A Shift in Focus: Why I've Chosen to Say "Consent-Positive" Rather Than "Sex-Positive"

This decision's been building for a long time. It's by no means final, absolute, or certain, only that it makes space for my own uncertainty (and hopefully the uncertainty and hesitation of others but more on that later). Like many things concerning love and relationships and sex, this decision and the conversations I've had surrounding it have resisted simplicity and can only be expressed in the messy progression that follows.

I'll start with my own experience. In the past when using the term “sex-positive” I, like many of my women friends, have had listeners assume that by saying I'm sex-positive I'm saying I’ll be into whatever kind of sex they’re into. And also that I am willing to do that kind of sex with them soon or immediately. "Sex-positive" is optimistically coded as consent, potential consent or some indication of how/what I will consent to. I can’t say I've had a full frontal "Hey! but I thought you were sex-positive" when I've refused such sexual advances but I have been coerced and "c'mon”d. On two separate occasions, other “sex-positive” (male) party goers suggested that because of my nudity at past events and my self-professed sex-positivity I should disrobe and “continue the tradition”. I first started to say “consent-positive” in an attempt to duck the possibility of the creepy interactions "sex-positive" had elicited.

It's not just self defense, but it was because of this and other like experiences that I slowly began to realize more reasons for this shift. I began to notice that whenever I talked about being kinky, poly, and/or sex-positive what I ended up talking about was consent. As much as I do enjoy talking about sex it felt much safer personally and more transgressive politically to talk about how powerful an experience I've found it to build language and rituals that ensure that my consent, and the consent of those I am sharing space with is consistently receiving attention. (Note I don't say that consent itself be constant or even consistent).

One of the main reasons I continue wanting to wrench focus onto consent rather than the sex is that when sex is the rhetorical focus of a conversation or the goal of a movement consent starts to look like a means (getting to yes) to an end (sex). Some of you may recognize this progression model as it is commonly identified in feminist circles as a way in which men are taught to and often do relate to women and women's sexualities. It's the same logic that tells folks that the ideal romantic evening involves a man romancing (the consent out of) the woman and him fucking her until he (or they both) comes. In this narrative sex is the happy ending and consent is the means. I want consent to be both the means and the end! I want consent without sex to be viewed as it's own happy ending.

I (optimistically) don't think sex-positive activists intentionally engage in or encourage a view of consent as a means to sex, but making sex the first and most visibly important part of our politics often activates this taught progression in the minds of those who hear sex-positive messages.

The shift in focus I am seeking is from sex to communication as a whole. This shift is not meant to slight or shame sex or even say that sex in an unimportant form of communication. I want to get clear on the fact that consent can and often is about more than just about sex. Making this shift in focus means that when we talk about consent as a whole what we're talking about is the practice of making our communications less violent towards the wants and bodies of other human beings. We don't have to just be talking about sex when we talk about consent.

Contrary to popular belief, consent exists to be more than just “sexy” (and yes, it can be very sexy). It exists so that we as humans can reduce the harm we do to one another in our interactions.
To me consent is more important and further reaching than sex, but wildly less visible and less trendy (more on this later). I have heard too many sex-positive activists talk about sex either without mentioning consent directly or merely tacking it on as a simplified footnote.

At the behest of her commenters popular sex-positive video blogger Laci Green recently made a video about anal play. Now to be clear I am overjoyed that people are getting more accurate and useful information on engaging more safely/comfortably in the kinds of sex/play they are interested in. But after watching her video on anal play I got the nagging feeling that something was lacking.
Before I could identify exactly why when radicalfeministquotes.tumblr.com beat me to it:

This is one of the big problems with sex-positivity. Laci Green says she received an “alarming amount of messages about people being pressured into anal sex”. I think we all know that by “people”, she means women (or at least people with male partners). Her solution is to make a video giving advice on how to have anal sex. How does that help those women? Her advice to commenters: “Just don’t do it if you don’t want to”. No shit, Laci, I’m sure that idea had already occurred to those women. It’s easy to tell women to just not do things they’re not comfortable with, but that doesn’t do anything about the GUYS PRESSURING THEM TO DO THOSE THINGS. They’re still in the same boat they were before, trying to figure out what to do with a guy who wants to fuck her butt in a world that says women will die alone if they don’t let guys fuck their butts. There’s not a moment in this video where she is reprimanding these guys or telling em’ to knock it off, because OMG THAT MIGHT HURT THEIR FEELINGS AND MAKE THEM FEEL ASHAMED OF THEIR SEXUAL DESIRES."

By keeping the conversation focused solely on sex and how to do it Laci dodges an important distinction. While having desires is totally valid, the ways we express them should not come from a place of expectation that those desires be met. For me the missing piece in Laci's video is her telling folks that want anal play that sometimes you can't always get what you want, nor should you expect to or continue asking after being served explicit refusal(s).

