Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
Perhaps "the power to orchestrate the giving up of power is the ultimate display of mastery"?
Honestly, there's so much wrong in Roiphe's argument that I don't really know where to start - perhaps with the idea that someone's sexual tastes re: top/bottom reflect their power position in other aspects of their lives? Because that's kind of bullshit. If that were true, then getting a promotion or leaving work to raise kids would change your sexual desires.
Or maybe with: where's the proof that women are more interested in submissive sex than they were? The media's still getting their heads around women being interested in sex at all. The fact that they've noticed one terrible book doesn't mean women's behaviour has actually changed in any way.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to kmont,
Sex positivity is one thing but the whole rest of the web that we live in is still there so I don't think that sex positivity alone would bring about utopia, not that I think that is what Emma is saying
Oh hell yeah, though I do think it has broader effects than people might initially think. There is so much other. But this was, perhaps, about combatting the idea that third-wave lipstick cleavage sparkle-pony feminism doesn't have a goal beyond giggling and showing people our tits.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to kmont,
I don't think BDSM excludes empathy and kindness by the way
I think it's essential.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
Collective political action. Conversation like this.
Collective political action doesn't just happen. It happens because individuals work to make it happen. In this field, it happens because individuals put themselves at significant social and emotional risk to make it happen.
Have shorter men been attractive in some cultures?
Certainly men have not always been required to actively be tall. Heeled shoes came and went. And a lot of that was about how they made their calves look. My anthropological knowledge just isn't extensive enough to say whether shortness has ever been actively desired. The Greeks liked their penises small.
Also, Tom Cruise. In the 80s, anyway.
This Utopia would seem to present a dilema for those people who enjoy fantasy about the forbidden?
This is a problem, yeah. Though, as I said, there are still ways individuals can contextualise their sexual encounters to feel all forbidden and dirty. If there's one thing BDSM can teach us*, it's how to set a scene.
*There are lots. So many lots.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
You say that like it's a bad thing. :)
I say that like it's a separate thing.
Individual decisions don't magically create social change.
What does create social change, if not individual decisions?
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
Symmetry, height and curviness won't stop being sexy just because a wider range of things might be.
Height and curviness, at least, have gone in and out of fashion over the centuries. Just like body hair has - for men and women - over the last few decades. But there's a whole thing here about the difference between socially-constructed attractiveness and actual 'sexual success' attractiveness that I don't know if we have the space or inclination to get into. (Basically, in any large social group, the person who's the most conventionally attractive may well not be the person who 'scores' the most.)
Disability was one of the things I was thinking about in the paragraph about prostitution. I've read some really great stuff in the last couple of years about disability from a sex-pos perspective, and the way the two trains of thought work together to expand our idea of what sex, or sexual activity is, to expand our sexual imagination.
I think... the idea that 'society' is this big separate thing that's beyond our control, that just does stuff to us, can be dangerous. It encourages us to give up. But society is, simply, made up of individuals. The actions of individuals make a difference. And yeah, social change happens slowly, like turning an oil tanker, but that doesn't mean that each individual little push isn't important. But then we're getting into the 'how'.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
things that are not matters of personal preference or socio-psychological constraint.
F'r'instance?
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
Yes, but who's making the space? I'm hearing a lot of 'me'.
We all are, for each other. What I demand for myself I give to other people.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Russell Brown,
But she's a mum -- and she doesn't want her daughter thinking that there's something wrong with the way she looks, or that waxing is the only choice.
The answer to this is the same as to Max's concern about young men only having seen waxed vulvas, in porn. It's that nobody ever, for the love of sanity, only sees naked bodies in porn, or near-naked bodies in advertising. That everyone, male and female, has seen a multitude of human bodies in childhood, and knows and accepts how wonderfully varied they are. The problem is not that kids see a particular kind of body presentation, the problem is that they're not seeing others.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Sacha,
Can 'erotic' be about more than sex?
For me, it absolutely can. Which perhaps is being all 'libertarian', but actually I'm calling bullshit on that, because part of living together collectively is accepting that our individual experiences are different, and making space for that.
But yeah, I find the idea we do have of sorting things into 'absolutely sexual' and absolutely not sexual' really strange, because it's simply not the way I experience life.