dworkin/
My bad. I called it a memorial, which yielded few search results. it was actually called a “commemorative conference.”
There’s one huge difference between the sex negs and what Obama is doing working the Repubs, though, Miz Shag.
Obama never considered himself to be much of a “liberal’, let alone a leftist, in the first place; in fact, he specifically campaigned that he would be more of a “centrist” than even Bill Clinton would,save for saying all the right things about “change” and attacking Bush. So, it would conclude that when in office, he would bend his back to attempt to “compromise” with Republicans, even to break off the few remaining “moderate” Repubs at the expense of the liberal base of the Dems. That’s just an old and tired game, and genuine liberals who should have known better and put some real conditions on their support of him will be disappointed to say the least.
That he is still worlds beyond Dubya and that the Repubs remain as obstinate and fascist as ever doesn’t change much…in fact, the Repub’s consistency of right-wing assholery actually strengthen’s Obama’s “centrist” creds by dropping a scare tactic at the putative liberals to stay put and get used to him punking them or risk the threat of a Repub comeback.
If leftists and legit libs want to overcome such “triangulation”, they’ll have to organize all by themselves, outside of the Democrats.
The same applies with the sex pozzies…but at least, most of them do understand that the GenderBorg will only eat them alive, so they see through all the bullshit.
Anthony
Thank you! And thank you for explaining sandwiches & socialism :)