Refusing to give consent should never be framed as negative or any less exciting or valid a choice than choosing to give consent for sex acts. And while I’ll admit to rarely experiencing outright exclusion (entitled vibes notwithstanding) at refusing sex in a sex-positive community there is a disproportionate amount of praise for those who consent to participate and support sex/play in sex-positive communities. Saying “yes” is framed as empowering and to give one’s consent is “sexy”. Which can and often does imply that a “no” or hesitation is a problem or “less cool/liberated”. Hesitation and refusal are totally valid expressions of uncertainty and deserve respect. The framing of "consent is sexy" can, in some applications, invalidate this vital uncertainty.

This pressure and implied coolness/liberation of "yes" is similar to a popular consumer culture's advertising strategy in which the consumer is presented the “empowering” choice between an array of products. The choice to purchase one (the best) of these products is framed as so powerful that the option to choose no product is implicitly framed as less powerful or even erased all together.

Many sex-positive folks I've met are well versed in active consent practices which is awesome, but what is often forgotten is that this specialized education in consent is not a uniform privilege that not everyone has access to. In some ways the BDSM community provides an example of this privilege. It has lots of explicit tools and language for focusing on consent (not that this makes BDSM spaces inherently consent-positive spaces). The problem is that some kinky and sex-positive folks sometimes forget that not everyone they will interact with will have as well studied or uniform understanding of consent as they do. For example, saying “you can say 'no' at any time” is vastly different from actually negotiating trust with a partner to ensure that they will say "no" when/if they feel the need/want to.

For me even, after learning, writing, and studying about it, consent feels intuitive, hard to translate, and hard to talk about. But talking about consent is a must. Especially in poor communities, communities of color, non-english speaking contexts, and other marginalized communities, whose models for consent are often invalidated or overwritten altogether by priviledged sex-positive educators and activists. So yes, sex-positive activists and BDSMers have a lot of tools for consent but these tools aren’t useful or applicable for every context.

But worse than these decontextualized potentially erasing approaches to consent, the “racier” parts of sex-positivity and BDSM are now gaining pop culture currency with the distinct absence of consensual tools and practices. Important nuances are often left out in favor of what's blindly edgy and controversial. You need only to glance at 50 Shades of Grey and it's popularity for an example of important nuances being left out. The sex and powerplay of BSDM are becoming trendy but the consent parts, not so much.

Ad culture is right. "Sex sells". But when ad culture (and many people) say "sex" what usually comes to mind is the kind of sex had by heterosexual, white (or nonwhite and exotified), young, able-bodied, gender conforming, conventionally attractive people (with the assistance of the right products). Because of this prevalent and incomplete understanding of sex, the parts of the sex-positive movement that have caught on the strongest are those which feature these kinds of sex. Whether sex-positivists intend support it or not this specific and inaccurate cultural definition of sex (which leaves out both consent & the sexual experiences of so many) is what gets applied to sex positivity by the wider media. As with all things scooped up by the mainstream it's losing it's nuance. Unfortunately losing that nuance includes losing importantly intersectional conversations about sexual diversity and consent.

Recognizing and building sustainable consent and sex practices is especially crucial in sex-positivity's intersection with sexual violence. In the Ethical Slut, Dossie Eaton and Janet Hardy famously say that “sex is nice and pleasure is good for you”. This is true for many but incomplete and perhaps dangerously so. Swathes of broader culture and the medical & legal communities consider rape and other traumatic and/or nonconsensual sexual acts to be sex. This is especially true of rapes and assaults that go unreported and unrecognized. One of my worst fears around casually saying saying “I'm sex-positive” is that those survivors of unidentified/unreported rapes/assaults will hear me and get the impression that I am trying to encourage them to view their traumatic experiences positively. Or that I am implicitly endorsing the actions of rapists/assaulters. I do not ever want to suggest, even implicitly, that I feel any sort of positivity about rape or sexual assault.

I do honestly believe consent is the foundation for good sex, but also to a less harmful way of interacting with other people. Consent education can start as soon as kids start to realize that their bodies are in fact separate from the bodies of others. Imagine how much easier it would be to confront the harassment and assaults of bullying if youths understood how to articulate their boundaries. This reasoning is the least formulated of all because it requires a radical shift in how we relate to children and how we relate to each other. And quite honestly I believe it’s more radical than many of the co-opted and often limiting goals of sex-positive revolution.

I'm not saying the fight for sexual liberation is over (far from it!), but I am saying sex-positivity, like any kind of effective activism, needs to brach out and realize how it connects and intersects with other radical movements and ideals. I see consent-positivity as a start to that. If sex-positivity is all about bring joy and sustainable, harm-reducing practices into the sexual interactions, then consent-positivity is about bring joy and sustainable, harm-reducing practices into all interaction humans share with one another. Let's work together.

Star Trek vs. Firefly: where would you like to live?

I'd forgotten about writing this. It resurfaced in a file recently and I decided to polish it up a bit. I wrote it during the early days of the OWS protests because I wanted to find a way to discuss capitalism in a fun geeky way. Enjoy.

