Month: September 2014

Sex positivity is not radical politics, it’s not going to save sex workers, women or queers from oppression, and the individualism it promotes through discourses of “agency” and “choice” in sex and work does more to preclude class-based analysis and prop up standard employment relationships than it ever will to actually create conditions for people to make free and unconstrained choices.

Yes, sex positivity addressed a very real gap in feminism in terms of granting women permission to feel pleasure and deconstructing taboos that made it impossible to talk about sex work as work (among other taboos).

No, it is not radical.

Autocannibal (via clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead)

And like, it’s not supposed to be politically radical, because it’s not supposed to be a whole political framework. It is limited in its scope to addressing issues of sexuality + sexual expression, which is only a fraction of the whole human experience. It’s not even a complete response to “sex negative”/radical-cultural feminism, which is indeed a whole political framework and includes a condemnation of a range of consensual sexual practices. It’s only that last bit that sex-positive feminism is responding to. And that response is necessary! Hell, it’s radical, but it’s not politically radical, and it’s not the only necessary response.  We also need a labor rights framework to counter sex negative feminism; sex work fits in rather lopsided in sex positive analysis, because sexpos analysis is only about the sex part and not the work part.

I have a ton of issues with sex negative analysis. I have no issues with sex positive analysis— I have issues with the scope in which it’s used, and the fact that it rarely seems to be used appropriately, in tandem with another analytical framework. That’s why I like the term “sex ionic,” even though it’s stupid and ridiculous and pretentious as fuck: it captures the truth that you can really only be sex-positive in your analysis sometimes.

(via loriadorable)