Imagining a Sex-Positive Future
We’re reading the Romantic critics in my Literary Theory and Criticism course this week. Tomorrow we’re discussing Percy Bysshe Shelley (aka Mary Shelley’s husband) and his essay A Defense of Poetry. I always love the day I teach Shelley, who thought that poetry has the power to transform society through pleasure and imagination. Taken more broadly, the question we’re discussing in class is whether art can enact social and political change.
This week at PC we also had the good fortune to host Malissa Burnette as our Constitutional Day speaker (see the second Hot Feminism newsletter for an interview with Malissa), and in the Q&A, she discussed how certain Republican legislators in South Carolina were changing their minds and their votes on abortion bans. State senator Tom Davis, for example, retold the story on the Senate floor of a woman who, while the six-week abortion ban was still in effect in South Carolina, was sent home for two weeks while miscarrying because the doctors could not perform an abortion to ease her suffering and prevent infection. Hearing this story, he testified, made him question his own vote supporting the six-week ban. This act of story-telling seems a major trend nationally, as women share their abortion stories, and as we see more representation of abortion in television and film, both in documentaries and in dramas.
These abortion stories are clearly changing attitudes and enacting real political change. Lately I’ve been watching the Netflix series Sex Education, a teen drama set in a rural English village. The main characters Otis, whose mother is a sex therapist, and Maeve, a wicked smart intellectual loner, decide to open an underground sex clinic to meet the needs of their classmates who find themselves without access to comprehensive sex education. The show is adamantly sex positive, presenting the fact of sex as a normal human desire, and the variety of human sexuality represented on the show is some of the most inclusive I’ve seen.
Watching the show has reminded me that an underlying current in the abortion rights debates concerns the rights of women to have, and enjoy, sex. Many arguments against abortion still assume pregnancy is a woman’s mistake: she shouldn’t have been having sex in the first place, if she didn’t want to become pregnant, or that she should have taken better precautions, etc. These are the attitudes expressed by many South Carolina legislators, including the governor.
These attitudes towards women’s sexuality in America don’t seem too far removed from the Puritan attitudes that inspired works like The Scarlet Letter (for a fun remake, see Emma Thomson in the 2010 film Easy A). Slut shaming is an unfortunate historical constant for American women, a situation made even more complicated by the proliferation of internet porn and the long-standing strategy of turning women’s bodies into sex objects in all sorts of visual media, using presumed male sexual pleasure as way to motivate consumption.
Girls in America grow up with two very conflicting patriarchal and heterosexist messages: on the one hand, be the perfect sex object and offer your body up at the altar of men’s desire, and on the other, abstain from sex or suffer the consequences.
These messages about women’s sexuality have long been at the center of feminist debates. Some feminists advocated for the rejection of men completely, imagining women loving women as the path to true sexual liberation. Others argued that women should be free to enjoy sex as much, or even like, men. If men aren’t considered sluts for their sexual behaviors, women shouldn’t, either.
But I think shows like Sex Education, and plenty of movies lately directed by women, are asking us to imagine what women’s desire and sexuality could look like on its own terms. Younger women seem to be questioning whether true sexual liberation looks like random dating app hookups. Recent feminist philosophy like Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century or memoirs like Nona Willis Aronowitz’s Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution ask similar questions about what we should consider good sex, in the literal but also the moral and political sense.
The hard turn to regulating women’s desire and sexual behavior at the heart of these abortion bans risks heightening the fear and insecurity we already instill in young people around sex. Following Shelley, perhaps art like Sex Education can inspire us to envision a sex positive future, in which girls and women can enjoy pleasure free from conforming to the desires and demands of men.