The driving difference between my two favorite future universes is the ways power is made available to their characters. Firefly is a universe in which capitalist systems of distribution and power are still very much in effect. It is a gritty universe and we feel good watching it and fighting for the underdogs who are trying to escape the boot heal of the Alliance. In the Firefly universe there is a premise accepted by all the main characters as well as the audience that you have to be a little but of a renegade or obedient to the current authorities to survive. Under a capitalist system somebody always has to be oppressed, someone always has to lose. This contributes to the drama and connection we feel with the characters of Firefly. We sympathize with their struggle for survival.

In the Firefly universe you more often usually have dramatic life-and-death dilemmas that are intellectually engaging; survival comes first and philosophy coming importantly second. The struggle to survive comes first in the firefly universe. In the opening sequence it is repeatedly presented, through a back story voice-over (& as a recurring theme), that the crew of Serenity is always looking for some kind of work. In the Star trek universe the complete opposite is true of the main characters.

In the Star Trek(TNG) universe more often than not the drama comes from deeply intellectual and often existential questions or thoughtful riddles about morality and ethics. The potential for mortal danger is occasionally present but is less often the focus of the action and discussion. The time and space to think and philosophize is the setting for the majority of the plot lines in the Star trek universe. People are fighting others and themselves to be ethical, not to survive. Fighting for survival is a novel plot device. It is sometimes employed in Star trek but certainly not in every episode. It is most often used to heighten the drama of a two parter or a season finale. Mortal danger in the Star Trek universe is something so foreign that when it occurs it is much discussed and very clearly upsetting to the entire crew. This runs in stark contrast to the ever present mortal danger under which the characters of Firefly live their everyday lives (they joke about almost dying/barely surviving with great frequency).

Of course there are a few other major features that distinguish Star Trek and Firefly universes from each other. Jean-Luc (others too) often recites (without much provocation) the fact that humans in the 24th century are without poverty and even without the need of a monetary system of exchange. There are also higher intelligences or more advanced beings featured as a sort of deus ex machina in the back story of the Star Trek universe. I find myself inferring, from this back story, in addition to the utopian distribution and availability of resources (replicators) that having contact with more advanced beings (like Vulcans) assisted humans in the abolishing of capitalist systems. In the Firefly universe there is no evidence that any organized race other than humans exists. This contributes to both the feeling of aloneness the crew feels as a theme but also the aloneness one feels when struggling to survive. Mal touts at one point: "you make your own luck". This loneliness makes for some really great dramatic storytelling and also lends to the shows larger commercial appeal (more explosions more people getting shot). 

The same reason some people might find Star trek boring are the same reasons others might find Firefly too overblown. My love of both of these shows is painful when I think about it critically. Part of me thinks "yeah the Firefly universe is totally an awesome future.” but people (people we love!) die with horrifying frequency & the government doles out large scale oppression over peoples bodies, movements and actions. They employ mercenaries to take out threats to their infrastructure. When I think about the Star Trek universe as a possible future. I find myself heartbrokenly skeptical. Whenever Jean-Luc says "we abolished poverty" the realist in my gut tells me that no, we aren't coming to that, too many humans are still too vehemently and proudly like the hyper-capitalist ferengi. Even those of us who see and feel poverty and hunger and abuses of power are still stupidly hungry for our own pieces of the pie. Honestly, I don't think that, even if there were a Vulcan god machine to descend upon us with a superior and awesome code of ethics, we would be able to relinquish that survival state without our own choosing.

I has been pointed out before that that technology of the replicators presents a solution to the scarcity that causes the fear that drives folks into a survival state. And yes the replicators make the essentials as abundant as needed (and easily distributed). But I'm not convinced that any technology will contribute greatly to the equal distribution of resources. It's failed to happen thus far even though productivity has soared exponentially in the last 40 years. 

Think about the distribution of information and the way that is metered by the availability of access to modern technology. Even if they make it simpler to do so, shiny new devices in and of themselves, will not, and have not compelled us to behave in a more equatable manner. This is evident in the Firefly universe where the unequal distribution of resources is very apparent. It's even one of the driving forces of the action. Think about the fancy accommodations on Ariel in comparison to the way colonists are treated or the "rustic" accommodations on Serenity. There is a well developed separation between the classes in the Firefly universe, despite the existence advanced technologies. Some places  are “flush" with it "other not so much."

The Firefly universe is great for escapism but you wouldn't want to live there. You wouldn't feel safe in that society. You might die, or most likely get shot once every year or two. The Star Trek universe on the other hand, while it's conventionally less exciting, would be comfortable and safe. As a human you'd rarely ever have to fight to survive (unless it is the season finale and you are a captain or first officer). Now I know staunch capitalists & free-market junkies would love to tell me that it'd be lazy or against that natural Darwinist way of things to want this. But even though the struggles represented on Firefly are pretty shiny, I would infinitely prefer living in the non-capitalist less survival-driven future of Star Trek TNG. Cause I really prefer not being shot. How bout you?