Sex is cool and you should be doing it
Reflections on being on Tumblr during the sex-positive movement: all of the fun with none of the critical thinking
I came of age in the era of sex-positivity. Kidding, I wasn’t alive in the 1980s. I came of age during the rise of the ONLINE sex-positivity movement, or the movement as it was after it had trickled down through legitimate channels and come to settle on the sticky basement floor of the internet (Tumblr circa 2012). If you are also a survivor from this time, I see you and I’m sorry. It was rough. Don’t get me wrong; feminist, sex-positivity is GREAT. Unlearning negative mindsets around sex? Sign me up. Focusing on inclusivity, exploration and pleasure? Aiming to separate all of our hang-ups about sex from the threads of misogyny and queerphobia that get tangled up in everything? Tick, tick, tick. Sex is natural, sex is healthy, and shame around sex is damaging and serves absolutely nobody.
But this wasn’t what I learned during my forays through the digital wilderness. I learned, through text-posts and GIFs, that sex was empowering and I should be having as much of it as possible. In fact, if I wasn’t having loads and loads of cool, boundary pushing sex all the time, because I wasn’t ready or hadn’t found anybody I wanted to do it or god forbid because I was fifteen years old, there was something wrong with me. My friends and I ‘reclaimed’ words like slut and whore, spoke excessively about sex and told ourselves we were being feminist icons. We dressed like Lolita and listened to Lana del Rey, and longed for the kind of dark, complicated sexual relationships we saw depicted in TV shows like Skins or Girls1. We thought we were being subversive, but we were being radicalised by concepts we didn’t even half-understand. It’s fun to be part of a movement, but it’s less fun to get bogged down by anything as educational as theory or genuine literature on the sex-positive movements; any actual discussion of its origins and intentions. I was bright enough to be interested in alternative ways of living but not bright enough to think critically about what I was consuming online. I didn’t understand that I wasn’t the intended audience for this sort of thing because I WAS A MINOR, and that I was too young to understand the politics and stigma at play in conversations around sex; too understand to realise how vulnerable I was.
There were also good things about being in these kind of internet circles. I realised I was queer, for one, and was able to start re-contextualising some of my thoughts and experiences. I found queer representation and depictions of people living non-traditionally, two things that were sorely lacking in my daily life. I also think of these internet experiences as the foundation of almost all of my ways of thinking when it comes to sex and gender. When I grew up a little bit2 I found myself starting to feel unsatisfied by the blogs I was reading online, like I had outgrown it. I took some of the things I had been reading about and dived deeper; started reading theory and thinking more critically about the TV I watched, and the people I spent time with. This time on the internet helped me figure out who I was, led me to specialise in themes of gender and sex in my university degree, and eventually to write a novel about modern gender identity. Every dark day on the internet was a stepping stone to the person I am today blah, blah, blah. But that doesn’t change the fact that there was also some formative damage caused by the shit I was seeing online from a young age. I think my main problem is with the internet in general, the way we’re encouraged to be as shallow as possible, to wear the aesthetic of a political movement as a badge of honour and not bother actually learning about anything. In the decade since I was fifteen, I’ve seen this cycle play out on the internet over and over again, with too many topics to name. Movements becoming more and more diluted until the only thing that’s left is a punchy slogan on a baby-tee. I still find it depressing but it isn’t a surprise to me anymore. The online sex-positivity movement could have been harnessed to teach young people about consent, rape culture, STDs and the destigmatisation of sex, but instead we were told that we should fuck whoever we want to without a second thought, that it was normal and even encouraged to have violent sex with near strangers. But fuck the patriarchy, right? My body my choice?
I would like to go go back and tell my teenage self that having sex you don’t want to have, with people who do not respect your personhood, is never, ever sex positive. I would highly recommend waiting until you’re older. You won’t believe me, but you’ve actually got plenty of time. It doesn’t matter if hot girls are telling you to do it, or if you’re absolutely desperate to be older, or if you’re irresistibly drawn to anything that might make you a totally different person, you are not old enough and wise enough to be making these kind of decisions. You’ve got a lot of other shit to wade through first. Lol. Bye!
Ps. Writing this made me realise how different the online conversation around sex is nowadays, and not necessarily in a positive way. It feels like there’s been an overcorrection. Shall I write about that too?
The idea of me finding Girls aspirational. Puke!
And by grow up, I mean, got more cynical