Demeaning Empowerment: The Sexuality Cycle

Is sex positivity working for feminism, or patriarchy?

I think, like most women, I was about eleven the first time I felt deeply humiliated to be female. Just out of an all girl’s Catholic primary and into the never-ending horrors of mixed-sex boarding school, I was walking through a row of beech trees leading to the music department. Out of nowhere, a classmate grabbed me from behind by the mouth and pulled up my school dress. “Maddie wears white knickers!” he crowed to his little friends. I wanted to die. I begged G-d to let me die.

He was a child, I was a child. I forgive him. An incident, the first of many. No one ever had discussed consent, assault, or abuse with us. No one ever would. Even today, I hate men touching me now. But in that moment, I knew I wasn’t a person anymore. I was a body, something to be touched and exposed and stared at. The male gaze was hard on the fantasies of my underwear, the shape of my form, the humiliation of what made me less than. As a female child becoming a woman, I was unnegotiably sexual.

This appalled me because I thought I wasn’t a body. I was very definitively a person, and I knew that. I wasn’t shameful. I wasn’t naked breasts and threesomes and fellatio or whatever else the boys shoved in our faces on the Blackberry™ their adulterous daddy had bought them for Christmas. I liked science. I liked writing. I liked history. I was good at it. I was smart. I pleaded with G-d for an extension to my personhood, a few more precious years to be flat chested, genderless, and unwatched. Unlusted. A little more time before the boys pulled up my skirts, groped at me or held me against the walls of the sports hall while I screamed.

All this would probably land me in a child therapist’s office now but this was 2007. Things were different then. The teachers would tell me to just ignore it. “They’re being immature,” I’d be told when the boys measured their penises under the tables in maths and loudly discussed whether I, a child, could ‘take it’. It was endless, unwavering, unyielding and relentless sexualisation. I grew to loathe my own body, to despise sexuality, to despise womanhood.

One incident solidified an intense hatred and revulsion at anything to do with sex, boys, or touching. New maths had come in with a jolt and we were being subjected like rabbits to spatial learning. It was a Tuesday, raining, and we had double maths. I remember all of this vividly, you just do. We were told to line up against specific walls and cross over when we thought something was a divisible or prime number and so forth. I’d irritated a boy earlier that day by beating him in a history mock. He moved beside me and slid his hand up the side of my skirt. I pulled away, but he didn’t let go of my tights. This was a punishment. A reminder that I was a woman. Less than.

“Stop touching me,” I said loudly. He didn’t. “He’s touching me!” I know my maths teacher heard. I know he saw. I know he knew I was being assaulted, in front of him, and he chose to do nothing. Because it was shameful. Because it interrupted his lesson. Because he was embarrassed. He was supposed to protect me. And he watched me and did nothing. There were other incidents, and there would be other things that happened in the years ahead, but that was the bullet. That was what hurt me the most. From that moment, I had a deep suspicion, distrust and yes, hatred of men that lasted for many years.

Why did this happen?

This was peak ‘sex lib’ era. It was lad culture, lad magazines, industrial digital pornography, Katie Price and WAGS. Sexuality was something you performed as empowering. If you didn’t enjoy it, found it demeaning, or you didn’t want it, you were the problem. You were prudish. Old fashioned. Even sexist. Being whistled at meant you were hot. Being groped meant you were sexy. And these were good things! Take a compliment. Hit me baby one more time, you know you want it, blurred lines. Pop culture consumed sex and became it. But no one had articulated the difference between consenting to sexualisation and objectification, and that hadn’t been a conversation, and wouldn’t be until, absurdly, until the arrest of a film producer on another continent.

Weirdly, Weinstein freed me. Well, the #MeToo debate did. Before that, it had never occurred to me that we could discuss consent. Consent was something you had when you were 16 and anyone who had sex with you before that was raping you, because it wasn’t consent. You could get him in trouble. After that, consent was simple. Unless he’s a serial killer, please the man you are with and be good in bed. Right? Isn’t that what sex is? What sexuality is? It’s amazing to think about how primitive we were with our conceptual understandings of implicit consent, retracted consent, negated consent and even just basic enthusiastic consent. I knew what rape was! It was when a man attacked you in a dark alley. I knew anything else was a misunderstanding. Too much to drink. You making bad decisions. Leading him on. Not being clear. Putting yourself in that context.

And all of a sudden: sex positivity didn’t mean pleasing men. Sex, for the first time I think in history, was about women enjoying and consenting to having sex, and sexualisation, because they wanted to. We had a conversation as a society and wow, we came out of it better. The number of men harassing me on trains went down. Men touching me on buses went down. Men following me home trying to get my number went down. And this wasn’t in years: this was in months. I really felt it in Nice a year later when men were shouting at me and making kissing noises: I wasn’t used to it anymore. It was weird. Men could control themselves. They could be compassionate and good and considerate and kind and thoughtful and not rapists.

I get it: I had a really bad experience and it’s taken me years to become normal and okay with sex and being sexualised on my terms. But I’m so pleased we had that debate. I’m so pleased we won. I’m so pleased men listened and I’m so pleased men heard. And cared! Feminism doesn’t work if just women discuss consent, mobility, freedom, and equality. This is a society thing, not a gender thing.

But we appear to be going backwards and that alarms me. The wheel turns. We burn our bras, then we dance in them in Carry On films. We demand the right to walk our streets without fear, and then we demonise a woman walking home alone in the dark when she’s abducted. We demand the right to enjoy sex and not feel ashamed of it, and then demonise sex workers and girls using Only Fans. Now, we’re silencing women who do feel uncomfortable with sexualisation and overt sexuality as ‘not sex positive’. This is wrong. Just because I find wearing replica children’s clothes demeaning or feel uncomfortable discussing sex toys in public, it doesn’t mean I hate you or your sexuality. It means I want a conversation on my own right to boundaries and consent to sexual exposure and potentially triggering fetish wear. We can be sex positive and acknowledge that your sex life doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The ‘daddy’ narrative does unfortunately play into how men perceive age gaps. The ‘sugar baby’ narrative does unfortunately influence wealth gaps. Unless we discuss the relationship between sex as power, and sex as humiliation, I’m not sure we should openly embrace these constructs as wholly positive or freeing.

I’m rambling a bit.

I’ll just finish on a quick point.

A male friend asked me, recently, why so many women like submission in the bedroom. Did it mean women liked feeling inferior to men, he asked? I’d argue no. I’d argue that this is the archeological remains of being free from the historical shame of what a woman who enjoys sex means. When you are under the illusion of not having consent, you can’t be shamed for enjoying it.

Just as I as a child feared being associated with the ‘stupid’ heavily objectified pornstars (through showing enthusiastic consent or sex adjacent consent), we still have an innate belief that enjoying sex as a woman is humiliating, demeaning, and shameful. I’m unlearning that.

But the cycle between sex bad/sex good needs to stop.

We need to talk about nuance.