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Inspired by a pervocracy post:
My thoughts, including sexual trauma discussion.
This ties in with something I’ve noticed with some anti-asexual rhetoric: a lot of allosexual people want to think of sex as this extension of romantic love that just sort of...happens naturally. Anything suggesting the possibility of romantic relationships without sex confronts them with the fact that they like having sex because they like sex, (albeit maybe only with romantic partners) and it feels like they’re being insulted because deep down they think only ‘sluts’ like sex for it’s own sake.
One underlying problem here is that Patriarchy is awful about straight men’s sexual tastes being Important to the exclusion of consent etc. The double bind a lot of us find ourselves in is having trauma around the very idea that sexual self expression is important (often because of men pressuring us with “You saying ‘no’ stifles my self expression”) but also wanting to express ourselves sexually. I imagine it’s very comforting to be able to go “My sexual self expression is a whole separate category with no ambiguity or crossover with the sort that traumatised me”.
This gets worse with things associated with men (penetration, penises etc) but is true in general. It allows “people who pro-active about their sexual tastes are gross” to co-exist with “I am allowed to be pro-active about my sexual tastes” because it’s not sexual tastes it’s Good Healthy Relationship Practice. Men do it too, eg acting like having a thing for chubby girls into science is a sign of being feminist instead of equivalent to having a thing for big boobs: morally neutral, unless you pursue that interest in a gross way. And men who do have a thing for big boobs etc often have that "I am so used to having my tastes catered to that any deviation from them is scary and makes me angry" thing.
Something that makes wlw spaces uncomfortable for me as a genderfluid person is arguments like “Men are gross when they’re into women, but wlw can’t be gross, because we’re not men”. Thinking this way is, I'm sure, very freeing, and lets women express themselves. But it’s also untrue, and hurtful to non-women and to people who have had bad sexual experiences at the hands of women. There absolutely is a difference between wlw and straight men, but the line is not clear and bright, and dealing with that ambiguity is so much more messy and confronting than pretending the world is simple and clean.
I had more I was going to say about how we can navigate that ambiguity without ignoring privilege, consent, trauma etc but got bogged down in the complexity of it all. I mean one obvious thing is that the issue with someone being pressured into sex is the pressure, not the particular kind of sex. But unfortunately a lot of people, myself included, doubt ourselves when someone is pressuring us, feel pressured even when our partner isn't doing anything wrong, and feel like we're pressuring our partner even when we're not doing anything wrong. So a neat objective line between Good Sex and Bad Sex would be very reassuring. It just doesn't exist.
“I’m not attracted to X, so I won’t date them”: okay then, you go ahead and do that
“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that people who are X hear and validate this statement and give me their official permission to not be attracted to them”: please no
“I’m not attracted to X, and I demand that the entire world hear and validate this statement and declare X objectively unattractive”: you can stop now
...[I think there’s] a lot of people who never internalized that they can make choices about their sexuality.
I see this a lot when I get asks saying “men should do [very specific behavior] in relationships with women,” where it’s obvious the asker just wants her boyfriend to do that behavior but has no tools for expressing that. The universal, objective rules of society may be up for debate, but the fact that such rules exist is not.
My thoughts, including sexual trauma discussion.
This ties in with something I’ve noticed with some anti-asexual rhetoric: a lot of allosexual people want to think of sex as this extension of romantic love that just sort of...happens naturally. Anything suggesting the possibility of romantic relationships without sex confronts them with the fact that they like having sex because they like sex, (albeit maybe only with romantic partners) and it feels like they’re being insulted because deep down they think only ‘sluts’ like sex for it’s own sake.
One underlying problem here is that Patriarchy is awful about straight men’s sexual tastes being Important to the exclusion of consent etc. The double bind a lot of us find ourselves in is having trauma around the very idea that sexual self expression is important (often because of men pressuring us with “You saying ‘no’ stifles my self expression”) but also wanting to express ourselves sexually. I imagine it’s very comforting to be able to go “My sexual self expression is a whole separate category with no ambiguity or crossover with the sort that traumatised me”.
This gets worse with things associated with men (penetration, penises etc) but is true in general. It allows “people who pro-active about their sexual tastes are gross” to co-exist with “I am allowed to be pro-active about my sexual tastes” because it’s not sexual tastes it’s Good Healthy Relationship Practice. Men do it too, eg acting like having a thing for chubby girls into science is a sign of being feminist instead of equivalent to having a thing for big boobs: morally neutral, unless you pursue that interest in a gross way. And men who do have a thing for big boobs etc often have that "I am so used to having my tastes catered to that any deviation from them is scary and makes me angry" thing.
Something that makes wlw spaces uncomfortable for me as a genderfluid person is arguments like “Men are gross when they’re into women, but wlw can’t be gross, because we’re not men”. Thinking this way is, I'm sure, very freeing, and lets women express themselves. But it’s also untrue, and hurtful to non-women and to people who have had bad sexual experiences at the hands of women. There absolutely is a difference between wlw and straight men, but the line is not clear and bright, and dealing with that ambiguity is so much more messy and confronting than pretending the world is simple and clean.
I had more I was going to say about how we can navigate that ambiguity without ignoring privilege, consent, trauma etc but got bogged down in the complexity of it all. I mean one obvious thing is that the issue with someone being pressured into sex is the pressure, not the particular kind of sex. But unfortunately a lot of people, myself included, doubt ourselves when someone is pressuring us, feel pressured even when our partner isn't doing anything wrong, and feel like we're pressuring our partner even when we're not doing anything wrong. So a neat objective line between Good Sex and Bad Sex would be very reassuring. It just doesn't exist.
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Well ...
I read an anthropology piece once that stated the universal rule of human societies is "Sexual behavior shall not be unregulated." They have all the different rules you can imagine, from "A brother cannot marry his sister" (everyone but ancient Egypt) to "A brother must marry his sister" (ancient Egypt). But nobody breaks that one; nobody has a society with zero sexual rules. So the only people I've seen debating the existence of the rules, or their mustness, are anthropologists and SF writers.
Since I want things like rape to be banned and incest at least discouraged (I'm flexible on the topic of consenting adults) that puts me in camp "Sexual behavior shall not be unregulated."
I have, however, written about societies with all sorts of extremely different rules, and some aliens don't have rules for sex because theirs is like farting or whatever. If all that happens is at a certain time your body automatically releases some gametes, and it's not a social interaction, then you don't need rules for it.
Re: Well ...
The topic of this post is people whose approach to sexual/relationship etc rules is that everything that isn't forbidden is compulsory. And what I and pervocracy are arguing is that some things should be compulsory, and some forbidden, but a lot can be left to individual preference.
Also, this may be an issue with the clarity of my post or the one I quoted, but it was pretty upsetting to make a post pushing back against the idea that trans/fat/old etc people are inherently unattractive, and get a comment implying that this is equivalent to advocating for rape.