Why I’m Negative on Sex Positivity

The term ‘sex positive’ is proliferating. I’ve noticed it beginning to crop up in mainstream media, on morning TV and in women’s magazines. It’s a pretty versatile term and can mean different things to different people; at its weakest it simply describes a positive attitude towards sex, and that’s great. But it also describes a new kind of activist, an activist campaigning for the liberalisation of sexual attitudes. And that’s not so great. Let me explain.

When it comes to sex and sexuality, as it often does on this blog, you’d be hard pushed to find a more liberal guy than me. There aren’t many fetishes and niches I haven’t explored in one way or another and I try hard not to judge when I hear about other’s sexual preferences. I mean, I sell dildos for a living, for fuck’s sake. Granted, that doesn’t immediately qualify me to talk about sexual politics with any authority, but what it does give me is the opportunity to interact with a vast array of different people about sex and masturbation. I was the main receiver for customer communications at GetMePleasure, and the main filter through which any customer communication were sent. Through this I’ve developed a pretty respectable understanding of what makes ordinary people tick when it comes to sex.

So why am I not entirely on board with the sex positivity movement? Surely it’s my responsibility as an adult industry-type, isn’t it? That’s a question with which I’ve been battling for a while now. Since I joined the adult industry a few years ago, I always felt that I should be a sex positive activist, like I should use my position to champion the cause of sex positivity at every opportunity. But the concept never sat very comfortably with me, and that made me feel a little guilty and a little ashamed of myself, not least because I could never understand why I was baulking from that responsibility. In fact, I felt like a hypocrite for selling sex toys while I was intimidated by the sex positive movement. It’s taken a long time for me to reconcile the conflicting emotions I have for the movement, but I think I’ve pinned it down now. Hence this blog, I guess.

Sex Is Functional

The reason it feels good to stimulate our sexual organs is because it encourages us to procreate. That’s all. That’s the only reason for the payoff of endorphins and dopamine and adrenaline that we’re given when we engage in sexual activity. It’s easy to trick our bodies into giving us those agreeable sensations with hands and tongues and mouths and things that vibrate and things that resemble the reproductive organs of the opposite sex, but we should never lose sight of the fact that sex is primarily functional. Like eating. Sure, we can pick foods that taste better than others to help facilitate the eating process, but we shouldn’t take for granted the fact that if we don’t eat we don’t survive as a race.  By extension, we can use tools and techniques that make sex more pleasurable, but it’s purpose is still utilitarian in nature. The sex-positive movement emphasises the importance of sex for pleasure over sex for function, and it seems to disregard its importance as a biological process in favour of a more humanistic approach. That might seem like a bleak assessment of one of the greatest feelings in existence, but I think it’s a necessary one. What I’m saying is this: let’s not get carried away with ourselves when it comes to sex. Sex isn’t necessary for our social continuity as it is in, say bonobo monkeys.

Pushing the Boundaries

One of the goals of sex-positivity seems to be to push the boundaries of sex as far as they go within the limits set by modern morality (as opposed to traditional religious morality). The problem is, boundaries don’t have to be pushed for the sake of pushing them. A lot of people, including myself and most of the people I speak to on a daily basis, don’t feel the need or the desire to push the limits of sexual experience. I’ll give you an example from my life. I’ve had some very kinky sex, some very exploratory sex and I’ve experimented with gender roles. Now though, I have a wonderful girlfriend and the sex we have is relatively vanilla.

Is it worse? No. it’s brilliant. It’s intimate and meaningful and every bit as pleasurable. I always get the impression that sex-positive activists are trying to make us experiment all the time. If you’ve seen the film JFK, you’ll know that there’s a section in which Kevin Costner’s character visits a gay guy in prison, played by Kevin Bacon, and as he’s leaving Bacon’s character shouts after him “you don’t know shit cos you’ve never been fucked in the ass!” I get the impression that those in the sex-positive movement feel the same way about those outside it; they seem to think, at the risk of stepping on some toes here, that you’re not complete without some sexual experimentation.

That’s simply not true and I resent that attitude. You can be happy and healthy and still have a relatively vanilla relationship; I feel that the sex positivity movement is trying to put pressure on ordinary people to go places they don’t necessarily want to go.

Proselytisation

The most important gripe I have with sex-positivity is its proselytising. The more active sex-positive campaigners try hard to convert non-campaigners, and they seem to do this by forcing their own sexual preferences on the public. I hate proselytisation of any kind; it assumes that the person preaching knows the absolute truth and the people to whom they’re preaching are ignorant and need to be shown “the light”. This is dangerous, particularly when it comes to sex. Everybody has sex in their own way; it’s as idiosyncratic as the way you talk and the way you think. And most people are nervous about it. To start telling them that they’re doing it wrong or that they’re not experimental enough can be damaging.

Luckily, most people will never come close enough to the sex positivity movement to really give a shit about it. But I am, and I just wanted to share my concerns early. So I can say “I told you so” when it fucks up in everybody’s face.